A small History lesson

I have always been fascinated by the stories of the concentration camp survivors of World War II.  How did a thriving country ever get to the point of killing millions of productive people within their society?  As I understand it, people have always shunned and kept away groups that are strange and new.  Some of this may be basic survival.  Get that new group away and they can't hurt us.  We have done this with racial and ethnic minorities.  We have done this with people of different religions.  I think we still do this with people who are homosexual.  I have yet to figure out how a stereotype can lead to blind hatred and then the killing of masses of people.  So I watch whatever comes across my path about that time in history.

I have seen maybe a half dozen movies and documentaries about this subject and I have read a few books too. I know I have only scraped the surface.  I never heard stories from any Jewish person with a disability who lived in a concentration camp or hid out somewhere or whatever.  Since I had always heard that people with disabilities Jewish or not were among the first groups to be killed,  I concluded that people with disabilities who were also Jewish either did not survive or were not talking about it. 

Today I saw a short documentary that was a revelation to me.  Ingelore is the story of a woman who is deaf.  Born in Germany in 1924, she first has to deal with parents who don't understand how to deal with her, and then she has to deal with a country who hates her.  Though Ingelore did not get placed in a concentration camp, she had her own Nazi horrors to deal with.  After all of those experiences she is told that she will not get a visa to come to the United States with er family if she is deaf.  She actually had to fake hearing.  Only 45 minutes this documentary packs a punch.  You will want to see it more than once.  It is On demand at HBO. 

Some other books at Amazon.com.