Ombre e Luci—Shadows and Light—is our magazine's name, our motto, the three words that have shaped how we tell the story of disability and fragility for nearly forty years now. But this time the darkness is total. The shadows deepen when we must confront Operation T4: the systematic extermination of people with disabilities devised and carried out by Nazi Germany. Germany was not alone in this crime—we will need to return to the eugenics programs of the so-called civilized nations—but as we approach Remembrance Day, we must recall how alongside Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and political prisoners, infants, children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly—men and women both—with disabilities were subjected to a systematic policy of death.
The operation took its name from a Berlin street: Tiergarten Straße. At number 4 stood a villa confiscated from a Jewish family, home to the office that ran the program. Devised in 1936, officially suspended in 1941 due to public protest and the courageous sermons of Bishop Clemens von Galen, yet continuing in fact until 1945, the extermination of "lives unworthy of being lived" began officially in October 1939. In a deliberately vague letter that gave "specialists" free rein to improvise, Hitler authorized the "granting of a merciful death to patients deemed incurable." The final count: approximately 250,000 people killed, including 5,000 children, most of them subjected to terrible suffering and criminal experiments.
The toll grows heavier still when we learn that many of those responsible—the Austrian physician Heinrich Gross, for instance, who after the war enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a forensic psychiatrist—largely escaped justice. Initially forgotten, Operation T4 later became the subject of serious historical research. In recent years it has inspired scientific essays (such as Asperger's Children and Ballast and The Chosen), novels, exhibitions, theater productions, and films—to name a few examples.
These works are profoundly difficult to read, hear, and see. Yet they are necessary. Not only because remembrance is first and foremost a duty to the victims—as Steve Sem-Sandberg, author of The Chosen, has said: "I wanted those names and faces to become individuals again"—but because remembrance is the only light left to us, the only way to keep from losing ourselves in darkness. And it is how we try not to fail again.