Читать онлайн "T4" - LeZotte Ann Clare - RuLit

Выбрать главу

But I always Thought Of those seven In the cabin.

The End

In May of 1945, Germany Surrendered.

The United States, Russia, and England Were victorious.

Japan and Italy Fell with us. Our crimes

Would live in Infamy. Forty-eight million

People had died Fighting Across the globe.

Grandmother said, “All the suffering, All the casualties.

This is the worst War the world Will ever know.”

I prayed to God, our Lantern in the dark, That it would be so.

In 1947

Father Josef married me and Walthar In a country church ceremony. I wore A long white gown and satin slippers. I braided my hair and pinned it around My head, like a crown. I proudly wore

A necklace of gold coins Walthar had Given me when he proposed. It was A Romani tradition. My groom had no Family left after the war, so he decided To join my world. Still, on our wedding

Night, we shared some salted bread before Going to bed, another Gypsy custom. We Had a son and daughter: one with dark, Faraway eyes, the other with hair like spun Gold. I was a farmer’s wife. We visited

Father and Mother until they died, four months Apart, in the same bed. Clara married too, And became an actress in Berlin. Whatever Season, whatever weather, we were glad we

Had survived the worst, but we also felt guilty. That feeling—that we had escaped when others equally Important had died—would never subside.

Postscript

A plaque commemorating The victims of Action T4 Was set in the pavement Where the offices once stood. The original building Had been destroyed in the war. Educating people is The best tool we have Against forgetting. We must make sure Nothing like T4 Ever happens Again. And so My story told in Poetry ends.

Notes from the Author

Paula Becker is named after the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907). The Nazis labeled her art, mainly portraits of peasant girls and women, “degenerate.” She was a close friend of the great German poet Rainier Maria Rilke (1875–1926). Rilke’s wife, the sculptor Clara Westhoff (1878-1954), was Paula’s closest friend.

“Hear the Voice of the Poet” was inspired by the English poet William Blake’s “Introduction,” the first poem in his book Songs of Experience (1794).

Unfortunately, the practice of pouring hot wax into a person’s ears to cure deafness was more common than it should have been into the twentieth century.

I thank Merriam Webster’s online student dictionary for the neutral definition of euthanasia.

“The Story of Anny Wodl” is taken from an English translation of testimony given at the Nuremberg trials. I borrowed Frederich Holderlin’s last name for Stephanie. Holderlin (1770–1843) was a major German lyric poet.

Nelly and Paul, two of the children in the cabin, were named after Nelly Sachs (1891–1970) and Paul Celan (1920–1970)—the two greatest German Jewish poets of the Holocaust. Sachs was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize in Literature; Celan committed suicide in Paris.

It is believed that 200,000 to 2,000,000 Gypsies were killed in the Romani Holocaust, also called Porajmos, which means “devouring” in the Romani language.

For readers, teachers, and parents interested in learning more about the Nazi’s Action T4 euthanasia program, a good place to start is the online exhibition on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum website, Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race. The book that originally got me interested in the subject is Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany, by Horst Biesold (Gallaudet University Press).

Many thanks to my sister, Jean Marie LeZotte, my brother, Peter George LeZotte, and my sister-in-law, Jennifer LeZotte. And to my dog friend/helper May, her dog Basho, and Pebbles and Twister for keeping me laughing.

Special thanks to Sid Fleischman, Shelly Ruble, Mari Lu Grant, my Dog Wood Park friends, Jenny Moussa, and to my editor, Margaret Raymo, for seeing what I was trying to do and helping me do it—beyond what I’d ever imagined.

About the Author

Ann Clare LeZotte is completely deaf from a birth defect and illness. As a young girl in Long Island, New York, she banged her head for hours at a time and created her own world. She had a percentage of hearing in one ear during her grade school years, which helped her learn to speak, lip read, and assimilate into hearing culture. She has gone through years where she communicated mostly using a pad and pencil. She learned American Sign Language in her early twenties. A 1991 graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, she has had her poems published in the American Poetry Review, the New Republic, and the Threepenny Review. She received fellowships from Hedgebrook, the MacDowell Colony, VCCA, and Yaddo, as well as a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her younger sister and their three dogs and one cat.

Houghton Mifflin Company

Boston 2008

Ann Clare LeZotte lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her younger sister and their three dogs and one cat. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, she has had her poems published in the American Poetry Review, the New Republic, and the Threepenny Review. She received fellowships from Hedgebrook, the MacDowell Colony, VCCA, and Yaddo, as well as a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Ann is completely deaf. This is her first novel.

www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com

The text of this book is set in Calisto MT.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

LeZotte, Ann Clare.

T4 : a novel in verse / written by Ann Clare LeZotte.

p. cm.

Summary: When the Nazi party takes control of Germany, thirteen-year-old Paula, who is deaf, finds her world-as-she-knows-it turned upside down, as she is taken into hiding to protect her from the new law nicknamed T4.

~ 8 ~