When Zeev Sapir is brought to Auschwitz, he receives a tattoo on his left forearm—A3800. Shortly after, his family is murdered, and Sapir spends his time at the concentration camp in constant fear, before escaping his own execution. Eighteen years later, in Jerusalem for Adolf Eichmann's trial, Sapir shows the court his tattoo. The tattoo is not only the physical mark of the violence of the Holocaust on its survivors, it is a symbol for the permanence of history, irrespective of the attempts to efface it.

The tattoo was not the first measure given to ostracize, segregate, and humiliate the Jewish populations of Europe during the Second World War. Jews were forced to wear yellow stars on their clothing, and were forcibly moved into ghettos well before they were given the tattoo. However, the tattoo was not just a literal sign of Nazi Germany's efforts to set Jewish people apart, but rather the penultimate stage of their plan to erase them forever. No one who received a tattoo was expected to survive; all were destined to be killed, either immediately in the gas chambers, or slowly, through forced labor. The tattoo then, is a kind of paradoxical symbol—the proof of the genocide, made permanent, to be carried by its survivors as long as they live.