Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and its Transformations, Jurgen Matthaus, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) x + 211 pp., cloth $74.00, pbk. $24.95

Abstract

The number 2286 is tattooed on the left arm of Auschwitz survivor Helen Tichauer, who is now more than ninety years old. The number indicates that she arrived early at the camp—in fact in March 1942. After she suffered a back injury while engaged in forced labor, Tichauer's own skill with numbers became her means of survival: she was discovered to be a skilled graphic artist with a gift for bureaucratic organization. In Slovakia before the war she had painted signs and license plates; now Tichauer painted red stripes on the back of prisoners' clothing and black registration numbers on white strips of cloth attached to the colored triangles that identified prisoners by category. Tichauer was born Helen Spitzer in Bratislava to a middle-class Jewish family in 1918. She attended synagogue only to say Kaddish for her mother, who died when Helen was eight years old. After her mother's death the girl was raised by her maternal grandmother until her father remarried. She joined Hashomer Hatzair, a leftist Zionist group, and developed an enthusiasm for the mandolin, the instrument she later would play in the Auschwitz women's orchestra. After training to be a commercial artist, Helen became the only female employee and the only Jew employed in a local German design firm. She was dismissed in 1939; in 1942, at the age of twenty-one, she was transported to Auschwitz together with two thousand other unmarried women.