International Holocaust Remembrance Day– Part I |
Dear Ms. Tova Friedman,
I heard your speech during the International Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at the Bundestag, introduced by Julia Klöckner. I did not hear it in person but watched it on YouTube. This day particularly commemorates the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where about 1.1 million Jewish people were murdered, including children, women, and men. I want to thank you for sharing this deeply moving personal story. History books cannot replace lived experience, which is why I always encourage everyone to seek education beyond the classroom. Life lessons are invaluable, and some of them are among the most important we will ever learn.
I am truly and sincerely sorry for what happened to you and your family, and for the Jewish people in Europe. I also grieve for those who tried to flee Europe but were rejected at the borders of the United States and other countries, only to be sent back to danger. The numbers are horrifying. In total, six million Jewish people were murdered, more than one million of them children. Yet numbers alone can never convey what this meant on an individual human level. Once suffering is reduced to statistics, it inevitably becomes abstract.
When we start from zero, six million is staggering. Yet during the ceremony, when the total number of World War II victims was mentioned in relation to this figure, I noticed that the number was perceived differently. I wondered why it was compared to the overall total rather than also having someone from another victim group persecuted by the Nazis tell their story. When attention focuses primarily on scale, the suffering of other victims risks disappearing from view.
This includes the roughly 300,000 people murdered under the Nazi program of involuntary euthanasia, known as Aktion T4, including Rolf Reichert, Benjamin Traub, Therese W., Emilie Rau, Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, Gertrud Fleck, Auguste Opel, Anna Margarete Kuskop, Alois Dallmayr, Anton Fuchs, and Johanna Melitta Arnold, among many others. In numerical comparison, their deaths may seem smaller, yet from zero, 300,000 represents an immense loss of human life, far exceeding the 2,977 lives lost on September 11, 2001.
Their experiences cannot be fully captured by numbers. One person was murdered because of a false diagnosis. Another was left in a psychiatric institution by her husband despite repeated pleas to be released. Her last name is still undisclosed; she is just known as Therese W.
“Forgive me for bombarding you with letters, but my situation is terrible,” she once wrote to her husband. “A healthy person is not suited for imprisonment, especially not for confinement in a psychiatric clinic. Let this chalice pass from me.”
On March 22, 1936, she wrote again, begging him above all not to place her in any sanatorium recommended by Professor Schröder, then director of the Psychiatric University Clinic in Leipzig. Instead, she asked that they first consult another authority in the field of psychiatry.
These were only two of the many letters Therese W. wrote from various psychiatric........