[Photo Caption: Jewish nurses and nursing students gather around a cart outside a coffee house on the designated Judenstrasse during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, ca. 1940-1942 – United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Clara Renee Karen Vromen]
At the beginning of January, I had the honor of being invited to be one of nineteen participants in the United States Holocaust Museum’s Jack and Anita Hess Family Faculty Seminar on Bioethics, Disease, and the Holocaust. I’m further refining my History of Medicine presentation: A Beautiful Day: Catastrophe, Memory & Psychiatry from Vienna, 1942 to Today, as well as my presentation for Psychiatric Grand Rounds: A Beautiful Day: The Mutability of Inherited Holocaust Memory. Both presentations look at the intersection between my own family history and the history of medicine and psychiatry in Vienna, discussing the role of psychiatrist and author Victor Frankl, who wrote the initial medical note for my great aunt, Josephine Helwing (Aunt Pepi).
Aunt Pepi was admitted to Am Steinhof, the mental institution on the outskirts of Vienna, after attempting suicide in 1942. She would later die there, probably of starvation. Am Steinhof was famous for developing humane treatments for mental illness before and after World War II. But under National Socialism, the institution became the site of the active “euthanasia” of several thousand children with disabilities and adults with psychiatric diagnoses, and later, the murder of thousands more through neglect and starvation.
Reading and preparation for the seminar was intense, covering the grim progression from sterilization of various groups to state-mandated murder of individuals with disabilities, to genocide. We also looked at the history of Eugenics and the resulting forced sterilization of individuals here in the United States. Additionally, we read about the impact of racism and ableism on medical atrocities in the United States, as well as the impact of systemic racism and ableism on ongoing health inequities in the United States and elsewhere.
Scholars and lecturers came from a breadth of fields: Medicine, Nursing, Literature, Bioethics, Philosophy, Sociology, Theology, History, Psychology, Gender and Disability Studies, Jewish Studies, Political Science, and Education. The lecturers were amazing. Finding a community of supportive scholars and educators of all ages was wonderful.