Being Heumann

Judith Heumann introduces her memoir by stating she never wished to not have a disability, and she recounts her parents’ reaction to finding out that polio had rendered her permanently unable to walk. She notes how the doctors recommended she be placed in a hospital because it was the norm at the time. People viewed children with disabilities as social and economic burdens and the result of some mistake the parents made. Judith’s parents, German Jewish immigrants Ilse and Werner Heumann, were teenagers during Hitler’s rise to power, and both fled to the US before the Holocaust began in earnest. Their parents were killed soon after.

Hitler’s mass genocide began with children with disabilities, whose parents were convinced to give them up for their well-being. These children were killed either by lethal injection or starvation, and Judith realizes that had she been born in Germany instead of Brooklyn, this would likely have been her fate. She notes how the Nazis saw people with disabilities as “life unworthy of life” (xiii) and how this genocide influenced her parents to never send her to an institution, even in America. Judith regards her parents as brave people who lived by their values and who taught her to question authority and remember the past without dwelling on it.