In 1997, Grete turns eighty and seems to have lived a happy, well-loved life. Yet something poisons her joy: the memory of her blond son, taken from her through deception because he was different—removed with the active help of her husband, a prominent figure in Hitler's aristocracy. The Boy Called Adolf Had No Eyelashes (Rizzoli 1998; Einaudi 2007) is a remarkable novel by German-born Italian writer Helga Schneider, tracing Grete's long and anguished life.
We follow her from a contented childhood as a grocer's daughter, through her work as a Gestapo clerk, to her marriage to Gregor—a union that promises social advancement, and the joy of pregnancy. Then comes the growing dread: her son is not like other children. And finally, the horror: forced separation, desperate searching. Grete refuses to surrender. Her unbending husband has her committed to a shadowy psychiatric clinic—which she soon discovers is actually one of many facilities designed for the elimination of "dead weight to the nation."
According to Gregor, this is "an extraordinarily progressive measure that many other countries will imitate in the future." In an appendix born from an interview Schneider conducted in Germany in the autumn of 1966, the author writes: "Rather than protect the weakest among them, Hitler's government systematized their extermination. Nazi Germany, by contrast, enacted strict laws against vivisection and the killing of protected animal species." The last child victim of the Nazi euthanasia program "was killed on May 29, 1945"—even as American troops closed in.
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