Introduction

“Wohin bringt ihr uns?” (Where are you taking us?) – those are the words which a resident at the psychiatric institution Weißenau uttered as he was transported to Grafeneck, one of the six main killing centers of the Nazi T4 Euthanasia program¹ where 70,273 patients were killed, primarily by carbon monoxide gassing, between October 1939 and August 1941 (Knittel, 62-64; Aly, 23). Those are also the words inscribed in the Monument of the Grey Busses created by Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz to commemorate the deportation of patients across Germany to the sites of their death. The monument consists of two concrete busses which represent the visage of the Gekrat busses used to transport disabled adults to the sites of their ‘medicalized’ murder: one is permanently placed at Weißenau, while the other travels to various cities which pay to host the memorial for a fixed period.

The transitory aspect of the one bus and how it passes through Germany effectively draws attention to the widespread fleet of busses implemented to destruct the lives that the Nazi biocracy² deemed “unworthy of life” and dangerous to the collective national health of the German people (read: able-bodied Aryan ideal of the “Volkskörper”). These busses are a haunting symbol of this past, and Susanne Knittel reads the memorial as a compelling “memory transport,” due specifically to its repurposing of “the perpetrators’ means of deportation as a means of transport for the memory of their victims” (Knittel 62-63). The artists chose the busses because of their high impact as a symbol, deliberately selecting “this instrument of the perpetrators as a sign of memory” due to their belief “that in the land of the perpetrators it is imperative that we also remember those who perpetrated the industrialized mass murder, instead of only honoring the victims at sites of mourning” (cited in Knittel, 63). This is logical and seems convincing, however, it is necessary to question to what extent the victims have been honored in T4 memorialization to date, and whether their perspective fades amongst an uneven focus on the perpetrators.

What I personally see as the most salient component of the memorial of the grey busses is the inscription “wohin bringt ihr uns?” (where are you taking us?); without these words, this memorial would not be nearly as compelling. By using the words reportedly spoken by a victim, the memorial explicitly tells the victims’ stories, transporting visitors into the position of the victim–in an ominous bus, uncertain of what awaits–; this grants the victims some memorial agency and speaks to their lived human experience. Without the inscription, the victim’s voices would be lost entirely. In both T4 memorialization and research, starting in the late 1970s with the journalistic work by Ernst Klee, there has been a tendency to focus primarily on the perpetrators, while missing much about the experiences of the victims themselves. This tendency can perhaps best be understood as an inadvertent fetishization in works such as Lifton’s “Nazi Doctors” and Friedlander’s “Origins of Nazi Genocide.” Starting in the early 2000s with the opening of the euthanasia memorial sites at Brandenburg, Grafeneck, Hartheim, and Sonnenstein-Pirna, the emphasis began to shift more towards victim’s perspectives and continues to trend in that direction. However, despite significant moves forward in the last decade in recovering and reporting information on the victims themselves³, there is still much resistance to allowing access to information under the argument of medical privacy (Mitchell and Snyder 254). Historicization and a later problematization by more theoretical works continues to bring T4 research to center more on victims’ perspectives. With the publication The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory, Susanne C. Knittel draws attention to the fact that public knowledge of the history of the T4 program was significantly lacking, as was scholarly discourse on euthanasia memorialization and literature (Knittel 16). By fleshing out the concept of “vicarious witnessing”, Knittel unlocks a powerful tool for mediating T4 postmemory that we can continue to build on today.

