Free A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy by Elie Wiesel, Thomas Buergenthal

horrendous crime committed
     in the name of the master race.
    The entrance to the Gypsy camp, consisting of a movable barbed wire gate, was guarded by the SS with their dogs. Once inside
     the camp, we were ordered to line up in single file behind a group of barracks and made to roll up our left sleeves. At one
     end of the line, two inmates sat at a wooden table. Each of us had to move up to the table, state our name, and stretch out
     our left arm. I was walking ahead of my father in the line and did not quite know what was happening. Then I saw that each
     inmate at the table was holding something that looked like a pen with a thin needle at the end, and that they were writing
     something on the outstretched arms after dunking the pens into an ink pot: we were being tattooed. When my turn came, I was
     afraid that it would hurt, but it went so fast that I could hardly feel it. Now I had a new name: B-2930, and it was the only
     “name” that mattered here. The number, now somewhat faded, is still there on my left arm. It remains a part of me and serves
     as a reminder, not so much of my past, but of the obligation I deem incumbent on me, as a witness and survivor of Auschwitz,
     to fight the ideologies of hate and of racial and religious superiority that have for centuries caused so much suffering to
     mankind.
    My father, who was right behind me in the tattoo line, became B-2931. Our numbers were also printed on a strip of cloth with
     a yellow triangle, the color identifying us as Jews. (There were different colors to distinguish between different types of
     inmates. Political prisoners, for example, were given red triangles. Other colors were assigned to homosexuals, criminals,
     and so on.) Some forty-five years later, when I returned to Auschwitz and gave the person in charge of the archives my name
     in order to find out when precisely I had arrived there in 1944, she asked for my number. I looked surprised since I had always
     heard that the Germans kept very precise records in their camps. “By the time you arrived,” she explained, “there was such
     a large influx of new arrivals that the SS no longer bothered to record the names of inmates, only their numbers.” Sure enough,
     once she had my number, she was able to provide the date I needed. The card with my number even disclosed how many people
     had come with me to Auschwitz from Kielce. It occurred to me then that unlike those of us who survived Auschwitz and can document
     our existence in that camp by reference to our numbers, those prisoners who died in its crematoriums after the SS had stopped
     recording their names have left behind no trace of their presence in that terrible place. No bodies, no names; only ashes
     and numbers. It is hard to imagine a greater affront to human dignity.
    After we had been tattooed, we were assigned to our barracks. Ours was a wooden structure like all the others in the Gypsy
     camp, with a mud floor that divided two long rows of wide, triple-level, wooden bunks. Once in the barrack, we were greeted
     by a burly prisoner with a cane. This, I was to learn right away, was the
Blockältester,
or barrack boss. He kept pointing to the bunks and yelling in Polish and Yiddish, “Ten men to each level!” Whoever did not
     move fast enough for him was hit or kicked. My father and I found a bunk, picked the middle level, and were soon joined by
     eight other inmates. Then we were ordered to lie on our stomachs with our heads pointing toward the middle of the barrack.
     I can’t recall whether we were given blankets, but I am sure that we had no mattresses.
    Although we were not given anything to eat that evening, the very thought of food was forced out of my mind by what happened
     that night. Into the barrack strutted two or three well-fed inmates with canes and clubs. They wore armbands that identified
     them as
Kapo
. Kapos were inmates who, together with the barrack bosses, ran the camp for the SS and terrorized their