Identifying With An Auschwitz Survivor

On my left arm I wear the Auschwitz number A-3317 as a tattoo. I was not there. I am neither a survivor of the camps nor am I Jewish. A-3317 belongs to Branko Lustig, Academy Award-winning co-producer with Stephen Speilberg of Schindler’s List. Lustig, with astonishing generosity, allows me to wear his number from Auschwitz, though he said, “It is a sacrilege.” I agree.

Why do I wear A-3317 tattooed on my flesh? Because no Jew was guilty. Because no Gentile was innocent. Because in a few short years there will be no more numbers tattooed on human arms to witness the reality of the Holocaust. Because we as a species must never forget who we are and what we did and what was done to us. Because we are all Jews. Because we are all Hitlers.

The Holocaust was a major cause of my leaving the Episcopal Priesthood. Our family have been Episcopal (Anglican) and Church of Ireland clergy for seven generations. My father was a Bishop. My oldest brother is a retired priest.

It happened this way. In 1965 I went to see a play called The Deputy. It had opened in Europe to great controversy, for it charged the Papacy with collusion in the destruction of European Jewry. The hero, a Franciscan monk as I remember, was eventually sent to Auschwitz and there one day exchanged places with one of those in the gas chamber line and was exterminated.

I was to last only two more years in my parish ministry before being fired, then leaving the ministry all together, and finally, in a fit of righteous outrage, renouncing Holy Orders. Subsequent participation in Adult Children of Alcoholics and Co-Dependents Anonymous led me to the discovery that I had been molested by my mother and my eldest brother as a very young child. What, you ask, does that have to do with A-3317 tattooed to my arm? It has everything to do with tattoos, for as the Holocaust had started me on my journey out of patriarchal Christianity by confronting me with the energy of horrible and terrible events in the collective, so my incest realization confronted me with the energy of horrible and terrible events in the personal.

In confronting the unrepentant pedophilia of my eldest brother, a retired Episcopal priest, I encountered rage on my part of towering proportions and it felt good! It was this process which illuminated me regarding the depth and intensity of my feeling and the degree of rage and power that could be, even yearned to be, released if not restrained and integrated. A therapist of my brother, seeking to mollify my pursuit of him, asked me if I were aware of the Hitler within me and suggested I ease up. I wrote back that, yes, I was only too well-acquainted with the Hitler within.

Long before I ever heard of psychohistory, I had been introduced by my own experience into one of its basic tenets, that the psyche of the commentator is an essential part of the commentary. As it turned out, I now had in my own personal, emotional history two polarities which were working their bright magic on me. On one hand I had the collective polarity of the Holocaust, which had been a deeply emotional and career-changing factor. On the other, I had the individual polarity of my incest, with the added polarities of being a helpless victim as well as a potential killer — the possibilities occasionally switching between themselves with lightning-like rapidity. (That part did not feel good, I assure you.) While I did not emerge unscathed, I did emerge, as the New Testament’s King James version notes, “clothed and in my right mind.”

It was after this particular point in my process that I heard of a woman, perhaps in a novel, who took the concentration camp number of another woman. I remember thinking to myself, “of course.” Later I read a psycho-

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historian’s admonition that to understand Hitler we must discover the “Hitler in ourselves.” This gave me the impetus to start my search to get a number and put it on my arm in a more serious way.

When I watched the Academy Awards of 1993, I saw to my amazement that as Mr. Lustig stepped up to receive his Oscar, he stuck out his arm and said, “I have a number.” I knew at that moment that this man was willing to be publicly identified as a “Survivor” in a powerful and assertive way. I called him as soon as I could get his phone number, and you know the rest.

Having this tattoo has changed my life in ways that I find very difficult to put into words. In some inexplicable way it has linked me to some of the energy of the Holocaust. Sometimes — not often — people ask me about it. Some of them know or guess what it is. Others have no idea, and are startled and stunned. Sometimes — not often — I volunteer my numbered arm to people.

In preparing this article I have realized that this is my first public discussion of the ongoing life of A-3317. I am old enough to have been in Auschwitz, I am in fact of the same generation of many of the survivors. At age 63, I, too, will soon be dead, and my A-3317 will disappear from visible human history like the other numbers. It is my hope that others may decide to wear this number. “NEVER AGAIN.”

Shalom,

James Kirchhoffer

San Rafael, California

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