Operation T4 was a program which was clandestine by design, a program which killed at least four times its originally intended target figure (Aly 23; Müller-Hill 64-65; Knittel 43), a program which should be remembered when speaking of Nazi genocide.⁴ As a whole, “T4 culminated in the deaths of three hundred thousand or more disabled people by bullets, gassing, lethal injection, and starvation” (Mitchell and Snyder 250). T4 left no witnesses (Knittel 14): there are no first-hand accounts of what it was like for the institutionalized individuals who perished either in the more official phase sanctioned by a decree made by Hitler, or during the “decentralized” phase which followed an official stop order and continued through, and even slightly beyond, the end of the war (Conroy 254). This lack of witnesses, alongside the silencing of their histories, poses a particular challenge in T4 memory, especially since disability was already a stigmatized identity before eugenics, social Darwinism and Nazi biomedical policy attacked nonnormative embodiment and villainized it further. The T4 program may be long over, but it lingers. Specters of the euphemisms and “medical” terms within the Nazi “software of killing”⁵ still appear within the German language, Western notions of individual worth are still primarily based in utilitarian humanist values of whether an individual can be said to be “productive” within society, and family members several generations removed from the victims of the T4 program still refuse to allow their names to be memorialized for fear of being associated with the “shame” of disability (Mitchell and Snyder 258-60). It is crucial to cover T4 history and recognize the atrocities of the perpetrators and the consequences of the complacency of the general public as it developed. I have found myself wondering, as a disabled person, academic and a poet, how best to spread awareness about this historical event and simultaneously work against stigma and lack of understanding of disability. I see ableism and stigma against disabled people as both a contributing factor and a remaining specter of the T4 program in society today. Yet I consistently find myself coming up against a significant problem: how does one witness an atrocity that had no witnesses?

Essentially, we need to “bridge the silence” (Knittel 33-73) to recover these lost voices as best as possible and find a means to identify with them and remember their histories. But with that goal, we come up against another question: what did we lose when these disabled people and their perspectives were lost? By attempting to allow the victims’ experiences to resonate with us, we can bring a neomaterialist disability studies dimension into T4 memorialization. Instead of seeking to humanize disabled people for others, vicarious witnessing allows us to deploy disability as a complex constellation of subjectivity that has tended to go unrecognized in the common handling of T4 history as a crime of inhumanity. Thus, the T4 program becomes a way to not just reckon with a more humanist history, but an opportunity to read ourselves into the value of subjectivities of alternative embodiment at stake. This hopefully helps us to be able to bridge another gap and allow for more empathy and identification across the able-bodied/disabled binary, and potentially even spark a rethinking and deconstruction of this binary.

When thinking of memorialization of the people killed in T4, we should return to the words of the victims: “wohin bringt ihr uns” (where are you taking us) and ask ourselves “wohin gehen wir jetzt?” (where are we going now?) Where can we find the lost voices? What was lost when they were lost? And where are we taking them? I propose that these questions of T4 can be addressed via vicarious witnessing through creative writing. Guided by Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory and the notion of “vicarious witnessing” developed by Froma Zeitlin and expanded by Susanne Knittel, I lay out the strengths of using creative writing in T4 memory mediation. I explore this through the personal example of my poem “Smoke & Ash”, speaking to the creative writing process, my incentive, and the poetic interventions undertaken.

Although I have several chronic illnesses and a physical disability, have been a German Studies scholar since 2010, and have lived in Germany and Austria for a total of about three years, I had not heard or read anything about the T4 program until 2018. Now when I talk about this historic event, it seems that very few know much or anything at all about the Nazi persecution of disabled people. I first started researching T4 as a part of a course on “Disability and Nazi Genocide” and even when I stepped back from this topic, I still found myself clinging to many aspects that struck me hard when I first learned them. I found myself pondering the fragmented facts we have; they occupied my mind almost as much as the questions that all of this stirred up in me. I wrote my poem “Smoke & Ash” as a way of taking the knowledge and feelings I had and transforming them into something that, although fragmented, felt more complete. This started as a personal form of processing and emotional release, yet as it took form on the page, I realized it could also be a small way to address the issue of lack of awareness and visibility surrounding the T4 program. This is a project far too vast for one poem, or even several collections of poems, historical fiction novels, films, or plays. Yet together, a combination of creators and mediums working creatively to focus on the historical aspects of T4 they believe need to be mediated will bring us as close as possible to forming personal connections to witness this tragedy and memorialize those lost to it.

