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“Countless numbers of
inferiors and those suffering from hereditary conditions are reproducing
unrestrainedly while their sick and asocial offspring burden the
community.”
The Sterilization Laws
After spending months studying the Holocaust in the eighth grade, I had
had enough; I could not bring myself to watch yet another interview of a
tearful survivor, or look at more black and white photos of emaciated,
beaten concentration camp victims. And yet, I still could not grasp the
enormity of the Holocaust, eleven million people “purged” from the
world. My teachers invited an actual Holocaust survivor to come to speak
with us. I came prepared with my box of tissues to hear a horrifying,
first hand story of a young man who had his life taken away by a group
of people who believed he was inferior. I watched the old man hobble
into the room with the help of his cane and I tried to fit all of the
pictures and movie clips together to imagine what this man must have
experienced. I could not. I imagined that as a young man, he may have
looked like pictures I have seen of my own Jewish great-great grandpa
who fled from his village in Poland named Zuromin years before the
Holocaust.
When the old man started his slide show, I braced myself to see
sickening images of Nazi atrocities. But instead of projecting
disturbing pictures, the old man projected a simple quote on the screen:
“Bad things happen, when the good people do nothing.” In his heavy
Polish accent, this man who had survived unspeakable horrors spent the
next hour engraving these nine words into our minds. I did not even
touch my tissue box. Instead of leaving with horrific images lingering
in my head, I left with a new understanding of not only the Holocaust,
but of any crime, from a school fight to a genocide. The message of the
old Polish man was that although tragedies like the Holocaust stem from
hatred, hatred can only succeed when those who do not hate do nothing.
He explained that along with the six million Jews who were killed (some
of them undoubtedly relatives of mine from Zuromin), almost half of the
people killed in the Holocaust were not Jews, and therefore the horrors
of the Holocaust cannot be attributed to Anti-Semitism alone. “Good”
people also did nothing while five million non-Jewish so-called
“inferior” people were rounded up and murdered.
I wondered about these “other” five million. I learned that they were a
wide variety of groups, including those who Hitler believed were
“unfit,” the disabled. I was so perplexed by the very idea that disabled
people should be persecuted that I investigated this further. I came
upon the story of a young deaf girl, Franziska Schwarz, who would once
again reshape my view of the Holocaust.
Franziska (Franny) was born deaf into a mostly deaf family. She “never
saw anything wrong with being deaf.” Hitler did. He believed that the
mentally and physically disabled were “defective” and did not deserve to
live. In July 1933, he declared the “Law for the Prevention of Offspring
with Hereditary Defects” which stripped all persons who were blind,
deaf, physically or mentally handicapped of the natural right to have a
child. One day in 1935, after coming home from the Convent where Franny
apprenticed, she found her mother crying over a letter that ordered her
and Franny to report to the health office to be sterilized. The day of
the hearing, Franny’s uncle petitioned the government arguing that the
children of hereditarily deaf people are not always deaf, and that
Franny was a healthy young woman who deserved the right of motherhood.
The judges denied the petition and forced Franny to be sterilized. As
she left the courtroom in tears Franny recalled taking long walks in the
park with her boyfriend, Chrisitan Mikus, watching the children play and
dreaming of one day having her own family with Christian. Franny
screamed the whole way to the hospital until they locked her in a room
with two other deaf teenagers where they cried all night. Although the
Nazi doctors attempted to sterilize her, the operation apparently did
not work because after a few years she became pregnant with Christian’s
baby. But soon a note from the health office came, ordering Franny to
come for an examination. The doctors forced Franny to take off her
clothes and then locked her in a room with barred windows. After three
days, the doctor came in, pointed to her stomach and mouthed “out.”
(Friedman)
After trying unsuccessfully to take away her ability to have a baby,
Hitler and the Nazis were now going to take away the baby she had been
so desperately trying to have. They performed a forced abortion
procedure, and once again tried to sterilize her. For the remainder of
the war, Franny went into hiding, working on a farm. “Life after the war
was better,” said Franny, “except for one thing: We could not have
children. This caused us much pain and regret.” (Friedman)
Even before Hitler and the Nazis were taking the “inferior” out of their
homes and cramming them into ghettos where they would await their death,
they were targeting the “unfit” of their own Aryan race. Starting in
1934 under the “Sterilization Law” 300,000 to 400,000 “feebleminded,”
schizophrenic, epileptic, deaf, blind and mute people were sterilized.
Under various secret “euthanasia” operations such as Operation T4, a
total of 200,000 to 300,000 were murdered. (Altman)
43 million, almost 1 out of 5 people in America suffer from a
disability. (“Disability Statistics”) Although preventing future
genocides and fundraising to send aid to victims of current genocides
like Darfur are important lessons learned from the Holocaust, a
different but equally important lesson is that we must become attuned to
the daily acts of persecution committed all around us without our
noticing because we are not members of the victimized group of people.
When I see my fellow students mock those suffering from cerebral palsy
or autism, or when I see people look at the homeless and mentally
disabled with disgust and hatred, I think of Franny and of the message
that the old man who visited my class was passionately trying to convey.
“Bad things happen when the good people do nothing.” Just as the
Holocaust began with countless, daily, small acts of Anti-Semitism that
were met with indifference by those who were not necessarily
Anti-Semitic, future genocides will only stem from the countless,
seemingly “small” acts of hatred that are ignored by us today.
Bibliography
Altman, Linda J. The Forgotten Victims of the Holocaust. Enslow, 2003.
"Disability Statistics." CODI. 15 Apr. 2008 <http://codi.buffalo.edu/graph_based/.demographics/.statistics.htm>.
Friedman, Ina R. The Other Victims: First-Person Stories of Non-Jews
Persecuted by the Nazis. Houghton Mifflin, 1995.
"Nazi Persecution of the Mentally and Physically Disabled." Jewish
Virtual Library. 15 Apr. 2008 <http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/disabled.html>.
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