In a series of six interrelated short videos, Kenny Fries reads excerpts from his forthcoming book Stumbling over History: Disability and the Holocaust. The readings are supplemented by personal and historical photographs from his visits to the six Aktion T4 killing sites, where disabled people were mass murdered during the Third Reich.
“Unlike the Holocaust, there are no T4 survivors,” he says. “We know about T4 and its aftermath mainly through medical records and from the perpetrators. Aktion T4 does not have its Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi. That is the main reason I write about what happened to disabled people during the Third Reich. I want to be what Susanne C. Knittel and other scholars call a ‘vicarious witness.’ . . . This is my way of bridging the silence, of keeping alive something that is too often forgotten.” Watch the video series here.
Kenny begins a month-long SSB AWAY residency in Tuscany on October 15th.