My Disabled Wife Inspired Me to Tell the Story of Nazi Crime

A Peppard MAN has published a book exploring the crimes committed by the Nazis against the disabled population.

Glenn Bryant, of Wyfold Lane, said he was inspired to write Darkness doesn’t come suddenly by his wife Juliette who suffers from a spinal cord injury.

Set in 1939, the novel follows Meike, a wheelchair-bound 17-year-old German girl, as she attempts to escape the Nazi euthanasia program that targeted disabled children and adults throughout World War II. .

The book addresses friendship, family and human nature and explores the very real Aktion T4 program in which an estimated 300,000 disabled adults and children were killed in hospitals and institutions in Germany, Austria and occupied Poland between 1939 and 1945.

Mr Bryant said he wanted to use the book, published by the Book Guild, to challenge readers’ attitudes towards disability today.

He said: “Juliette inspired the story and really inspired me to write about it. She is simply fantastic and the best person I have ever met.

“We have a very normal 50/50 relationship. She lives an independent life and we have what I consider a perfectly normal marriage. But in the first few years we were together, it shocked me how people behaved around her, because of her injury. How people, in different ways, have been prejudiced.

“I think generally speaking, attitudes are much better now. In my experience, as with anything, a lot of prejudice simply comes from ignorance and that ignorance can unconsciously turn into fear.

“The only way to break these cycles is to talk about things and get people to think differently. »

Mr Bryant, a former journalist who works as an editor for a technology company, first became interested in the Holocaust while studying for a master’s degree in modern history at Dundee.

He said: “I was very interested in the world wars. We studied the Warsaw Ghetto, we took a whole course on it for about three months, I wrote an article and I became a little obsessed with it. I just remember being blown away.

“My tutor graded me one point below a ‘first’. He said my conclusion was too emotional. It probably was, but it summed up how I felt. I still feel the same way today, a quarter of a century later.

However, it was not until Mrs. Bryant bought him a book Forgotten Crimes: The Holocaust and People with Disabilities by the historian Suzanne Evans that the idea for her novel came to her.

Mr Bryant said: “I was aware of the Final Solution and how terrible it was, but I read this book in the context of Juliette having a back injury and I thought ‘wow’. »

He found that before extermination camps like Auschwitz were established, the process for carrying out this mass murder had been refined from 1939 to 1941 on approximately 300,000 members of Germany’s disabled community.

Mr Bryant said: “I find it a bit of a double whammy, it’s a shocking fact to discover and it’s shocking that it’s so unknown and unreported by history.

“One of the first extermination camps, Chelmno, was designed based on the gassing techniques used to kill disabled people.”

The Aktion T4 program was authorized in October 1939 by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler who signed a “euthanasia note” authorizing the mass murder of disabled people.

Mr Bryant said: “I think I find it quite unique that these were the first people targeted by Hitler in an organized way and they were also the last victims.

“As soon as Auschwitz or Bergen Belsen was liberated and everyone said ‘oh, my God, how did we not realize this was happening?’ The Nazis were trying to cover their tracks. But the massacres of disabled people continued.

“It is a very shocking note in history that the last widely considered victim of the Holocaust was a four-year-old boy called Richard Jenne who was killed in a euthanasia center three weeks after the end of the Second War. world in a region where American troops were occupied and in total control.

Mr. Byant’s book explores these very real events through its central character Meike, who lives in a rural village outside Berlin.

Meike, whom Mr Bryant describes as “feisty” but full of fun, found her life suddenly turned upside down after the government announced that disabled young people under the age of 18 would have to spend the war in specially designated institutions.

He said: “Meike was taken by the authorities and her family does not know where or why she was taken, or what will happen to her.

“Families were simply told that they would take care of their disabled child during the war and that once the war was over, they would return. Meike must understand what is happening to her and try to survive.

Meike goes on the run and meets two allies, one her grandmother, an old Catholic woman forced to question her faith and the other is a fifteen year old boy she barely knows.

Mr Bryant said: “Her grandmother is towards the end of her life. She never objected to her husband or what her friends thought. But she adores her granddaughter and conducts her own investigation.

Like Mr. Bryant’s wife, Meike suffered a back injury because he wanted to try to discuss attitudes toward disabled people, drawing on his own experiences. He said: “Meike uses a wheelchair, but I deliberately don’t talk at all about why she’s in a wheelchair.

“I don’t want to perpetuate the prejudices that people have about disability. Unfortunately, I can only rely on my observations with Juliette.

“I guess I wanted to write a book that dealt with disability in all its aspects, but in a completely normalized way, with this family and this character.”

Mr. Bryan wrote another book, A quiet genocidewhich he self-published in 2018 and is a historical fiction novel also set during World War II.

He met his wife for the first time, a multidisciplinary artist from Charvil, while he was working as a reporter for the Reading chronicle in 2003.

Mr Bryant said: “There was a speed dating night at Reading jazz club, and we both went. We were the last date of the evening of 20 speed dates while I was very drunk. I was out of beer and drank his wine.

“Juliet was furious with me, but we both ticked boxes and went on a date the following weekend and have been together ever since.”

The couple married in 2006 and Mr. Bryant dedicated his latest novel to her. He said: “She was my only inspiration. I would not have written this book without her.

• Darkness doesn’t come suddenlyis out now and can be purchased on Amazon and at Bell’s Bookstore in Henley.