Carlos Porter on Auschwitz Tattooist

FEATURE
The Auschwitz tattooist
ANGIE FOX

The Australian Jewish News

December 19, 2003

LOU Sokolov wears a permanent reminder of the three years he spent in Birkenau. Although it is faded, the number 32407 is still clearly legible on his left forearm. The tattoo which indelibly scars his tanned skin bears witness to his encounter with hell on earth.

Indeed, thousands of Holocaust survivors worldwide, as well as at least 10 in Melbourne — including his late wife Gita — bare the same reminder, not just of the horrors they endured at Auschwitz/Birkenau, but of Sokolov’s presence at the Nazi death camp.

Small with pale blue, haunting eyes which large glasses fail to hide, Sokolov was the Auschwitz/Birkenau tetovierer (tattooist). From August 1942 to late 1944 he, along with assistants, tattooed the arms of 200,000 Jews from Holland, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Norway, Germany, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Austria and Hungary.

A piece of wood attached to two needles and a pot of ink were the tools of his trade. Each tattoo, he says, took 30 seconds. Yet those numbers have become long-lasting evidence of the most heinous crime in history.

Smiling as he reclines in an armchair in his Caulfield apartment with his two precious dogs — which he calls his children — Sokolov, 87, says his role as tattooist was simply a “job”.

“It had to be done,” he says. “We weren’t human beings, we were numbers. Those who got a number, those that went into the camp, I call them lucky because they had another few days or months or whatever to survive.”

Sokolov smiles often, but his broad grin has the impression of someone who has taught himself to laugh in the face of trauma.

“I witnessed things, killings, torture, beatings. Unbelievable. Boys killed boys, inmates killed inmates, for a piece of bread. People killed people. I saw it with my own eyes.”

In fact, the only way he has been able to cope with the scars of his experience is with the knowledge that his job as a tattooist, which gave him a position of some status in the camp, enabled him to save countless lives.

“I saw one-and-a-half million people die. One-and-a-half million people go through the chimney. Some people can’t take it , but one good thing is that I helped a lot of people.”

Sokolov even came face to face with the notorious “Angel of Death”, Dr Josef Mengele, whose infamous medical experiments have been well documented. Dr Mengele also acted as an Auschwitz selector, sending new arrivals either to the gas chambers or the camp. After witnessing these selections on numerous occasions, Dr Mengele approached Sokolov, though the encounter is one he would rather forget.

“He said to me in German, 'One fine day you will go next.’ I said to him, "Yes sir.’”

Born Ludwig Eisenberg in the Czechoslovakian town of Krompacly in 1916, Sokolov was raised in a “good Jewish” home, although his parents and older brother and sister were not religious.

Graduating from high school, he moved to Bratislav, where he worked for the Bata Shoe Factory.

According to the 1930 census, Czechoslovakia had a Jewish population of 356,830. In 1938 Slovakia established an autonomous totalitarian government and on March 14, 1939, declared itself an independent state, becoming a vassal of Nazi Germany. The following day Hitler occupied Bohemia and Moravia, effectively breaking up Czechoslovakia.

Sokolov, then 21, worked as an assistant to the leader of a Slovakian political party. He was given the job by a friend who wanted to protect him from increasingly frequent antisemitic attacks. Dressed in party uniform, Sokolov travelled around the country disseminating newsletters.

In 1941 Slovakian Jews were increasingly ousted from life and 10,000 Jewish businesses were liquidated. In February 1942 the German Foreign Ministry requested the Slovak Government to begin transporting Jews to Nazi concentration camps.

Between January and October 1942, 60,000 Jews were deported to Nazi camps in the east. Auschwitz was the main port of call. Sokolov was one of 1500 Jewish men on the first Slovakian transport to Auschwitz/Birkenau.

The two-day journey in cattle cars, direct to Birkenau, was “shocking”, but Sokolov wasn’t afraid.

“I couldn’t imagine where I was going or what could happen to me.”

Upon arrival, the “hell started”. Greeted by SS guards armed with dogs, Sokolov recalls people were beaten if they failed to move quickly enough onto the platform.

