I cannot imagine..............................

see and yet he remains tall, straight and unbroken. A true mensch.

in Beverly Hills and Hollywood had holocaust number tattoos, that I actually knew of. Each time it was a shock to see and realize that this person really been in a death camp, almost certainly Auschwitz, and survived. I remember one nice old gentleman noticing my eyes rivet in shock on his arm, but he just smiled pleasantly. I wondered but of course didn't ask if any of his loved ones had also somehow survived. The answer was almost certainly no.

I had just moved into the neighborhood, a one bedroom house in an alley in the city. My brother & a friend were carrying a couch into my home, Pete walked by and helped them, when his arm reached up toward the couch, I saw the tattoo on his wrist.

All I ever learned about Pete is that he immigrated from Ukraine after the war, he was a practicing Orthodox Catholic and the most important, before talking business with him, you must drink vodka.

I learned the vodka when I went to speak to him about protesting the development of an empty lot into a 24 hour diner with parking that would exit into our alley. I had 5 shots of vodka with him before getting him to promise to attend the zoning hearing.

We are rapidly approaching a time where there will be no more survivor accounts. They are more important now, then ever, with maybe the exception of right after the war.

Despite being Jewish and having Holocaust survivors in my extended family, the first tattoo I saw was on the arm of a Catholic Hungarian, whose family was deported for harboring Jews. He was taken when he was 7 years old to Auschwitz. He was the only survivor from his immediate family.