The Ghost Tattoo

By: Tony Bernard

Narrated by: Conrad Coleby

Growing up, Tony Bernard knew that his father, Henry, had been in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. He was familiar with the tattoo bearing his Auschwitz number-B1224-and the scar resulting from a suicide attempt while in a camp in Blizyn. As an Australian boy growing up on Sydney's Northern Beaches where Henry was a well-respected doctor, Tony simply accepted these facts. Only as a young man, on a trip to Poland with his father, did he begin to uncover the secrets that filled Henry with regret, anguish, and guilt.

Henry's experiences in the concentration camps were harrowing, and he survived through ingenuity, grit, and countless miracles of chance. Yet there was another, deeper story—of what happened before his deportation to the camps. In 1940, Henry was recruited into the Jewish Order Service in his Polish hometown—an organization set up by the Nazis to help maintain order among Jews. Like many other young recruits, Henry believed he would help protect his community. Instead, the ghetto police, as they became known, were forced to assist the Nazis in the subjugation and mistreatment of their own people. Faced daily with impossible choices, desperate to keep his loved ones alive, Henry was both victim and unwilling participant.

The Ghost Tattoo is a haunting, emotionally resonant memoir of war and its aftermath.

©2022 Tony Bernard (P)2023 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

The incredible painful detail that reads like fiction but is truth.

Sometimes it was a bit hard to know what time frame the book was in. After completing I understand why this was necessary. The horrific events are so well described. It is difficult to believe how horrible man can be to his fellow man.

Honesty

First time that I've encountered a Holocaust related book that connects experience with compound psychological trauma.