The Nazi T4 Adult “Euthanasia” Program

Before delving into the particularities of postmemory, vicarious witnessing and creative writing, a brief overview of T4 history is necessary. First, how did Nazi Germany come to this medicalized killing? By turning the focus of medicine from individual well-being to that of the collective, and by simultaneously eliminating all opposition in the medical profession (read: “Gleichschaltung” – “coordination”), the Nazis were able to rationalize this shift from healing to killing. They did so by taking up existing discourses of eugenic science and social Darwinism to claim an eminent degeneration and death of the ‘healthy’ national body (“Volkstod”) to lay out the necessity of “weeding out” the “unhealthy”, non-normative bodies as a healing goal for the collective national body (Volkskörper) (Lifton, 25-35). When thought of in terms of collective health, the murder of disabled people was considered a work of healing instead of the murder that it was. This illusion of the “therapeutic imperative” of killing (15) was upheld by euphemistic language like “Euthanasie” (euthanasia/good death; Friedlander, XXI), “Gnadentod” (mercy killing/death; Lifton 50/63), “Sterbehilfe” (death assistance; 47) and Erlösung (deliverance; Friedlander 104) and medicalized terms for killing like “Desinfektion” (disinfection/decontamination; Friedlander 98) and “Behandlung” (treatment; Lifton 53), combined with dehumanizing terms for the disabled target group itself, such as “lebensunwerte Leben” (life unworthy of life; Lifton, 21) “unnütze Esser” (useless eaters) “Ballastexistenten” (ballast existences; Lifton 47; Burleigh 196) which labeled nonnormative body-minds as “lesser than” as well as a threat to both the economic and biological health of the nation (Lifton 47). Once the “threat” had been identified and rationalized, then the system for killing could follow, and it, too, was constructed under the name of science and medicine. In the second page of “Smoke & Ash,” I bring attention to this software of killing by using some of these most common euphemistic terms, including several that Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche implemented in their influential 1920 pamphlet “Permitting the Destruction of Unworthy Life”⁶. This includes “leere Menschenhülsen” (empty human shells; 55) and “das furchtbare Gegenbild echter Menschen” (horrible counterparts of real humans; 32). These calculated terms distanced disabled people far enough away from the concept of “human” and painted their deaths as something distinct from murder and within a “humane practice of medicine.” In my poem, I use these euphemistic terms to draw attention to the power of rhetoric and expose these terms for the lies they are. With the first stanza, “MURDER/ by/firing squad, lethal injection, gas inhalation, suffocation, starvation/of/ FELLOW PEOPLE,” I first spell out the T4 program for what it actually was, using bold and all-caps for emphasis. I then mirror this stanza, redacting these true terms just as the Nazi government did. My poem continues by replacing these redacted truths with the very same terms the Nazis replaced them with, indenting and italicizing them to stress the rhetorical manipulation at work. I represent this censorship visually with both black redaction marks and strike-through to call attention to the Nazi government’s rhetorical erasure of the humanity of the disabled victims and the heinousness of the acts of killing them. I similarly italicize the last lines of the first three stanzas, as they also represent false arguments that eugenicists and the Nazi government used to support their genocidal stance against disabled people.

