My favourite apocryphal story associated with the Third Reich is the one about a football team from a special school challenging the local Hitler Youth to a match. Of course, the school won and struck a blow against the Aryan super race.
The romantic nature of the story can’t hide the dark centre at the heart of Hitler’s policy towards disabled people. The harsh truth is if I was disabled and living in Germany during that time, I would not have survived.
In the early years of Hitler’s regime, the disabled were the first to be targeted and ‘exterminated’. The industrial murder machine needed a few test runs and those who wobbled, shook, and stuttered, were in the firing line.
Chilling.
In between last week’s counts, coups and political shenanigans, one story began to make waves. The discovery of a mass grave in the grounds of a ‘mother and baby’ home brought us back to a dark time in our nation’s history.
We know that children born in such homes throughout the country were sold to good Catholic families in the US. But where did that mass grave come from and whose remains lie in it?
When it comes to historical child abuse, I thought my propensity to be shocked had been reached. Last Friday I was proved wrong.
It happened during Lunchtime. Shane Coleman was standing in for Jonathan Healy and was speaking to Susan Lohan of the Adoption Rights Alliance. Half way through the interview Ms Lohan said this:
That stopped me in my tracks. My breath stopped. Ms Lohan used the phrase ‘dying rooms’ which planted the image of Cambodia in the 1970s.
But this was Ireland from the 1940s to the 1960s - the era when extermination camps and jackboots came into public consciousness. But we were a good Catholic nation. Nothing like that would happen here.
The truth may well be quite the opposite. Ms Lohan was right in asking why she never saw records of disabled kids being adopted. Is it because being true ‘gifts from God’ they were only born to good Catholic families?
Who are we kidding? God and the great dollar coalesced to send healthy kids to the states. That is a fact. So what about those children born with a disability?
Where did they go? Did they find happiness? Did they grow up to be fulfilled human beings who enjoy life? Or did their lives follow a far darker arc?
We just don’t know. We don’t know if they led happy lives and played football. We don’t know if they were ignored. We don’t know if their lives were cut short by a lack of interest. We don’t know if they had great lives. We don’t know if they had good deaths. We don’t know if any of those remains found in a septic tank were those of children with a disability.
We need to know. I need to know. I need to know that past generations of disabled citizens were loved by friends and family in the same way as I am.
I hope they were but this latest dark stain has me worried. I knew what would have happened if I was born in Nazi Germany. I never thought that I would have the same thoughts about Ireland in the same period and later. That frightens me. We need answers.
