Fighting for ‘Other’ Victims of Holocaust

Who died in the Holocaust?

The short, awful answer is 6 million Jews. Sid Wolinsky prefers a longer and also grim reply: Six million Jews. And, among others, nearly 300,000 people with disabilities, dubbed “lives not worth living” by a Nazi regime that despised them.

Wolinsky has spent years helping disabled people shoulder their way into American life, into schools and stores, onto streets and buses. Now, the litigation director for Disability Rights Advocates here is fighting so that people with disabilities will be remembered as equal victims of the 20th century’s foremost horror.

For starters, he is pushing for greater acknowledgment of the “invisible” first victims--the German men, women and children who were murdered or sterilized in the ‘30s and ‘40s because of conditions such as schizophrenia, genetic diseases, physical handicaps and developmental disabilities.

Eventually, Wolinsky and his international organization want an apology from the German government, financial restitution, and perhaps, someday, even a separate memorial here in Northern California, the cradle of the disability rights movement. In the process, they hope to highlight current discrimination against people with disabilities around the world.

Last month, Disability Rights Advocates stepped into the controversial Holocaust-related litigation filed against Swiss banks. Although the suits have resulted in a $1.25-billion settlement, lawyers are still fighting over how it will be distributed.

The organization wants surviving disabled victims to receive a share of that settlement and wants another share to be used for setting up a foundation to advance the rights of people with disabilities primarily in Central and Eastern Europe today.

“We believe it’s appropriate for people with disabilities to have a voice in that distribution,” says Wolinsky, who is Jewish and whose brother is developmentally disabled.

In museum exhibits around the world, next to graphic depictions of emaciated corpses and piles of shoes once owned by European Jews, Wolinsky wants a testament to the 300,000 dead and the 400,000 so-called useless eaters who were sterilized by the Nazis so they would not reproduce.

When Jews gather each spring on the Day of Remembrance to mourn friends and forebears who died in concentration camps, Wolinsky wants them also to think about men with mental illness and women in wheelchairs who were killed by the Nazi government a few years earlier in the hospitals and institutions that were meant to protect them.

The burgeoning ranks of Holocaust centers around the world--which largely memorialize Jewish life and death at the hands of Nazi Germany--display a leg brace here, a plaque there, a line or two on a slab of granite to recognize the Nazis’ “other” victims.

“But it’s not good enough to talk about the 6 million Jews--and a few others, by the way, who got in the way of Hitler,” says Wolinsky, 62. “When you’re talking about an issue of this seriousness, slight mention is not as bad as complete forgetting. But it does almost as much a disservice to historical accuracy and memory as no mention.”

More is at stake here than historical hairsplitting, for the seemingly simple question--What is the Holocaust and whose lives did it claim?--has prompted painful and difficult debate worldwide, as nations have grappled for half a century with the process of memorializing man’s most systematic inhumanity to man.

At the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, for example, Rabbi Abraham Cooper acknowledges that the Nazis cut a wider swath than simply victimizing European Jews. And his institution includes some mention of victims with disabilities, among others.

But as the museum’s associate dean, he argues that his facility is dedicated to the memory of Jewish victims alone--to which the disabled killed by Nazi doctors in the 1930s were a “precursor.” As a result, he says, only Jewish victims are commemorated on Yom Hashoah, the official Day of Remembrance.

“There is a way to be inclusive without pulverizing history,” Cooper says, but expanding such a remembrance ceremony is not it.

Pushing for a Place in History

So far, Hitler’s “other victims”--people with disabilities, gays and lesbians, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political prisoners--have largely been overlooked as Holocaust memory has been formed and memorials built.

But Disability Rights Advocates, along with a similar effort in New York to create a memorial to homosexuals targeted in the Holocaust, could change that. The very act of pushing for a place in history is a sign of maturity in two young civil rights movements, historians say, and in the Holocaust memorial process itself.

Success, however, is another thing entirely.

“I think it’s going to be hard” for people with disabilities to crack into established memorials and museums, says James E. Young, author of “The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning,” published in 1993.

“Most of these groups have already set their definition of the Holocaust in stone in memorials,” says Young, a professor of English and Judaic studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “It’s very difficult to change.”

British historian Michael Burleigh, the author of “Death and Deliverance: Euthanasia in Germany 1900-1945,” worries about “a permanent war of the monuments, with the possibility of endless squabbles about how much space a group gets or who to include.”

Burleigh’s viewpoint makes Wolinsky and other disability rights activists bristle. They are not competing for space, they insist, but rather setting the historical record straight.

“No one wishes to be perceived as getting into an argument over who has a greater claim to victimhood,” says Deborah Kaplan, executive director of the Oakland-based World Institute on Disabilities, which supports Wolinsky’s effort. “Our desire is not to diminish the experience of any other group. It boggles my mind to think that our asserting our history somehow takes away from somebody else’s.”

Part of the Same Catastrophe

Sid Wolinsky’s foray into Holocaust history began just over a year ago, as he drove the long, flat expanse of Interstate 80 in the heart of California’s Central Valley. Listening to National Public Radio, he says, “a lightbulb went off.”