The deaths brought about by the T4 program extend far beyond the aforementioned six main killing centers of Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, Bernburg, Brandenburg, and Hadamar where 70,273 patients were killed primarily with carbon monoxide gas under the guise of showering. This was done upon the initiative laid out in the “Führer decree” of October 1939 (Lifton 62; Aly 23); although this document was official, it was kept secret, likely due to concern of public disapproval and because the T4 program violated existing laws against murder and manslaughter (Friedlander 116). The medicalized killing machine consisted of a complex web of institutional and bureaucratic agencies. There were institutions of origin from which the victims were sent to the killing centers, and interim institutions were established to serve as transport hubs which proffered another twist in the dense bureaucratic maze of deception devoted to keeping the nature of the T4 program and the killing centers clandestine (Friedlander). It is these interim institutions that I refer to in the sixth stanza “Smoke & Ash” with “soon-to-be corpses / shuffled … through multiple … locations,/ inevitable end post…poned/ for the sole purpose/ of/ concealment,” and it was the “Gekrat” busses that transported patients from one place to the next. Despite the many attempts at keeping the program clandestine, there was simply too much evidence of deception, including the coercion of parents to institutionalize their children, sudden bans on visiting institutionalized relatives, and people searching for seemingly untraceable family members (Lifton 70). When some family members were informed of a relative’s death, there were slip-ups that alerted them to the wrongdoing. Some families received two urns, or an urn that contained personal items like a comb that did not belong to the patient; sometimes it was obvious that a death certificate was falsified, perhaps because it listed appendicitis as the cause of death, although the person had received an appendectomy years prior (75). Some families discovered that they had been paying the state for weeks after their relative had been killed and that they were essentially funding the murderous system with the money meant to care for the patient. In “Smoke & Ash” I tried to present several different examples of the bureaucratic aspects of T4 built to hide its purpose, and the failings of those elements. As mentioned above, a further 230,000 adults were murdered during the remaining “decentralized” stages of the euthanasia program. This came after knowledge of the T4 program was leaked – due to bureaucratic slip-ups and the difficulties of disposing of the bodies without alerting neighbors, etc. – triggering public dissent. The stop order of the Führer decree did not slow the killings, which had previously been largely concentrated in the six killing centers and then spread to nearly all psychiatric and medical institutions in Germany and a variety of personnel (Lifton 75). This is why my poem explicitly states the dates that the Führer decree was active, as well as the fact that this killing continued through 1945.

Certain scholars view T4 as either a precursor to (Snyder) or the first chapter (Friedlander) of the Holocaust; however, this view remains largely controversial even with various proofs of direct links between T4 and the Holocaust.⁷ I believe it is necessary to recognize these links in order to deploy disability as a complex constellation of subjectivity, and attempt to discover what was lost when those witnesses and their perspectives were erased from this earth. Robert Jay Lifton demarcates five identifiable steps through which the Nazi biocracy targeted “lives unworthy of life”: 1) “coercive sterilization”⁸; 2) “killing of ‘impaired’ children”; 3) “Killing of ‘impaired adults’” transported from psychiatric institutions to centers equipped with carbon monoxide (T4); 4) killing of “‘impaired’ inmates of concentration and extermination camps” under the code name Aktion 14f13: Sonderbehandllung (Action 14f13: Special Treatment); 5) “mass killings, mostly of Jews, in the extermination camps” (e.g. Operation Rheinhard) (22). The overarching goal of eliminating the non-normative, non-Aryan bodies that did conform to the mythicized utopian biological ideal of the Nazi vision resulted in some overlap of these stages, and T4 memorialization should recognize that. Institutionalization isolated the patients, both removing them from the larger public eye and documenting them within a system which made them easy to track. In other words, institutionalization served as a systematic “rounding up” of a group of individuals destined for mass killing on the grounds of bodily difference.

One way to work against “the pervasive resistance toward making direct links between T4 and the Holocaust” (Mitchell and Snyder 255) is to complicate the belief that there was no broad, systematic “rounding up” of a select group for killing in the T4 euthanasia program. With “Smoke & Ash”, I focus on institutionalization for this very reason, because it served this function. In mapping out the basic mechanisms of the T4 program and the role institutions played therein, I hope to guide readers to draw parallels between the institutionalization of disabled people and the ghettoization of the Jewish population. Making such a statement seems brash and uncouth and I want to highlight that I do not intend to fall into the trap of competitive memory, and I will not explicitly draw such a comparison. However, I do think it is important to recognize T4 as both occurring within and shaping the Holocaust, and I aim to evoke multidirectional memory, to use Michael Rothberg’s term. I hope that readers can draw upon more widely known historical knowledge of the Holocaust as a touching point to reflect on the more implicitly genocidal goals accomplished by institutions through the sequestration and control of non-normative body-minds. Institutions were particularly compatible to feed into the more explicitly genocidal structure of the direct killing in the T4 program. Specifically, regarding institutionalization of disabled individuals and T4:

