The 15 percent

In May and June 1940, 83 years ago, the first prisoners arrived at Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

Two years later, Ludwig “Lale” Sokolov, arrived at the camp before subsequently serving as the tattooist for both Auschwitz and Birkenau.

I just finished reading “The Tattooist of Auschwitz,” by Heather Morris, a novel based on interviews conducted with Sokolov.

I read my first holocaust memoir in middle school. “I Have Lived a Thousand Years,” by Livia Bitton Jackson follows 13-year-old Elli Friedman as she grows up in the Holocaust, spending nearly a year in the Auschwitz before its eventual liberation.

As I compare the two tales, I find it interesting how different their experiences were. I wonder what part age, gender and simply their time of arrival played in their different journeys.

To be certain, Elli’s tale is much more common than Lale’s. Historians estimate more than 1.3 million were sent to Auschwitz, the most deadly extermination camp, and 1.1 million were killed within its walls — only 15% surviving.

Of the 1.3 million, there were only two head tattooists in the three years Lale spent there. It makes sense for his story to be an outlier.

He was never content to sit and wallow. From the day he walked through the deadly gates, he vowed he would do whatever it took to see his way out.

Lale partnered with women who processed belongings to steal any precious gems and trade them to workers who lived outside the camp. He used this power to feed others, get medicine and capture the heart of his sweetheart — Gita.

Though he finally shared his story with Morris in his 80s, he lived with the secret for nearly 50 years. “This man, the tattooist from the most infamous concentration camp, kept his secret safe in the mistaken belief that he had something to hide,” said Morris, who spent three years recording Lale’s story before he died in 2006.

He entered into the position of tattooist for two reasons: the first to survive and the second was to ensure the job didn’t go to someone with less compassion and empathy. He had an apprentice, and together, the two saw every prisoner of Auschwitz and Birkenau for its last two plus years of operation.

The barbaric numbers have become an icon of the atrocity that occurred during the Holocaust.

I wonder if Lale tattooed Elli’s arm as the sadistic Doctor Josef Mengele chose Elli and her mother to be selected for work. In an interview late in her life, Elli said she believed it was her thick blonde braids that garnered the attention of Dr. Mengele.

Her aunt Serena was not selected for the line to the right. Though Elli’s mother begged to go with her sister, Serena was sent to the left by herself. They would later learn the left line went straight to the gas chambers.

The SS assigned to watch Lale once joked that Lale was the only Jew to go into a gas chamber and come out alive. He said it after Lale was called in to investigate why two men shared the same number.

Due to Elli’s blonde hair and blue eyes, she was in a select group of “superior intelligence,” in a factory producing parts for the German air force.

Elli’s mother was assigned to a different work group, but they were both allowed to stay in the same sleeping quarters. As they worked in the factory each day, the women regretted contributing to the war effort of their enemies, but were too afraid to disobey their orders.

Holocaust Remembrance Day is celebrated around the world on Jan. 27, the day the camps were liberated.

However, by the time soldiers of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front opened the gates, only 7,000 prisoners remained of the 200,000 survivors.

The Germans had begun frantically moving the prisoners out of the camps near the front and take them to be used as forced laborers in camps inside Germany. Prisoners were first taken by train and then by foot on “death marches,” as they became known.

Prisoners were forced to march long distances in bitter cold, with little or no food, water, or rest. Those who could not keep up were shot. The largest death marches took place in the winter of 1944-1945, when the Soviet army began its liberation of Poland.

Lale’s beloved Gita was a part of a death march until she escaped to an nearby house as officers began loading women on to cattle cars. Approximately one in four died in the long marches, including Gita’s dear friend Dana, who had been in the camp with her for years.

Elli and her mother were evacuated out of Auschwitz on trains. At one point, the train doors open and confused, many fell out, hoping for liberation, but finding themselves in the crossfire of the Allied and German soldiers.

When Elli was finally liberated, the Americans asked the prisoners if they were men or women as they couldn’t tell. Elli was 14 years old on the day Auschwitz was liberated, but when they were rescued, a man commented how difficult the work must have been for a woman of her age.

After less than a year in the camp, Elli appeared to be in her mid sixties — prompting the title, “I Have Lived a Thousand Years.”