Yellow star

The Yellow star is the badge that the Nazi regime forced Jews to wear, marking them for persecution and ultimately for deportation to Auschwitz. In Lale Sokolov's story, the star functions as the visible sign of the crime of being Jewish, the brand that separates him from other prisoners and from the unmarked SS men who rule the camp. It is the symbol of the dehumanization that the cattle train begins and the tattoo completes, and it becomes the emblem of the identity that Lale both refuses and is forced to bear.

The Mark of the Crime

When Lale arrives in the camp, he learns the full meaning of the badge he has been forced to wear. A fellow prisoner explains the system of colored triangles that classify the inmates: the green triangle marks criminals—killers and rapists who make good guards because they are terrible people; the red triangle marks political prisoners; the black triangle marks those deemed lazy. Then the man turns to Lale and his friends. "We wear the yellow star," Lale says. "Yes, you wear the star. Your crime is to be Jewish," comes the reply. The star is not a punishment for a deed but a sentence for an identity, and it places Lale in a category that the camp regards as lower than murderers and thieves. When Lale later questions this hierarchy, asking why the man who explained it wears no brand at all, he is dismissed with a curt "That's none of your business, Jew boy." The star marks him as someone who can be spoken to that way, as someone whose very existence is treated as an offense.

The Refusal to Wear It

Before the camp, the star was a badge Lale refused to wear. In early 1942, all Jews in Slovakia were ordered to display the yellow Star of David on their clothing when out in public. Lale defied the order, not out of fear but because he saw himself as a Slovak: proud, stubborn, and even, he conceded, arrogant about his place in the world. His being Jewish was incidental and had never before interfered with what he did or who he befriended. If it came up in conversation, he acknowledged it and moved on. It was not a defining trait for him. It was a matter discussed more often in the bedroom than in a restaurant or club. The star was thus the first instrument of the regime that tried to reduce him to a single category, and his refusal to wear it was an early act of resistance—a claim that his identity was larger than the badge. Yet the refusal could not protect him. In February 1942, he was given advance warning that the German Foreign Office had requested the Slovak government begin transporting Jews out of the country as a source of labor, and soon he was on the cattle train, dressed in his pressed suit and tie, headed for a place where the star would be replaced by a number burned into his skin.

The Star and the Cattle Train

On the journey to the camp, the star is the invisible mark that binds the men together. Lale rattles across the countryside in a wagon designed to transport livestock, less than ten feet wide, with two buckets substituting for toilets. He is just one among countless young men stuffed into the wagons, and what they all share is fear, and youth, and their religion. The star is the common denominator that has landed them here, the badge that made them targets for the rifles that forced them onto the train. When a young man named Aron pushes through the scrum of bodies to ask Lale how he can be so calm, Lale responds with words of encouragement, trying to turn fear into hope: "We stand in shit but let us not drown in it." The men around them raise their heads toward the two speakers before lapsing back into silent reveries, sinking deep into their own thoughts. The star has made them all equal in the eyes of the regime, but it has not erased their individual terror. Lale clings to his suitcase, hoping that with the money and clothes he has, he might be able to buy himself out from wherever they are headed, or at the very least buy himself into a safe job. The star has marked him for transport, but he still believes he can negotiate his way out of the fate it promises.

The Star and the Tattoo

The star is the precursor to the tattoo, the first brand that the regime applies and the one that the camp replaces. In the camp, the yellow star is superseded by the Auschwitz tattoo, the number burned into the arm that makes each prisoner a unit of the camp's accounting. The star marks the Jew for deportation; the tattoo marks the prisoner for the camp. Together they form a sequence of dehumanization: the star declares the crime of being Jewish, the cattle train delivers the branded to the camp, and the tattoo completes the transformation from person to number. Lale, who becomes the Tätowierer, the camp tattooist, is the one who applies the second brand, the one who turns the star-wearer into the numbered prisoner. He tattoos Gita, the woman he will love, with the number 34902, and in doing so he becomes complicit in the system that the star began. The star is the badge of the Jew; the tattoo is the badge of the camp; and Lale is the man who bridges them, the Jew who brands other Jews.

The Star and the Aftermath

The star does not disappear with the camp. It lingers in the memory of the survivors and in the testimony that Lale gives at the end of his life. When Lale's son Gary grows up, his parents are determined that he should know what they went through. When the TV series The World at War started, Gary was thirteen, and they made him watch it by himself every week. They were unable to watch it with him. The footage of the camps is stuck in his mind even now. The star is part of that footage, part of the visual vocabulary of the Holocaust that the family carries into the postwar world. Lale's mother Serena, who survived the camp, tells Gary that when she was very sick her mother had come to her in a vision and told her, "You will get better. Move to a faraway land and have a son." The star is the mark that made her a target, but it is also the mark that her son inherits as a memory rather than a badge. When Lale finally tells his story, he wants it recorded so, in his words, "it would never happen again." The star is the beginning of that story, the first mark that the regime placed on him, and the symbol of everything he survived to testify against.