Sokolov was tattooed as he entered the camp. He says he is one of only four men from the original transport of 1500 who are still alive with the numbers that begin with 32,000. The others live in Sydney, Slovakia and America.

In those early days, Auschwitz was mainly populated by political prisoners and criminals. In his first few weeks at Birkenau, Sokolov worked with inmates building the barracks that would soon house hundreds of thousands of Jews from all over Europe.

Sokolov became an assistant to a Polish kapo, but was soon infected with typhoid. He recovered and later met a Czechoslovakian political prisoner named Pepan, who unwittingly saved his life.

Pepan, Auschwitz’s original tattooist, took Sokolov under his wing and taught him the trade. Two months later, when Pepan was transported out of Auschwitz, Sokolov took over as camp tattooist. All inmates were tattooed with a number on their left forearm. More than 400,000 tattoos were issued.

When Sokolov started the job in August 1942, the tattoo numbers commenced at 38,000. When they reached approximately 70,000, the tattoos commenced with the letter A. By that time, Sokolov had a number of assistants helping him cope with the transports, which were arriving day and night.

There was barely any exchange between himself and the person whose arm he was tattooing.

“People had no hope. They were the walking dead,” he recalls grimly.

Sokolov’s position came under the auspices of the political arm of the camp, which oversaw the SS. He was therefore considered untouchable by the SS and lived in relative peace. He had his own room in the gypsy camp.

During his time as the camp tattooist, he used his privileged position to save lives.

Jewish boys were required to sort through the luggage of inmates who, unaware of their pending fate, brought all their worldly possessions. The boys would steal whatever valuables they could, including jewellery, diamonds and money. They would then give it to Sokolov in exchange for bread, alcohol and chocolate, which Sokolov would buy from local Poles who worked in the camp offices. He also used the money and jewels to bribe the SS to secure better working conditions for inmates, which ultimately saved many lives.

One of them became his wife, Czechoslovakian-born Gita. Although he does not recall it, the pair met for the first time when Sokolov tattooed Gita’s arm upon her arrival at Birkenau in August 1942. Shortly after, he saw her again and bribed an SS officer to deliver a letter to her in the women’s camp. The couple arranged clandestine meetings and Sokolov secured Gita an office job working with other Polish women.

When, in the face of the advancing Russian Army, the Nazis began their infamous death marches in 1945, Gita escaped during the night and was hidden by a Polish colleague in an attic for the remainder of the war.

Sokolov also used his skill to save a man who was scheduled to be hanged after a failed escape. He transformed the man’s tattoo into a picture of a snake and bribed an SS officer to register the man on the next transport out of Birkenau. Today that man lives in Israel.

Sokolov witnessed many of the events at Auschwitz and Birkenau which fill the pages of history books and memoirs. He recalls the daily suicides by people who threw themselves against the electric fence, the public hangings, the day the entire gypsy camp of 4000 inmates was gassed, the building of the three crematoria in 1943 and the uprising by the SonderKommando — Jewish men who worked in the crematoria and revolted by throwing SS officers into the flames. He also recalls the day, in 1944, that Crematorium Three was blown up by the SonderKommando.

He holds the rare distinction of being one of the only Jews who went into the crematorium and came out alive. When two men, one dead and one alive, were registered with the same number, Sokolov had to go into the crematoria to verify the number on the dead man’s arm.

“I saw more bodies than you could count lying around like sacks,” he recalls. “Thoughts of survival kept me going. I always looked for the positive — maybe because I wasn’t beaten like others or I had more to eat,” he says, adding that the fact that he spoke Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, German and Russian aided his survival.

On January 19, 1945, as the Russians approached, Sokolov joined one of the last groups to march out of Birkenau. A few days later, he was taken by train to Mauthausen in Austria. From there, with the aid of a Slovakian kapo, he was transported to a camp outside Vienna.

When the Russian Army advanced, Sokolov and other inmates were marched out of the camp. He escaped and spent time with a Russian Army unit, introducing the soldiers to local Austrian women.

By the time he returned to Czechoslovakia, the war was over. Sokolov was reunited with Gita and they married shortly after the war. They migrated to Australia in 1949 and had a son, Gary, now 44.

