The profoundly moving story of a son's quest to uncover his father's Holocaust secret.
To the outside world, Henry Bernard was a hard-working and beloved family doctor on Sydney's Northern Beaches. Yet he was also a Holocaust survivor whose life was profoundly affected by the experiences of his past. He took extreme steps for his family's security, keeping a rifle near his bedroom and covering up his family's Jewish origin. He was obsessed with paying off debt - the German word for debt being the same as the word for 'guilt'. He kept his striped Auschwitz uniform with a picture of his mother in his wardrobe. These obsessions helped destroy his marriage and restricted any hope he had of conventional domestic happiness.
But Henry had a bigger secret and a deeper shame about what he had done during the war. He suffered privately until he began returning to Germany and Poland to confront his past and come to terms with the deaths of his parents and of Halina, the love of his life.
The Ghost Tattoo is the story of how Tony Bernard, Henry's eldest son, went on a forty-year journey with his father to solve the mystery of why Henry was the way he was, and how he finally came to understand the desperate choices Henry had made in the ghetto to try to keep himself and his family alive.
Grace
2025-01-28
Thank you for this extraordinary book! This book is about a topic I’ve.never read about from this perspective but ofc heard about in many other books. As. I try to understand the shame on a philosophical level the main character is carrying his entire life, I’d not claim I comprehend it, but the closest thing I can come up with to compare the feelings of guilt and shame is the following: I think guilt and shame stems from two main tentacles 1. The ones we put upon ourselves & 2. The shame others make us feel! In regards off this book I heavily lean towards the first option I mentioned, how our own guilt turns into shame, and I want to emphasize that if i could I’d try and convince this man his free of guilt and shame! I wish we humans could see what others see’s in us. In that way we would have an easier time forgiving ourselves. Too often we blame and shame ourselves for things that are completely out of our control, and I thoroughly believe that most of us do know this in an intellectual level,- and yet we can’t help ourselves from continue to torment ourselves with shame and blame. I don’t know the reasons behind this human complexity but it’s there nevertheless! Many of us are shaming ourselves and blaming ourselves for something, whilst we on the other hand would give grace to someone else for the exact same reasons that we’re blaming ourselves for. That’s part of being human I assume, but boi do I wish I had an answer that would help us humans be kinder to ourselves, the same way we are to others! Again thanks for an excellent book! Respectfully, Grace
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