Their social marginality was physically approximated in their geographical isolation within psychiatric institutions located outside of major German city centers. This literal absenting of disabled people and the stripping of their citizenship rights by the state (yet, ironically, within an elaborate state bureaucracy that actively supervised and meticulously recorded the killings) made many crip/queer lives more susceptible to radical exclusion and, ultimately, mass murder (Mitchell and Snyder 257).

Additional mechanisms of “radical exclusion” within German psychiatric institutions during the Nazi period include the significant drop of funding to institutions and the backdating of the “Führer decree” to correlate with the beginning of the war on September 1^st, 1939 to both cover for the killings by situating “euthanasia” as a heroic war against biological “enemies” as well as rationalize this with arguments of wartime rationing and the necessity of opening up hospital beds and personnel to care for injured soldiers (Lifton 62-63). Meldebogen questionnaires served as a major “rounding up” method, as they were used to inform the selections of which disabled adults would be sent to the killing centers. This decision was made primarily based on the evaluation of an institutional resident’s capacity to work, and the purpose of the questionnaire was unclear to many (65-70). Some doctors held the misconception that it was a statistical survey, some exaggerated certain patients’ conditions hoping to protect them from an early release stipulated by budgetary concerns and instead unknowingly sent them to a killing center. Institutional doctors were incentivized to fill out these forms quickly and without care: for example, the state demanded ridiculous deadlines and also offered monetary compensation for each completed form. In sum, the T4 program was particularly complex with its nationwide span, hush orders, multifaceted bureaucratic mechanisms of deception, and scientific, medicalized structures of killing, and it is thus challenging to explain and understand all of the different aspects. Creative writing can help to lay out these complexities of the T4 system while bringing the historical knowledge into a more publicly accessible format.

Postmemory and “Vicarious Witnessing”

“Smoke & Ash” is my attempt at constructing T4 postmemory through the act of “vicarious witnessing.” Memory scholar Marianne Hirsch coined the term “postmemory” to define the “structure of inter- and transgenerational return of traumatic knowledge and embodied experience” (6). Postmemory centers on a group or individual’s investment in connecting with a human perspective generationally removed and is “mediated by imaginative investment, projection, and creation.” More specifically:

postmemorial work […] strives to reactivate and re-embody more distant political and cultural memorial structures by reinvesting them with resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression. It is this presence of embodied and affective experience in the process of transmission that is best described by the notion of memory as opposed to history. Memory signals an affective link to the past–a sense, precisely of a material “living connection”– and it is powerfully mediated by technologies like literature, photography, and testimony. (Hirsch, 33)

This focus on re-embodying distant memorial structures lends itself well to a disability studies approach to T4 memorialization. By centering memory on the particularities of nonnormative embodied experience, the focus shifts towards the sensorial and subjective aspects of that existence and away from the notions of disability as failed bodies, “ballast existences” and “useless eaters” that were utilized by the Nazis to other and dehumanize their victims. Forging an affective, “living connection” allows us to better memorialize and understand the people lost to history. In addition to forging an affective link between past and present, I hope that this embodied evocation of disability memory can act as a catalyst for recognizing social and physical barriers that disabled individuals face today. I also believe that the re-embodied nature of postmemory has the potential to spark reflection on the remnants of Nazi perpetrator thought and logic which remain in the German language, as well as the fields of science, medicine, education, and art. After all, “embodied disability perspectives not only generate incisive critiques of social norms and practices; they are also the basis for understanding and critiquing other areas of philosophical inquiry such as ontology, epistemology, political economy, and aesthetics” (Wilkerson 69). If bridging the silence can unlock a largely disregarded perspective, then taking this fresh perspective into other areas will offer new insights.

