Birthday
(Vienna, Austria - December 31, 1944)
Excerpt from the Book of Collected Holocaust Poetry, Unworthy Lives, Published 2004, Page 54
Also Published as a Single Poem in Ripples, 2007 Edition
Copyright © 1998, 2006
Jason Lester Atkins
985 Fleet Drive, #347
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All Rights Reserved.
"I am Elfriede Karner:
Today is my birthday:
I am nine years old today:
I will always be nine years old:
They gassed our school today,
December thirty-first, nineteen forty-four:
We all died today: screaming:
It takes only three soldiers,
a sergeant and two men,
to end our unworthy lives:
We are not Jude or Gypsy:
We are afflicted Catholic souls:
Unworthy lives - by State's decree:
I will always be, Elfriede:
My friend will always be, Maria:
Little boy Karl, will always be:
Now, I speak in spirit language:
Now, I call to you as spirit,
through our connected conscious souls ...
Some Information About the Above Poem
Unclaimed remains of "unworthy lives" will be laid to rest this fall.
Associated Press
VIENNA, Austria - One mother took her child to the Nazi doctors voluntarily, all but signing the girl's death warrant. Another was frightened into handing over her daughter. A boy was selected from the street and came back in a coffin.
The Nazis called them "unworthy lives." Across Europe, 75,000 people, including 5,000 children, were pronounced mentally or physically deficient and killed because they did not fit Hitler's vision of a perfect world.
Vienna now plans to get rid of a gruesome legacy of this policy - the brains of some 400 children murdered by the Nazis and stored for medical research in a city clinic.
The children were killed by injection, medical experimentation or starved. Little was said about their murders for more than 50 years.
Fear during Hitler's rule and shame afterward kept discussion of Nazi horrors to a minimum for decades. A real look at Austrian complicity did not begin until 1988, when the 50th anniversary of Hitler's annexation of Austria coincided with the furor surrounding then President Kurt Waldheim and his concealed past as an officer in the German army.
This month, Vienna urged relatives to claim the brains in radio, TV and newspaper ads in Austria and Germany. By fall, those that remain will be buried in a memorial ceremony.
City officials say the existence of the brains - used for teaching and Nazi research on abnormalities - had been common knowledge since the 1980's, when they were transferred to Vienna's main psychiatric clinic, complete with a plaque decrying Nazi horrors.
In Vienna, Leopoldine Karner, 77, spoke bitterly of her struggle to keep her daughter after the baby's bad ear infection was reported to Nazi doctors. They told her to leave Elfriede with them. "I refused," she said, fingering a faded black and white picture with the caption "Mommy and Elferi."
"They then threatened me that if I did not leave her there, there would be 'consequences' for me and the rest of my family." After more threats, she reluctantly complied. The child died - officially of pneumonia.
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