The Ghost Tattoo
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4.6 • 16 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FOR BEST HOLOCAUST MEMOIR
For readers of The Tattooist of Auschwitz and The Watchmakers, a powerful, profoundly moving Holocaust memoir from a rarely told perspective—the story of a son’s quest to understand his father, a heroic, complicated Jewish survivor—and to uncover the hidden past and desperate choices he made when the Nazis recruited him to police his own people in their Polish ghetto.
Growing up, Tony Bernard knew that his father, Henry, had been in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. He was familiar with the tattoo bearing his Auschwitz number—B1224—and the faint scar resulting from a suicide attempt while in a camp in Blizyn. As an Australian boy growing up on Sydney’s sunny Northern Beaches where Henry was a well-respected doctor, Tony simply accepted these facts. Only as a young man, on a trip to Poland with his father, did he begin to uncover the secrets that filled Henry with regret, anguish, and guilt.
Henry’s experiences in the concentration camps were harrowing, and he survived through ingenuity, grit, and countless miracles of chance. Yet there was another, deeper story—of what happened before his deportation to the camps. In 1940, Henry was recruited into the Jewish Order Service in his Polish hometown—an organization set up by the Nazis to help maintain order among Jews. Like many other young recruits, Henry believed he would help protect his community. Instead, the ghetto police, as they became known, were forced to assist the Nazis in the subjugation and mistreatment of their own people. Faced daily with impossible choices, desperate to keep his loved ones alive, Henry was both victim and unwilling participant.
The Ghost Tattoo is a haunting, emotionally resonant memoir of war and its aftermath. It is also a singular account of resistance, resilience, and hope. Henry was eventually called to Germany to testify in a trial against Nazi murderers, where his evidence proved pivotal. After decades of silence, he seized the chance to bear witness—for history, for his family, and for all those who did not survive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Australian ER doctor Bernard debuts with an evocative account of gradually learning what his father, Henry Bierzynski Bernard (1920–2016), went through during the Holocaust. Born in 1955, Bernard grew up unaware of his Jewish heritage. It was only in 1979 that his father began to share his experiences, revealing that he had been interned in Auschwitz. Still, it took more than 20 years for Henry to relate the full story. In the 1930s, the Nazis used local Jewish councils to control the Jewish populations in areas they occupied, including Henry's hometown of Tomaszow, Poland. In 1939, Henry's father, a council member, requested that Henry join the Jewish police force the Nazis had compelled the council to create, hoping to ensure that the force was composed of "honest" people. Henry continued in that role for years, acting as ethically as possible under the circumstances, but was later haunted by the idea that he'd "unknowingly assisted the Nazis in their murderous plans." Bernard's narrative combines recollections of a childhood spent adoring his father (even as his parents' marriage couldn't withstand Henry's obsessive behavior and bouts of melancholy) and Henry's harrowing story, which is full of crushing moments, including his futile attempt to save his mother from being transported to a death camp. The result is a standout new addition to the literature of the Holocaust.
