“Never Forget.” This is an important message conveyed by every Holocaust museum, library, memorial, and now tattoos. There’s a bizarre new trend going around where relatives of Holocaust survivors have gotten the survivor’s number tattooed upon their skin. While this seems nice in theory, this is actually a disgusting homage to what the Nazi party so proudly encouraged: the dishonoring and destroying of Jews.
There are many Holocaust museums, memorials, and even some libraries to make sure the survivors stories will continue to live on. In “Fetishizing Holocaust Tattoos” by Jonathan Tobin, Tobin mentions that “fear that their experiences would be forgotten have fueled the proliferation in Holocaust museums and memorials.” In other words, we don’t really need these holocaust tattoos to remember
…show more content…
However, this just isn’t true. As Tobin says, “the tattoo craze seems like an effort to personalize an experience that can never truly belong to the person copying a survivor’s numbers.” This quote shows that the current generation is not doing this to honor their relatives at all. These tattoos say more about the people getting them than the survivors themselves, which isn’t helping to memorialize the survivors at all! As revealed by Rudoren, the grandfather of one of these tattoo-crazed adolescents told him that “if I knew, I would have said to you not to do it,” This demonstrates how these tattoos aren’t honoring the survivors, since even the survivors see it as wrong and inappropriate. It also shows that these people don’t truly care about the survivors opinions, as this person did not even consider talking to the grandpa about it. The grandson he was talking to, Mr. Gelles, even admitted that it was “provocative.” This shows that the tattoos are nothing more than a conversation piece. The people getting these tattoos only want to get a response out of