Letter From A Child
Yet this story is larger than them. It carries the memory of more than 400,000 disabled people murdered under the Nazi euthanasia programs at least 100,000 of them children and teenagers. Their names may be erased from records, but their voices echo through these pages.
Dear Sir or Madam
Perhaps you have already heard. The Ministry of Education has ordered every school to report its “poorly performing” students. Those who receive low grades are to be expelled. The only way to remain in school is to pass the state intelligence and knowledge examination.
But, the test is not fair. They ask the middle school students high school questions.
I took it and I failed. I was classed as feeble‑minded.
They took me like a broken object that needed to be repaired and put me in a psychiatric hospital. I am frightened.
Sometimes the doctors come into our ward and perform what they call “selections.” They choose a few children, quietly, without explanation and take them. None of them ever return.
I share my room with a girl who never sleeps. She wanders the corridors at night, pressing her ear to doors, listening for secrets. She says terrible things happen in the hospital. She says this place is a graveyard disguised as a hospital. She insists that our letters are never mailed, that they are burned.
I don’t know what is true. But I know what fear feels like, and it lives in every corner of this hospital.
There is one person here I trust — a nurse in our ward. She treats me like a human being. She promised to send this letter for me, if I tell no one. I believe her. I have to believe someone. I am an orphan. I grew up in an orphanage. I have no family, no one to speak for me, no one to come looking if I disappear.
Please save me from this horrible place.If you cannot, at least make my voice heard.
And if they select me by the time you read this, then I beg you, help the others. Help the children who wait in these rooms. Their voices are trapped behind locked doors. Tell the world what is happening to the mentally handicapped children here. Tell them we are not monsters, not mistakes, not burdens.
Tell them we are alive. Tell them, even if our bodies are dead, our spirits are still alive.
We need some peace.
After all the suffering we went through, don’t you think we deserve it?