If we return to the memorial of the grey busses, it serves as an excellent example of an evocation of postmemory. An affective response is triggered in the visitors by their bodily emplacement in the genocidal space of the grey bus; not only are they transported back into time, but they are transported into a disabled perspective, into existing in a limiting and disabling space that asserts power over them. Being thrust into that space pulls at the delicate threads of one’s certainty of the future. In this way the divide between then and now, perpetrators and victims, us and them, nondisabled and disabled are blurred, and through this complication, imaginative thought is provoked: what must it have been like to be on a bus like this? With my poem I aim to trigger the same question and help others to see this history as firsthand as possible, to empathize with the victims by trying to imagine what the world must have been like for them and by shedding some sense of the safeness of time/space/embodiment that separates readers from the victims’ perspective. And most importantly, I hope to incite readers to recognize the individuals killed not only as victims of the Nazi regime or as victims of their non-normative bodies, but to recognize the value in their embodiment and their perceptions that was ignored and denied by the Nazis, and which continues to be devalued by compulsory able-bodiedness⁹ today.

The aim of capturing the embodied disability perspective in order to approximate the affective force and psychic effects of T4 memory can be understood more specifically as a type of “vicarious witnessing.” This is about more than forming a “living connection,” it is about forming such a bond with a perspective that has been lost to history. Susanne Knittel interprets vicarious witnessing as “giving voice to these silent and silenced victims” and “offer[ing] an alternative to the stereotypical or dehumanizing representations of disability that so often stand in the way of a genuine or appropriate commemoration of these victims” (Knittel 27). By “bridging the silence” (Knittel 33-73) about Operation T4 in this way, we can deploy disability as a complex constellation of subjectivity that seems to be short circuited when approaching Aktion T4 solely as an obvious “crime” of inhumanity. If analyzed and memorialized through a vicarious witnessing approach, the T4 program becomes a way not merely to reckon with a more humanist history but an opportunity to read ourselves into the value of subjectivities of alternative embodiment at stake. This helps us get at the point that I find most worth learning about T4 history. Namely, what is lost from the universe in the offing of disabled peoples’ perspectives? A similar question remains poignant today: what is lost to society when we exclude disabled people, whether it be intentionally or unintentionally, whether it has to do with a lack of accessibility (to physical spaces, job opportunities, medical resources) or accurate cultural representation, etc. The continued importance of this question and others like it today is why I turn to the present day in the final two stanzas of “Smoke & Ash.”

A crucial step for the “never again” aim so tied into remembrance of Nazi crimes is identification with the victims. In the widely forgotten and repressed memory of T4 (Knittel 65), such identification with disabled individuals appears to be lacking. Eugenicist ideas, taboos, and stigmas still linger close to the surface within present-day German society. From the reticence of family members of T4 victims to have their names memorialized (Mitchell and Snyder), the shocking amount of T4 vernacular in everyday speech—such as the use of “asozial” (Sedlaczek)—as well as Germany’s delayed attempts to “integrate” special education into the public education system (OECD), recent discourse on selective abortion, and current discussions on medical rationing in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, a more silent classification of “lives unworthy of life” seems to have prevailed. It is thus crucial to bridge this gap in public memory to bring the medicalized murder of disabled individuals to the forefront but also to bridge this distance between able-bodied and disabled persons, to try and break down the many layers of stigma and false assumptions about disabled life to come to a more compassionate and inclusive understanding of human diversity. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney highlight how all mediation and remediation of memory is fundamentally imbedded in social constellations (2-3). Considering this, the way that disabled people are stigmatized today affects attitudes towards the past, just as a reckoning with the past has the potential to influence social relations today. The way that we bring T4 into cultural memory by breaking the taboo and focusing on the victims will both be influenced by and have the potential to complicate notions of disability widely held in modern-day society. In order to effectively bring disabled history and memory into the mainstream, it is essential that my poem and other attempts at creating T4 postmemory urge readers to think comparatively. Specifically:

