THE GHOST TATTOO

An incredible tale of guilt, grief and self-forgiveness.

The Ghost Tattoo is the profoundly moving story of a son's quest to uncover his father's Holocaust secret. Growing up Tony Bernard knew that his father Henry had been to Auschwitz, and to Blizyn before that. He knew that his father had attempted suicide in Blizyn. But as a child he saw the scars and he just took them as part of his father: 'With a child's mixture of acceptance and indifference to his father's experiences I had not asked more about the surrounding circumstances.' Only when he was a young man travelling through Poland with his father Tony started to ask questions. Why was his father affected by a deep sadness? Why was he fanatically frugal? Why was he obsessed with aspects of security? And what made him a man so hard to live with that his wife, Tony's mother, abandoned the family? While Henry's experiences in the camps were as harrowing as they could get, it was what happened before his deportation that kept Henry in a constant battle with himself for the rest of his life. Henry carried a deep shame about the desperate choices he had made in the Polish ghetto to try to keep himself and his family alive. Only the approach of old age could unlock those secrets from Henry. And when they came out, they came in a rush. Most Holocaust survivor stories are a testament to truth; Henry's memoir is something more. It is a wrestling match with his conscience, an unfair contest that he could never win. But his story is also proof that he could not be defeated. The Nazis turned millions of Jews into helpless victims, plain and simple. But due to a decision the Nazis made for him, Henry's fate contained a special punishment: the burden of ambivalence about what he was forced to do in the period between 1941 and 1943, about daily decisions that a young man should never have had to make, working as a policeman in the ghetto of his Polish hometown. TONY BERNARD is an accident and emergency doctor at the Northern Beaches Hospital in Sydney. He followed his father Henry into the medical profession. Henry was his hero. Yet it was one thing to idolise his father, and another to understand who he was. Shortly before Henry's death in 2016, Tony recorded his father's memoirs and collaborated with the Jewish museum in Sydney to produce a document for the Bernard family. But it uncovered new details of an extraordinary holocaust survival story.