“They were talking about homosexuals and the Holocaust,” Wolinsky recalled, about memorializing victims largely ignored. “And I thought, ‘Oh, my God, that concept fits people with disabilities, and no one’s done anything about it.”

So he hit Cody’s Bookstore in Berkeley for anything he could find on the experience of people with disabilities during the Holocaust, broached the subject with colleagues and embarked upon what he expects to be “a monumental task over the next five years.”

Why not, indeed, commemorate such victims? asks Hugh Gregory Gallagher, author of “By Trust Betrayed: Patients, Physicians and the License to Kill in the Third Reich,” which was published in 1995.

“Surely there is grief enough to go around,” says Gallagher, who contracted paralytic polio in 1952 and uses a wheelchair. “What happened to the Jews, the ‘asocials,’ the disabled people were all part of the same gotterdammerung, the same catastrophe, and must not be forgotten.”

That catastrophe was Hitler’s desire to rid the German people of what was viewed as inferior genetic and racial stock, culminating in the Final Solution, which sought the annihilation of all Jews.

Gallagher’s history chronicles eugenics efforts by German physicians spurred on by a series of official edicts: the 1933 law requiring sterilization of men and women with mental and physical handicaps; the 1939 registration of all “malformed” children; and Hitler’s decree in the same year authorizing physicians to kill the “incurably ill.”

Between 1934 and 1945, an estimated 1% of Germany’s child-bearing population was sterilized, nearly half of whom were inmates of asylums. In fact, those sterilized are among the few disabled survivors of Nazi Germany.

The “euthanasia” of people with disabilities was officially halted in 1942, after protests led in part by Clemens August Graf von Galen, the bishop of Munster, but it continued surreptitiously until at least the end of the war.

The shower gas chamber, later used in the mass murder of Jews, was created for and perfected on people with disabilities at German hospitals in the 1930s, according to Gallagher, Burleigh and other historians.

Last July, Wolinsky got a taste of how difficult it will probably be to gain greater acknowledgment for disabled Holocaust victims, when he and Patricia Kirkpatrick, director of development at Disability Rights Advocates, visited Yad Vashem, the massive Holocaust memorial outside Jerusalem.

Wolinsky argues that Yad Vashem’s depiction of the murder of people with disabilities at the hands of the Nazis “seriously understates the issue and is historically inaccurate.”

Yad Vashem vice chairman Johanan Bein wrote to Wolinsky after his visit, acknowledging the disabled dead. But Bein called that mass murder a “forerunner” to the Shoah-Holocaust and said that his center “by law, is dedicated to the remembrance of the Shoah-Holocaust,” defined as including Jewish victims alone.

The Oakland organization got a slightly better response from a survey Kirkpatrick sent to 70 Holocaust centers and associations around the country. In the survey, she asked the groups if they mention disabled Holocaust victims in their remembrance ceremonies and, if not, would they consider it.

Only 17 surveys were completed and returned, but of those, four responding organizations said that they already commemorate people with disabilities.

At Rick Landman’s gay and lesbian synagogue in New York, worshipers have included the disabled in their Yom Hashoah ceremony for the past 11 years. Traditionally, six candles are lit during such commemorations, representing the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust.

After experimenting with as many as 15 candles to include all the various victim groups--”We had a big fire,” Landman says with a laugh--the synagogue settled on the usual six plus one for gays, the disabled and others.

Landman is the founder of the International Assn. of Lesbian and Gay Children of Holocaust Survivors, which plans to erect a separate memorial in New York for gay and lesbian Holocaust victims in May, rather than asking for inclusion in existing monuments.

A lawsuit filed by a group of Orthodox rabbis in 1997 against New York’s new Museum of Jewish Heritage--A Living Memorial to the Holocaust is one reason why.

The rabbis are “shocked and outraged” about the museum’s inclusion of gays and lesbians alongside the Nazis’ Jewish victims, according to court documents. The suit, which has yet to come to trial, seeks to close the museum.

Groups Forced to Rethink History

So far, Disability Rights Advocates’ efforts for inclusion have caused several Holocaust organizations across the country to rethink how they remember the Nazis’ disabled victims.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington already distributes a separate pamphlet on victims with disabilities and displays a photograph of a “euthanasia” center with smoke billowing from its crematories.

And, because of Wolinsky’s request that remembrance ceremonies be broadened, the museum’s board is “considering an appropriate response,” says spokeswoman Mary Morrison.

The Holocaust Resource Center in Buffalo, N.Y., this month is considering whether to include a separate commemoration for people with disabilities in its Day of Remembrance ceremonies. The Holocaust Center of Northern California will address the issue in the next year.

And the Dallas Memorial Center for Holocaust Studies voted in early November to light a seventh candle during its Yom Hashoah ceremonies “in memory of the other victims,” says Frieda Soble, executive director.

“It wasn’t a deliberate exclusion,” Soble says. “No one brought it to our attention” until the survey landed on her desk this fall.

“Their letter made a difference,” Soble says.