Unearthing the Unseen: The Plight of Disabled Children during the Holocaust in Saving Amelie
Keywords:
Holocaust; disability; ableism; racial hygiene; biopowerAbstract
Tobin Siebers believes, “Disability is not a physical or mental defect, but a cultural and minority identity”. As part of the cultural ‘defect’, or the so-called ‘euthanasia’ programme, the Nazi authority methodically killed thousands of children with disabilities. They have been treated as Ausschusskinderer, or ‘garbage children’. Children in the paediatric wards were often put to death via medication, but it also occasionally happened through starvation. Cathy Gohlke’s novel Saving Amelie (2014) explores the awful condition of the children with disabilities whom Hitler targeted for Germany’s racial purification. The novel shows how and why children with disabilities were marginalized during the Holocaust. This paper wants to exhibit that the children with disabilities are more capable and potential than the atrocious Nazis. By evaluating the deaf child Amelie, the novelist shows that people with disabilities may be different, but they are not less than human.
References
Bergel, Allan L., and Naomi Berger, editors. Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators. Syracuse University Press, 2001.
Bigsby, Christopher. Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Brashler, Karin Lynn. Mothers for Germany: A Look at the Ideal Woman in Nazi Propaganda. 2015. Iowa State University, Graduate Theses and Dissertations. https://core.ac.uk/download/38937654.pdf.
Cureton, Adam, and David Wasserman, editors. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability. Oxford University Press, 2020.
Evans, Suzanne E. Hitler’s Forgotten Victims: The Disabled. History Press, 2016.
Gohlke, Cathy. Saving Amelie. Tyndale House Publishers, 2014.
Mitchman, Alan, and Alan Rosenberg, editors. Postmodernism and the Holocaust. Rodopi, 1998.
Oksala, Johanna. Foucault, Politics, and Violence. Northwestern University Press, 2012.
Ross, Stephen David. The Gifts of Kinds: The Good in Abundance. State University of New York Press, 1999.
Ryan, Donna F., and John S. Schuchman, editors. Deaf People in Hitler’s Europe. Gallaudet University Press, 2002.
Shapiro, Joseph P., No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights. Three Rivers Press, 1981.
Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. The University of Michigan Press, 2011.
Worth, Russel Shuttle, and Linda R. Mona, editors. The Routledge Handbook of Disability and Sexuality. Routledge, 2021.
