The deaf community’s experience is an often overlooked chapter in Holocaust history. Deaf Jews suffered the same fate as hearing Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe: discrimination, persecution, deportation and mass murder.
Nazi policy targeted deaf Germans, subjecting an unknown number of hereditarily deaf individuals to sterilization. Societal prejudice about the intelligence of persons with hearing disabilities led many individuals to be institutionalized. In those facilities, a small number of deaf Germans were murdered within the framework of the Nazi “euthanasia” effort, a program of mass killing directed at persons with disabilities.
On Thursday, December 5 at 7:45 p.m., the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will present “Crying Hands: The Deaf Experience Under Nazi Oppression,” a special program on the deaf experience during the Holocaust era with a Museum archivist and curator, along with the producers of an independently run traveling exhibition, In Der Nacht, which captured deaf survivors’ accounts in the late 1980s.
The Museum’s Deaf Victims of Nazi Persecution and the Holocaust Initiative is committed to preserving and telling the stories of deaf survivors. The program is co-presented with All The People. A question-and-answer session with the audience will follow the program.