Remembering...

 

As a child the most vivid vicarious experience I would have of the Holocaust would be coming across individuals with numbers tattooed on their arms.

The first time is the one that has really stuck. The man's name was Leon, and he was head of Monagasque government's Tourism and Convention Authority.

My father used to drag me along to brief, cheery meetings with him in his office in the Boulevard des Moulins and it was probably on the very first of these encounters with Leon — rolled up sleeves and veiled in cigarette smoke behind his big wooden desk — that I fixated on the numerical code etched into his skin.