Content note: the following article discusses genocide and sexual assault.
Author and poet Kenny Fries takes on a sombre and too often forgotten subject at the first of this year’s Public Lecture Series: Representations of Disability in Historical, Scientific and Artistic Perspectives
On a cold winter night, nearly 60 people, including students, faculty and members of the public, poured into Alumni Hall on January 21, 2025, to hear award-winning author Kenny Fries speak about the Nazi Euthanasia Program that targeted people with mental and physical disabilities.
Kenny Fries’ lecture was first in this year’s Public Lecture Series at King’s, titled Representations of Disability in Historical, Scientific and Artistic Perspectives, part of the Contemporary Studies course 2011.03 and also open to the public. These biweekly lectures feature internationally renowned disability scholars, researchers, writers, artists and activists, who examine how ideas of “disability” and “normality” take shape in different cultures and contexts.
Fries lecture centred on the Nazi Euthanasia Program, also known as Aktion T4, responsible for the murder of approximately 70,000 people, mainly children, with mental and physical disabilities. However, due to poor records or victims, the total number of deaths is unknown.
“Unlike the Holocaust, there are no T4 survivors,” said Fries. “We know about T4 and its aftermath mainly through medical records and from perpetrators.”
Fries learned of this program through the 1978 mini-series entitled Holocaust, in which Anna Weiss, a young girl who is mentally disabled, is raped by German soldiers and then murdered by the Nazis under Aktion T4.
“Why did it take this fictional portrayal to rouse me from my naiveté?” asked Fries, reading aloud from the manuscript of his latest, unpublished work.
For Fries, the connection to the horrors that took place in Germany during the Nazi regime is personal. He described himself as the “Nazi-trifecta”—gay, Jewish and disabled. Fries was born premature and missing bones in his legs. He spent the first four weeks of his life in an incubator.
“I know that if I had been born in a different time, in a different country, my fate would have been the same as those children,” said Fries.
Fries reminisced about walking the streets of Germany as a young man, describing the city’s past as “the history of one era [imposing] on another.” He spoke of the more than 5,000 Stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” embedded amongst the pavement stones around Berlin, part of a global art project started by German artist Gunter Denmig. These plaques commemorate victims of the Holocaust and are often placed at a victim’s last known address—there were five just outside of Fries’ Berlin apartment. As we sat in Alumni Hall, Fries deliberately and calmly read out the full names, birth dates and deportation dates of the five people listed on those Stolpersteine, along with the names of the concentration camps where they were murdered. “I wonder how many stepped on the stones without knowing upon what they have trod,” he said.
Fries spoke with a powerful presence, his words focused and deliberate. His description of the Aktion T4 rooms, the final holding place for many of the program’s young victims, painted a picture that was difficult to forget. He described the tiny beds and small bottles of medications that ended so many young lives. In these rooms, so many children were denied their adulthood.
Fries discussed the action of being what scholar Susanne C. Knittel described as a “vicarious witness.” This is not an act of speaking for another and thus appropriating their story and memory, but instead as an “attempt to bridge the silence through narrative means.”
“This book is my way to bridge the silence,” said Fries. “To keep alive something that is too often forgotten.”
If you missed Kenny Fries’ lecture, you can watch a recording of the event. You can also watch a recording of the second lecture of the series delivered by Elizabeth Bearden, entitled “Crip Touches Across Time or Getting in Touch with Disability in the Renaissance.”
Upcoming events in the lecture series include Nicole Ineese-Nash speaking about decolonizing disability, a screening of director (and King’s alum) Josh Dunn’s film Our Hearts are not Disabled, and this year’s Dr. Saul Green Memorial Lecture featuring Mara Mills on the history of ventilator allocation protocols. The series wraps up with an art exhibition in the New Academic Building featuring the work of artists from L’Arche Communities that opens on April 1st.
