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In just over a hundred pages of sparse, haunting verse, LeZotte illuminates a part of the Holocaust tragedy that takes up little shelf space in libraries today: the organized mass murder of mentally ill and physically challenged people, as well as the massacre of European Gypsies – all in addition to the six million Jews who lost their lives under Hitler’s extermination programs during World War II.

Amidst all that inhumanity, Paula Becker, a deaf 13-year-old Catholic German girl in 1939, somehow manages to survive the Nazi purging that originated at Hitler’s Tiergartenstraße 4, headquarters for “Action T4 / … the Nazi program that / almost cost me my life. / … named after / The address of its / Headquarters in Berlin.” Ironically, Tiergartenstraße means ‘animal-garden street’ or ‘zoo street,’ and not surprisingly, the most vicious animals to be found there are irrefutably humans: “The Nazis believed that certain people / Were superior to other people. / …They wanted to get rid of people / Who they thought / Polluted the gene pool.” In the name of perfection, Jews, people of color, homosexuals, and Gypsies were systematically exterminated. Additionally, ” … they decided / Disabled people / Were ‘useless eaters’ / Who were ‘unfit to live.'” Like her protagonist, LeZotte herself is deaf.

Paula leaves her family in order to survive, hidden for years from safe house to shelters by a family friend, Father Josef. Unable to bear the hidden life, Paula runs away with Poor Kurt, one of her shelter-mates, and lives briefly with a Jewish family who take them in. T4 continues on, even after Hitler officially orders the murder campaign to stop. Eventually 275,000 disabled victims were “euthanized” and another 400,000 were forcibly sterilized so as not to bear imperfect children. Paula survives the war, falls in love with Poor Kurt – who reveals himself to be a Romani Gypsy with a horrific past. The two marry, and yet their union is bittersweet: “… we were glad we / Had survived the worst, but we also felt guilty. / That feeling – that we had escaped when others equally / Important had died – would never subside.”

A postscript prayer ends the slim volume: “Educating / people is / The best tool / we have / Against / forgetting. / We must / make sure / Nothing / like T4 / Ever / happens / Again.” Indeed, for every student that reads the Holocaust classic The Diary of Anne Frank, T4 should be added as a companion text. In a current world of seemingly neverending wars, education is truly our best weapon to ensure our own children’s survival.

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2009