Without a Story: Remembering the First Holocaust Victims
People with disabilities or mental illness are a lesser known, in the Czech Republic almost forgotten, group of victims of the Nazi regime. The Without a Story project wants to give back these victims their story and thus contribute to a greater awareness of the dangers of contemporary right-wing populism and the far right. In the first phase of the project, we are preparing a publication with contributions by historians and other experts, while the illustrations are created by a team of artists with and without learning disabilities. We still need 4000 euro to publish the book.
In 1939 Hitler himself initiated a secret killing program for people with disabilities and psychiatric patients called "Aktion T4". Residents of institutions and hospitals were transported to several special centers, where the first gas chambers were built. The gas chamber technology that the Nazis developed for the mass murder of people with disabilities and psychiatric patients was later used in the concentration camps to kill Jews, Roma and other groups. "Aktion T4" can therefore be considered the first phase of the Holocaust.
In 2020, seventy-five years after the end of World War II and ten years after the signing of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in both Germany and the Czech Republic, we plan to publish a bilingual publication (in Czech and German) about this part of history. Most of the texts will be in easy language, accessible to people with learning disabilities. Artists with learning disabilities or autistic spectrum disorder from the Jamming project of the Barvolam association are collaborating with students of the Ladislav Sutnar Faculty of Art and Design of the University of West Bohemia to create the illustrations.
Right wing populism and the far right are on the rise, and with this we see an increasing intolerance towards otherness. In the Czech Republic we have recently experienced cases in Náměšť na Hané and not long before in Svitávka in Blanensko, where local residents petitioned against the building of sheltered housing for people with learning disabilities, saying that the clients would sexually harass women, threaten children, and even that they “just don’t want to look at people with disabilities all the time”. Just a few years ago, we have seen that some unscrupulous politicians have sought to gain more popularity by refusing to accept refugees, while also presenting the integration of children with disabilities as a danger to others. In this situation, it is useful to remember the lessons from the past and where in the end such a division of society into “us” and “them” can lead.
