Through this project, we found that the combination of the four categories of truth provided a holistic view of the truth of tattoos during the Holocaust. We could easily refute any Holocaust denials relating to the tattoos after having collected evidence that supported the categories. Although each category may have flaws, the collection of factual, narrative, social, and restorative truth gave us a complete and credible perspective of identity markers during the Holocaust.
Social Truth: Our specific look at identity markers made it hard to find entire societies with concrete views on Holocaust tattoos. Even when looking at the social truth of the Jewish community we found that different sects of Judaism have very different opinions on what is social acceptable in relation to body markings. Additionally, there are so many ways to group people that when discussing a specific incident it becomes hard to find a group with a single oppinion that clearly emanates from its members. While social truth can add to a combination of all four truths, alone it provided little information about identity markers during the Holocaust.
Restorative Truth: In our research we found ample information about how victims of the Holocaust feel about their tattoos and this added to our understanding of the victims' perspective. However, the factual and narrative truths both also focused on the victims and how they reacted to the way they were treated. In this sense, the restorative truth added few new voices to our investigation. Moreover, between the victims there was not a clear opinion on how to use tattoos as coping mechanisms so we intern could not make a clear conclusion about how Holocaust tattoos help or hinder reconciliation.
Overall, we found that a combination of all four truths provided a much more effective holistic view of identity markers during the Holocaust than any single truth could by itself. Looking at tattoos as a microcosm for all of the events of the Holocaust, we conclude that all four truths need to be taken into account in order to create a credible truth.
