http://benefitscroungingscum.blogspot.com/2012/01/world-holocaust-memorial-day-black.html
Today, Holocaust Memorial Day, this article by BendyGirl highlights something very important for me: that disabled people were the first to be targeted by the Nazis. Her eloquence is superior to mine today, but I will try and give a brief summary, and you can click on the link above to read the article.
The “black triangle” mentioned in the title refers to the concentration camp badges that the Nazis designed. Disabled people and “asocials” wore it.
Different colours designated the prisoners in whatever way Hitler’s regime had marked them as “undesirable”. The large variety of different combinations and colours boggles the mind – a testament to the Nazis almost compulsive need to label everyone and to keep records of the atrocities they committed.
Yellow Star/Yellow Triangle: Jews – this is perhaps the most familiar one. The yellow star was created by superimposing one triangle over an inverted one.
Pink Triangle: Homosexuals – the movie Bent (with Clive Owen and Lothaire Bluteau) tells the story of a gay man’s ordeal at the hands of the Nazis, and of how he falls in love with another prisoner when he’s thrown into Dachau concentration camp. (“Bent” was a slang term for gay people.) He denies his sexuality by identifying himself as a Jew and wearing the yellow star instead of the pink triangle, believing it will make it possible that he might survive longer. Horst, the prisoner he falls in love with, wears his pink triangle with pride. The ending ripped my heart out.
Dachau is also one of the camps that had “the most elaborate system” of branding the prisoners with these labels.
Black Triangle: “Asocials” – this broad category included the disabled, lesbians, and the “work shy”.
If you were unlucky enough to be in more than one category, one triangle would be superimposed over another. More information about them can be found here.
Although today, the disabled are not forced to wear identification badges, we’re still singled out and cannot be invisible much of the time due to the nature of our individual disabilities. We’re immediately identifiable to the naked eye if we limp, use a cane or wheelchair. For those of us with “invisible disabilities”, it’s more difficult because we’re in some way expected to “prove” that we are disabled because there may not be readily identifiable characteristics to our disabilities.
I was at the doctor’s yesterday, and I was finally put on extended-release morphine for my severe, chronic headaches that are caused (probably) by low intracranial pressure secondary to hydrocephalus. I was very nauseated as I walked into the consultation room with my husband, and as we entered I told the doctor this because I wanted to know where I should throw up if I needed to: in the sink or in the garbage bin. I’d had a very severe headache for most of the morning that continued through the appointment.
After my husband’s appointment, I went next.
As I sat down next to her desk, the doctor’s first words were, “Well, you look healthy.”
Disabled people are not invisible even if you can’t see their pain.
Some days, I wish that I could be.
As BendyGirl ends her post, so will I:
To mark World Holocaust Day, please remember,
“First they came for the disabled people
And I did not speak out because I was not disabled.”
