Reviews of My Little Blue Tattoo

     I liked reading the memoirs of Gershon Ron's "My Little Blue Tattoo." Despite the hard times he went through, his story is riveting, intelligent, and spiced with a wry sense of humor.

- Gila Fatran PhD.   Historian Tel Aviv, Israel

    Gershon Ron offers the reader a narrative stream of consciousness in which, with a wry sense of humor, he chronicles the formative, adolescent years he spent in Auschwitz during World War II. Ron is an alchemist, spinning and converting the surreal time, place, and events, to mundane daily rituals of survival in the limbo environment of a concentration camp. Without the dramatization that the public has come to expect in memoirs and films of the Holocaust, the author recounts the horrors and hardships-starvation. beatings, murder, the trappings-guns, dogs, barbed wire, the unimaginable loss of parent, sibling, friends, freedom, and the numbed conscience required for getting by, going on, accomplishing the constant and ultimate objective - living one more day.

     A-10490-Gershon Ron's "My Little Blue Tattoo," was the indelible stigma that both denied and defined his individual identity. It serves now as a visible, permanent marker, affirming the endurance of human life, and the triumph of the human spirit.

-Sindy Becker, Fleischmanns, NY

     I read the story with much interest and sadness, in knowing how cruel life can be. On the flip side, however, it is amazing what friendship, caring, a good sense of humor, and love for one another, can do! Go figure.

-Marilee Asher

Letter from John Lundgren

To Gabi Ron:

     I sat down to read your manuscript last night. After I started, I could not put it down. Although the parts of your life before the Nazis intruded were certainly entertaining, your early years, various pranks, playing soccer, relationships with friends and relatives, wry comments on your Hebrew education, etc, it somehow seems offensive for me to say that I enjoyed it. How can someone “enjoy” reading about such a disaster as WWII and the Holocaust? Nevertheless, you infuse your writing with such a spirit that your story becomes compelling, commands the reader’s attention, and demands to be read from start to finish. At least that was my experience. Hats off to you for making the effort to preserve, in writing, a story that should not be forgotten.

     Anyone can list a sequence of events, dates, and places, and mistakenly believe such a list is the story of his or her life. What we really want to know, what brings the story to life, are the writer’s thoughts and reflections on those events, dates, and places. I especially liked (enjoyed?) your running commentary throughout your manuscript, never mincing words, where you stand back from your narrative to point out the ludicrousness, the ironies, and the insanity of so much of what happened to you before you were sixteen years old. It starts immediately with your opening line: “In the beginning, whatever!” lots of symbolism and hidden meaning in those few words, the foreshadowing of your views on religion to mention just one.

     Of the statements or ideas, I would have to include your leitmotiv of “free will” that reoccurs throughout your story, how you did not ask to be born, yet still had to suffer the consequences. “How smart was it to bring a child into this world (1938) without consulting the one who has to face the music?” Your sense of humor radiates from every page, too numerous to mention (except a few at the bottom.) Many other parts of your text are ripe for hours of discussion which, of course, is beyond the scope of this e-mail. The following are a few of those more profound statements:

“The time and effort I put in to memorize all those prayers and blessings I could have mastered calculus.”
“Lots of Jews burned in hell, but not because they picked up a stone on Saturday or watched the priest blessing the congregation, or even eating pork.”
“One can always use his imagination not to offend God.”
“He (the teacher) would send a message to my father…complimenting me on my math test, but adding that the Jews are good in math because they are money lenders.”
“If anyone can imagine hell, this was it.”
“There was never a love affair between the Polish and Hungarian Jews…Only the Nazis were biased?”
“I am the recipient of A-10490. There was no need for names anymore.”
“I am not sure about the crime I committed. I don’t remember being in court. On the other hand, I must have committed some heinous crime. People don’t get sentenced to death just like that!”
“I thought there must be some mitigating circumstances. My hair was lighter than Adolf’s, my eyes are green. I don’t have a hooked nose.”
“Stefen was a Mensch.” (Ein hoher kompliment, wenn man deutsch richtig versteht was das Wort, Mensch, bedeutel; schwer auf englisch to uebersetzen.”
“Whatever happened, an SS could always blame the Jew.”
“True, it was a sunny day; the skies were blue, only a small cloud lingered over Birkenau, and the always present smell of burning flesh.” (The contrast is profound.)
“Shma Israel! Oh hear Yea Israel, we are duped! Maybe we duped ourselves!”
“What would Rabbi Jungreis say? Would he stick to his anti-Zionist ideas? How would he explain the absence of divine intervention?”
“I got even! I got even with a horse! Go figure!”
“At the end, Ervin and I survived. Bandi wasn’t that lucky, fate, destiny, luck? Go figure!” (Some luck to be sure, but your youth, your physical conditioning, your smaller stature needing fewer calories, and, above all, your indomitable spirit certainly contributed.)
“Sometimes ten or more cigarettes could purchase a loaf of bread. A hundred made one a millionaire…”
I did not realize at the time that to survive a certain time in the camp gave one a certain status “…As strange as it sounds, after a while a relationship developed between the guards and us.” (Perhaps after a few months you were no longer just a number, but a real person, someone whose personality they knew, which inhibited at least some of the guards from mistreating you?)
“At the time, Germany conscripted children to protect the Third Reich from the Russians and the Americans. Here (in the camp) able bodied young SS were fighting the International Jew. What a formidable army of Jews they had to face!”
“…dressed in designer pajamas with clogs to match…” (Your sense of humor must have helped you survive. More examples below.)
“The cattle cars were ready and now the second time in a year I was traveling on the expense of the Third Reich.”
“The tattoos were not enough for the Mauthausen authorities. They had their own accounting firm.”
“We were not surprised when we were told to pack…We the striped ones had nothing to pack. We always traveled light.”
“There was no welcoming sign at the gate.” (a wry reference to the customary “Arbeit Macht Frei!” greeting.)