Disabled wife inspired me to tell story of Nazi crime

A MAN from Peppard has published a book exploring the crimes committed by the Nazis against the disabled population.

Glenn Bryant, of Wyfold Lane, said he was inspired to write Darkness Does Not Come at Once by his wife Juliet who has a spinal cord injury.

Set in 1939, the novel follows Meike, a 17-year-old German girl and wheelchair user, as she tries to escape the Nazi program of euthanasia that targeted disabled children and adults throughout the Second World War.

The book touches upon, friendship, family, and human nature and explores the very real Aktion T4 programme in which about 300,000 disabled adults and children were killed in hospitals and institutions across Germany, Austria and occupied Poland between 1939 to 1945.

Mr Bryant said he wanted to use the book, which is being published by the Book Guild to challenge readers’ attitudes towards disability today.

He said: “Juliet inspired the story and really inspired me to write about it. She’s just fantastic and the best person I’ve ever met.

“We have a very normal 50 50 relationship. She lives an independent life and we have what I would view as a very normal marriage. But in the first years we were together, it shocked me how people behaved around her, because of her injury. How people, in different ways, were prejudiced.

“I think broadly, attitudes are a lot better now. From my experience, like with anything a lot of prejudice just comes from ignorance and then that ignorance can subconsciously turn to fear.

“The only way to break those cycles is to talk about things and make people think differently.”

Mr Bryant, a former journalist who works as copywriter for a tech company, first became interested in the Holocaust whilst studying for a master’s degree in modern history at Dundee.

He said: “I was very interested in the world wars. We looked at the Warsaw ghetto, we did a whole course on it for about three months, I wrote a paper and I just got a bit obsessed with it. I just remember being blown away by it.

“My tutor marked me one point below a ‘first’. He said my conclusion was too emotional. It probably was, but it summed up how I felt. I still feel the same today, a quarter of a century later.”

It wasn’t, however, until Mrs Bryant bought him a book Forgotten Crimes: The Holocaust and People with Disabilities by historian Suzanne Evans that the idea for his novel came to him.

Mr Bryant said: “I was aware of the Final Solution and how terrible it was, but I read this book in the context of Juliet who has a back injury and I was just like ‘wow’.”

He discovered that prior to the creation of extermination camps such as Auschwitz the process to commit this mass murder was refined from 1939 to 1941 on about 300,000 members of the disabled community in Germany.

Mr Bryant said: “I find it a kind of double whammy, it’s a shocking fact to discover and it’s shocking that it’s so unknown and unreported by history.

“One of the first extermination camps, Chelmno, was designed on the gassing techniques which they used to kill disabled people.”

The Aktion T4 programme was authorised in October 1939 by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler who signed a “euthanasia note” which authorised mass murder of people with disabilities.

Mr Bryant said: “I guess I find it quite unique that these were the first people Hitler targeted in an organised fashion and they were also the last victims.

“As soon as Auschwitz or Bergen Belsen were liberated and everyone said ‘oh, my God, how did we not realise that this was happening?’ The Nazis were trying to cover their tracks. But the disabled killings carried on.

“It’s a very shocking footnote in history that the last widely thought of victim of the Holocaust was a four-year-old boy called Richard Jenne who was killed in a euthanasia facility three weeks after the end of the Second World War in an area where American troops were occupied and were fully in control of.”

Mr Byant’s book explores these very real events through its central character Meike, who lives in a rural village outside Berlin.

Meike who Mr Bryant describes as “feisty” but full of fun, has her life suddenly upturned after the government announced disabled young people under the age of 18 must spend the war in specially designated institutions.

He said: “Meike gets taken by the authorities and her family don’t know where or why she has been taken, or what’s going to happen to her.

“The families were just told that they would look after their disabled child while the war is on and that once it had ended they would be returned. Meike has to work out what’s happening to her and try and survive.”

Meike goes on the run and encounters two allies, one her grandmother, an elderly Catholic woman forced to question her faith and the other is a fifteen-year-old boy she hardly knows.

Mr Bryant said: “Her grandmother is towards the end of her life. She’s never gone against her husband or what her friends think. But she adores her granddaughter and she sets out her own investigation.”

Like Mr Bryant’s wife, Meike has a back injury because he wanted to try and discuss attitudes towards those living with disability, drawing on his own experiences. He said: “Meike uses a wheelchair, but I deliberately don’t talk at all about why she’s in a wheelchair.

“I don’t want to perpetuate these preconceptions people have about disability. Unfortunately, I can just draw on my observations with Juliet.

“I suppose I wanted to write a book that was about disability in every small little way but in a completely normalised way with this family and this character.”

Mr Bryan has written one other book, A Quiet Genocide, which he self self-published in 2018 and is an historical fiction novel also set in the Second World War.

He first met his wife, a multidisciplinary artist originally from Charvil, whilst working as a reporter for the Reading Chronicle in 2003.

Mr Bryant said: “There was a speed dating night at jazz club in Reading, and we both went. We were the last date of the evening of 20 speed dates when I was very drunk. I didn’t have any beer left and I drunk her wine.

“Juliet was furious with me, but we both ticked each others boxes and we went on a date the next weekend and we have been together ever since.”

The couple married in 2006 and Mr Bryant has dedicated his latest novel to her. He said: “She was my single inspiration. I wouldn’t have written that book without her.”

• Darkness Does Not Come at Once, is out now and can be purchased on Amazon and the Bell Bookshop in Henley.