To think comparatively is not to blend but rather to illuminate difference, to contextualize, and, with respect to memory, to create an awareness of the diversity of memories, to overcome polarities that prevent an understanding of the need to place memories in a broader historical or cultural perspective (Knittel, 13).

Knittel discusses the importance of comparative thinking within the context of the cultural memory landscapes of Italy’s and Germany’s Holocaust histories, but we can bring comparative thinking beyond the cultural container of the nation to compare different cultures of embodiment and overcome the binary thought separating disabled and nondisabled persons. By bridging readers not only to perspectives of the past, but to disabled perspectives that focus on embodiment and human connection, there is the potential to represent disability as a valued form of human diversity rather than a biological defect. Spurring able-bodied readers to think comparatively about history and to consider a disabled perspective which they have not yet personally thought of or tried to understand or identify with not only helps to form a more accurate picture of the past but can also spark similar reflection on disability and society today. Hopes would be that after reading something like my poem, a teenager would be less likely to say “are you retarded?” and a German schoolteacher would pause and think before labelling a student as “asozial.” If the historical roots of these terms are made more widely-known, then perhaps they would not be so carelessly thrown around today. This is why the ending of my poem mentions that “idiot” was a medical diagnosis during the time of Nazi rule.

Creative Writing as Vicarious Witnessing

When remembering T4, it is crucial to recognize that “memory is a continuous process, or even a debate, and that literature, film, memorials, and museums participate in, shape, and provide the language for this process” (Knittel 13). Creative writing like poetry and narrative historical fiction can play a particularly important role in this process of memory by bringing an underrepresented historical occurrence back into the public sphere and by remediating this memory in a way which allows people to connect and identify with the victims on a personal level. There are a few salient works of T4 fiction and memoir, and this pool needs to continue to expand to better foster the imagination and identification so crucial to the formation of postmemory. Three works of particular significance are Stanislaw Lem’s 1950 novel The Hospital of Transfiguration, Günter Grass’s 1959 novel The Tin Drum, and Sigrid Falkenstein’s 2012 memoir of Annas Spuren. Ein Opfer der NS-“Euthanasie”, which covers the life of Anna Lehnkering, who was murdered in Grafeneck (Knittel 66). Whereas Annas Spuren explicitly feels like postmemory to me, both works of fiction distance the disabled perspective too much for me to feel as if a “lived connection” is formed or a silence bridged. The Tin Drum mystifies the disabled narrator Oskar too much and The Hospital of Transfiguration follows the protagonist Stefan in his position of authority as a doctor at an institution and has no proximity to the disabled individuals, except for possibly the poet Sekalowski, who occupies a liminal space between genius and patient. These are the only T4 fiction novels that I have read, and I found myself pondering how I would portray T4 differently, specifically regarding the disabled individuals impacted by it.

