Fog in August

It is through the true story of Ernest Lossa—a boy of Jenish descent who died at fifteen in the psychiatric clinic at Kaufbeuren in southern Germany—that German director Kai Wessel chose to chronicle the Nazi extermination of disabled people in Fog in August (2016). The choice of protagonist itself is revealing. Ernest, orphaned and with a homeless father, is not a disabled boy; he belongs to a nomadic group that the Nazis hunted alongside Roma and Sinti. Yet in the eyes of the Reich, this makes him defective all the same. Played with conviction by Ivo Pietzcher, the "antisocial and rebellious" boy quickly grasps that his fellow detainees are being killed under the watchful eye of the clinic's benevolent director, Dr. Veithausen (Sebastian Kock). To him belongs the invention of the starvation diet—"patients will starve while eating," he explains to applause—a method designed to hide the true cause of death. The vegetable broth was boiled for hours until it held no nutritional value, leaving patients to waste away. Adapted from Robert Domes's 1908 novel of the same name, Wessel's film is fundamentally about individual responsibility. Young Ernest, raised on the streets, cannot remain a silent witness to what happens around him, even though he knows the price he will pay. On August 9, 1944, he is killed. It is a difficult film to watch because it tells us how we failed as adults. And how much we might have done instead, simply by listening to children. Disabled or not.