A 50 or so years old man lies on the examining table and removes his shirt for the
impending medical procedure, revealing tattoos across his back and arms. He bears the
usual biker tattoos with aggressive images of faces and signs, crosses and daggers.
Most of my younger patients sport tattoos. Little anklets or barbed wire wrist bands and
flowers in the lumbar lordotic sacro-iliac area, names of girlfriends or children roses,
flowers and mottos. One ex-con had a whole litany in gothic lettering on his back that
looked like an ancient manuscript telling the world what an evil place it was. He told me
he received it in jail over many months. In fact it is so common that the tattoo has
become a fashion statement and most of my patients sport them.
However on this patient’s outer right arm is a swastika-in reverse. When I ask him about
that image he responds:
“Yes, doc, I was much younger then, but have no fear, it is in reverse because I had
many friends who were black and Jewish!”
How kind of him! How manipulative! His biker friends and the gang would not notice the
phase reversal of the swastika all the while his ethnic friends would not be offended
because it was not a real swastika! He had solved the problem of loyalty to his gang
and not offending his friends. So he thinks.
My electro-diagnostic technician Dennis, seeing me stare at the swastika, nods with that
knowing look, having been with me so many years now-he knows of the struggle I have
as a physician. I am responsible for my patient unconditionally, yet the meaning behind
that symbol, that image etched in his flesh, represents a hatred that destroyed my
father’s family and a world. This tattoo threatens the very rapport between doctor and
patient, it is so fraught! I hold back my raging emotions and continue the study. I ignore
the flesh for the nerves buried deep beneath the surface. I prod and electrocute to
determine the integrity of the peripheral nerves exiting the spinal cord.
It is so ironic that those with the fewest teeth have the largest density of tattoos, they
are the same who fear my spinal needle the most! Those who demand sedation on
pondering the flashy steele of the surgeon’s knife “resolving the enigma of the fever
chart”. I who stand with the needle over the prone patient who trusts the doctor to inject
accurately, innocently waiting for the treatment and the relief.
In Synagogue my old friend Farkash, sits behind me, aged around 88, a Holocaust
survivor and a legend in Chicago. He is a pious talmudic scholar as well as a pious but
creative thinker with tomes of novellae unpublished. Honored for his charity as well as
erudition he too sports a tattoo on his left arm. Being an observant Jew he did not
voluntarily agree to this branding (tattoos are prohibited in Jewish Law) but received itA 50 or so years old man lies on the examining table and removes his shirt for the
impending medical procedure, revealing tattoos across his back and arms. He bears the
usual biker tattoos with aggressive images of faces and signs, crosses and daggers.
Most of my younger patients sport tattoos. Little anklets or barbed wire wrist bands and
flowers in the lumbar lordotic sacro-iliac area, names of girlfriends or children roses,
flowers and mottos. One ex-con had a whole litany in gothic lettering on his back that
looked like an ancient manuscript telling the world what an evil place it was. He told me
he received it in jail over many months. In fact it is so common that the tattoo has
become a fashion statement and most of my patients sport them.
However on this patient’s outer right arm is a swastika-in reverse. When I ask him about
that image he responds:
“Yes, doc, I was much younger then, but have no fear, it is in reverse because I had
many friends who were black and Jewish!”
How kind of him! How manipulative! His biker friends and the gang would not notice the
phase reversal of the swastika all the while his ethnic friends would not be offended
because it was not a real swastika! He had solved the problem of loyalty to his gang
and not offending his friends. So he thinks.
My electro-diagnostic technician Dennis, seeing me stare at the swastika, nods with that
knowing look, having been with me so many years now-he knows of the struggle I have
as a physician. I am responsible for my patient unconditionally, yet the meaning behind
that symbol, that image etched in his flesh, represents a hatred that destroyed my
father’s family and a world. This tattoo threatens the very rapport between doctor and
patient, it is so fraught! I hold back my raging emotions and continue the study. I ignore
the flesh for the nerves buried deep beneath the surface. I prod and electrocute to
determine the integrity of the peripheral nerves exiting the spinal cord.
It is so ironic that those with the fewest teeth have the largest density of tattoos, they
are the same who fear my spinal needle the most! Those who demand sedation on
pondering the flashy steele of the surgeon’s knife “resolving the enigma of the fever
chart”. I who stand with the needle over the prone patient who trusts the doctor to inject
accurately, innocently waiting for the treatment and the relief.
In Synagogue my old friend Farkash, sits behind me, aged around 88, a Holocaust
survivor and a legend in Chicago. He is a pious talmudic scholar as well as a pious but
creative thinker with tomes of novellae unpublished. Honored for his charity as well as
erudition he too sports a tattoo on his left arm. Being an observant Jew he did not
voluntarily agree to this branding (tattoos are prohibited in Jewish Law) but received it
free of charge courtesy of the Nazi party circa 1941-2. It needs no further explanation.
When they took away his name and identity they substituted it with a number to as to
easily identify him on roll calls. He was no longer a person. “Vermin” they used to call
Jews. Now after memory fades these numbers etched into his skin some 70 years after the
Nazis were destroyed, remain as a stark indelible sign. They mark him forever as a
survivor, a Holocaust survivor, even after death. So I turned to him and asked “how do
you pray?” pointing to the tattoo in shul one year, during penitential prayers begging
God to save us. He gives me a pious answer that only a saint could respond “we were
trained in cheder as children to be ready to die Al Kiddush Hashem (to be martyrs for
the sake of the Holy Name) so it came naturally.”
What connects me to these two tattoos? My patients’ fashion Nazi adornment and my
friends concentration camp numbers? I ask myself as I stare at the photo montage of
the “hyper fascist” website www.nork.ru. What is the Schechina doing in the SS helmet
and the reverse swastika? Lighting the emblem of the State of Israel like a Greek
Goddess. What is the Lucifer reference below it? and its reference to the Luftwaffe?
I asked my cousin Sylvia Klein, an artist from Ottawa Canada to imagine a world in
which fascism continues to linger in the psyche ready to inflame the heart at a moment’s
notice, once ignited by some trigger, a world where the hyperliteral readings of texts of
terror inflame the religious heart in a wave of fundamentalism that crosses all cultures
and faiths.