Personally, as a physically disabled person who has been diagnosed with a genetic disorder and several chronic illnesses which affect my motor skills, visual processing, and occasionally my auditory perceptions, I am drawn to T4 subject matter with a sense of urgency. This is in part due to the strong emotional impact of seeing two of my conditions listed in the Meldebogen form used for selecting candidates for Nazi euthanasia, and being shaken by my personal identification within a victimized group and the arbitrary circumstances of time and place which separate my fate so drastically from those 300,000+ individuals who had the misfortune to come eighty years before me. I am also driven by the deep sadness and sense of injustice I feel at having mere statistics, the exact numbers of which we still do not know and will likely never know (Poore 89), as one of the sole representations of the people who lost their lives because others decided that they were ‘deficient’ and thus unworthy of living. I agree firmly with Sonnenstein Euthanasia Center’s memorial practice of posting the names of the 22,000 individuals who were killed in the gas chamber there and doing so without conferring with family members to ask for permission (Mitchell and Snyder 260). I believe this is a necessary move forward, a crucial act of materialization and memorialization of those who the Nazi’s goal was to erase from the “Volkskörper”, from existence, from memory. We need to break the trend of anonymity and forge a “living connection” with these individuals so that their existences can rematerialize and they can finally be recognized as humans with personal stories which their institutionalization, dehumanization, and murder stripped from them. In the handling of traumatic histories, I follow that it is important to allow for the victims’ voices to come through as prominently, if not more so than those of the perpetrators. While it is important to recognize the crimes of the perpetrators, I think that a focus on the notoriety and heinousness of the crimes and perpetrators themselves easily translates into a fetishization which adds to the erasure of the victims in a particularly cruel way: the offenders continue to garner individualized recognition for their harmful acts, whereas the victims fade into a faceless, nebulous mass of numbers.

Disability memoirist and poet Kenny Fries is currently working on a book, Stumbling over History: Disability and the Holocaust. Vicarious witnessing is a major aim of his in this project because there were no T4 survivors and because “too few know the history of the Nazi methodical mass murder of disabled people” (Fries, NYT). He has visited the six Aktion T4 killing sites as part of his research. His website currently includes a page called “What Happened Here in the Summer of 1940?” which consists of six videos featuring readings of excerpts from his anticipated book, accompanied by personal and historical photographs from the sites. About the project, Fries says, “This is my way of bridging the silence, of keeping alive something that is too often forgotten” (Fries). I look forward to reading his work. Due to the aforementioned entrenchment of memory remediation within social constellations, I find the burgeoning number of disabled authors writing on this subject matter particularly exciting – the more varied the representations, the more diverse the group of disabled authors and artists shaping T4 postmemory, and the more representative it will be of the largely nonhomogeneous group it aims to vicariously witness for. There is a transformative power within this particular type of vicarious witnessing by disabled authors. Since cultural memory is “an ongoing process of remembrance and forgetting in which individuals and groups continue to reconfigure their relationship to the past and hence reposition themselves in relation to established and emerging memory cites” (Erll and Rigney 2), remediating this past is not only an act of honoring victims, but also an agentive act of modern identity negotiation which contemporary disabled persons have a personal stake in.

Vicarious witnessing is the key to uncovering what was lost to this world when over 300,000 people with disabilities were murdered by the Nazi government. We can never truly know who all was lost, what exactly was erased when their perspectives were extinguished. However, approaching the T4 program through creative writing and vicarious witnessing is an opportunity to read ourselves into the value of subjectivities of alternative embodiment at stake. We can use creative writing to bridge the silence and memorialize and rematerialize the adults who died within the highly complex medicalized murder system of the T4 program. At the core of “Smoke & Ash” are my aims to expand public knowledge of Nazi crimes against disabled people, to complicate and expose the ableist ideology of “lives unworthy of life”, to form a bridge between the present and the past as well as between disabled and non-disabled perceptions, and to hopefully inspire others to take a magnifying class to ableist and eugenicist elements that exist within and inform present-day society. A tall order for a small poem, yes, but an effective medium for an important and often unrecognized voice clamoring to be raised back up to the surface. This voice is one of many who were silenced before us as well as the voice of many more to come. I look forward to reading future poems, short stories, historical fiction novels, etc. on the T4 program and/or ableism at large that allow for both the individuality and relatability of the disabled characters to shine through. Across our transgenerational remove of the 21^st century, creative writing affords us the ability to construct stories that hopefully hit as close as possible to the lived experiences of the victims and carve out a space for the disabled gaze and disabled perspectives necessary to vicariously witness and create a T4 postmemory.