Sokolov narrates his epic story with relative calm, becoming emotional only when talking about Gita, who died two months ago.

But when asked about Holocaust denier David Irving, he becomes enraged. “I would kick him in the pants and say "I was there. I saw it.’”

Questions asked a tattooist about the above claims

Q: How long do you need to tattoo five (5) numbers onto someone with an electric machine ?

A: About 10 minutes.

Q: Is that the fastest you could do it?

A: Yes.

Q: How good do the numbers have to be?

Answer: Readable

Q: Do you think it's possible for someone with needle(s) between two pieces of wood to tattoo five numbers into an arm in just 30 seconds?

A: No, I do not.

Q: How long have you been a tattooist?

A:  12 years.

This man needs lessons from the tattooist of Auschwitz!

----- Original Message -----
From: "LFP" lfp@swing.be
To: "Walter Mueller" <thetruthisback@yahoo.com
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2004 11:58 AM
Subject: Re: Patriot Letter: It's all your turn, with a few comments from me

On the subject of tattooing, a modern tattoo artist would take 10 minutes
partly because he would need to shave the arm, change the needles, and
 disinfect the spot being tattooed (for example, with rubbing alcohol in a
spray bottle), both before and afterwards, then bandage the tattoo. 

Anbody using a sewing needle and a cork (like modern gang or prison 

tattooists) or block of wood (as mentioned below) would naturally take

 much longer, simply due to clumsiness. If the National Socialists are 

alleged to have tattooed people in their camps they would either have

 required tons of tattooing needles, and/or an autoclave, or else every inmate

 in the camp would get some blood-borne disease, usually hepatitis-B or C, 

sometimes syphillis.

It hardly seems a mass production process to me. Or maybe they had a
tattooing needle factory at Auschwitz. The tubes, ink pots, wooden skin 

depressors, rubber gloves, cotton swabs, etc. would also have to 

be changed after every inmate if they didn't want the whole camp to come

 down with some some sort of disease. 

It seems absurd to build huge complicated disinfestation
stations using Zyklon, Argon, steam, ultrasound, and hot air to prevent
typhus if half the camp is going to die of hepatitis or syphilis caused
by tattooing, including the tattoo artist. 

The transcript of the First Nuremberg Trial contains only reference to

 tattooing, as I recall, a single sentence in the testimony of a Communist 

named Schmagalevskaya, in volume 8 as I recall, and even that was just

 her assertion.

In a famous case in the United States, 20 people were infected with
 syphillis because the artist suffered from secondary syphillis (during
which stage I believe the spirochete is carried in the saliva) and licked the
needle with his tongue for some reason during the tattooing process.

Deserters, prisoners and slaves have been tattooed throughout history, but
never on a mass-production line basis. The British army stopped this
 practice because the rumour became widespread that deserters were being
branded with a red-hot iron (considerably safer where the question of
disease is concerned). (The intent was to prevent them from re-enlisting
under a false name, claiming a bounty, then deserting again). Victims of
the modern trans-Atlantic slave trade were never tattooed, they were branded.

CARLOS

---- Original Message -----
From: "LFP" <lfp@swing.be>
To: "LFP" <lfp@swing.be>
Sent: Friday, January 16, 2004 12:25 PM
Subject: Re: Patriot Letter: It's all your turn, with a few comments from me

Incidentally in case anybody-some smart-ass objects that the victims of
the trans-Atlantic slave were not tattooed just because they were black, the
answer is that tattooing is widespread in Africa, but that it is an
entirely different process, involving the rubbing of soot into incisions.

Another thing that occurs to me is the obvious absurdity of using TWO
needles stuck in a piece of wood? How the hell could anybody tattoo using
two needles at once? Unless you wanted to tattoo in parallel straight lines,
like a pantograph. Even it would be impossible because they'd run out of ink
at different times. Gang members use one needle stuck in a cork, and keep
dipping the needle in India ink. But they use one needle at a time. The Jews
are nuts.

It is worth noting that hepatitis B and C can both be fatal, and hepatitis C
can even cause cancer of the liver. The same people who invented ultrasound
are going to tattoo hundreds of thousands of people with a couple of
[presumably sewing] needles stuck in a piece of wood?