one i m very struck by is. ..is the tattoo, which every person, everyjew, every inmate of auschwitz was stamped with a number. right. by the nazis. you still have that stamp? absolutely. i don t know if it s possible. i never want to forget it. i want to show it to the world. can you show it to me? yeah, of course. i see it. it didn t even fade. i see it. just the way it was. see, i mention it because you tell the story of how, after liberation i believe it was by the time you got to the united states there was a doctor who said, you know what, i can fix that for you. i can erase it. right. and you refused, and you were actually angry. i was 12. and i remember saying to the. it was a doctor, a very kind person, who was going to give me a gift. he wasn t going to charge me. and he even said, you know, you ll have such a tiny scar that by the time you grow up,
isaid, no, i m not even touching it. she wanted to remember. she wanted the world eventually. she never talked about it publicly, by the way. mm. and she only spoke to people who were there. earlier, when we were talking about your mother, you talked about the way in which some of her memories, particularly what happened with her nieces, was something she could never get over, and she died young and i think she died mentally very troubled, of course. very, very, very troubled. now, people talk about survivor s guilt after the holocaust, after places like auschwitz. right. is it a phrase that means anything to you? how would you describe.? i don t feel like that. i feel in a sense a survivor s obligation, the obligation to tell the story. ..and to lead a life
institution and they took on something. they can say anything they want. i don t talk to them. i don t respond. i ignore them. your mother, when, injanuary 45, auschwitz was liberated by russian soldiers. yes. your mother and you spent weeks still there, and then you were, in the spring, sent back to poland. we went back, yeah. i think your mother said as you were leaving auschwitz, i think she said to you. ..as you were called then tola, not tova. tola, yes. i don t like that name. your name at that point was tola grossman. she said, tola, remember. remember this place. she also took me around to show me things. she took me around and she showed me soap. ..made from human fat. and i remember she said to me, shall we take it?
what you also evoke, along with the hunger, the loneliness, and the fear, is the anguish of your parents, and that to me is very moving. again, going back to the ghetto, even before we get to auschwitz, you describe certain scenes that you remember with a child s memory, for example, of your mother faced with one of the nazi selections. right. who, at the time, had two of your cousins, her nieces. right. ..clinging to her. her sister s two children. yeah. and they were clinging to her. yeah. hoping that she would take them through. exactly. and it s the sister who pushed them over to my mother, because my father had working papers, so he was going to be saved. he was on a line with those that are going to not be killed. she was on the line to go to her death. your mother. so, she shoved them and they read. they got it. they were only three or four.
how would you have saved them in auschwitz? and the truth is that your mother did so much. right. ..to protect you as best she could through all of the horror of auschwitz. right. and one of the ways she did that was by, in essence, training you, training you not to look at those nazi officers in the eye. perfect. not to ever make any gesture that would draw attention to yourself. i love that word training . i didn t think of it, but it s an excellent word. i kept saying she protected me by telling me the truth, and she was training me so that when i am alone without her, i will know how to behave. do you know, i never, throughout the entire war, had eye contact with a nazi. that s how she trained me. i remember seeing them from here down. oh, and their hands.