Holocaust Suvivor & Lottery Winner

Hello All;

Just heard a new Urban Legend one with very few details, which makes it hard to research. I'm wondering if anyone else had heard a version of it with details that would make finding out the truth of the story easier.

As it was told to me, an elderly Jewish gentlemen had won the New York state lottery, and at the press conference to receive his novelty check (yes such press conferences are not uncommon, they are simply not often covered) He thanked the governor, the state lottery commission, and Adolf Hitler. When asked why he would thank Hitler, the gentlemen supposedly pulled up his sleeve revealing his concentration camp tattoo and said, "He gave me the numbers."

I am skeptical of a Holocaust survivor playing the numbers on his arm tattoo, but then again people play numbers for all sorts of reasons, and it's really just too interesting of a story to just let it go without research.

So if anyone has heard this story, please let me know what else you may have heard about it.

Thanks,
Matches

[Troberg]

I am skeptical of a Holocaust survivor playing the numbers on his arm tattoo, but then again people play numbers for all sorts of reasons, and it's really just too interesting of a story to just let it go without research.

People may stick to such symbols as a way of honouring the memory of those lost, or as a symbol of how they survived. By the very act of surviving, he has mocked all the insane agendas of the nazis, and being alive and able to show that tattoo is a symbolic way of proving that they failed. Come to think of it, it's not that far from cannibalistic traditions where eating the muscles that made you enemy strong gives you his strength, in a symbolic way, of course.

So, I can easily see how such a number might become an important positive symbol, despite its original purpose.

That said, I have no idea if the story is true or not.