Only the Beautiful

by Susan Meissner

My darling girl. My only child. Gone from my arms but still residing within me somehow. I think I understand now that a person doesn’t stop being a mother just because her child is taken from her.

Who defines what is weakness? I’d wondered. Isn’t it only the strong who get to decide that? Isn’t it only the strong who have the power to act on what they decide? How can that be right or fair or good?

“But how do you know her life was miserable because of it? And what gives you the right to decide who is worthy to be a mother or a father and who is not? What gives you the right to judge whose life has value and whose doesn’t as if you were—” “As if I were God?” he cuts in. “I’ve heard that before from people like you who haven’t seen what I’ve seen.” “I was going to say, ‘as if you are better than everyone else.’ God doesn’t devalue people the way you do,” I say evenly. “Is that so? And yet he permits some to be born with the worst birth defects imaginable.” “But he doesn’t love or value them less because of it! Do you honestly think because of her condition that God in heaven loves Rosanne Maras less than you or me? Do you honestly believe that he loves anyone who is blind, or crippled, or can’t think straight, less than anyone else?”

As I climbed the stairs, I was reminded of what a seasoned nanny told me decades ago in London’s Hyde Park as we both pushed prams with babies tucked inside them. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking the children you nanny—or their parents—are your family. They’re not. And you’re not theirs.” I had forgotten, grown careless, when it came to Brigitta. I’d given in fully to love. If I could see that other nanny now, I’d tell her that though my soul felt fractured in this moment, I had no regrets over having loved her. None.

The world was full of evil people, to be sure, but there were also good people in it.

But I also know that love is a powerful force. Far more powerful than the strength I saw on display in Nazi-occupied Austria. Love, to overcome that kind of power, just needs to be unleashed from fear.

I had read in George’s books that one person with a desire for change might struggle for years to get noticed by elected legislators, but a groundswell of public opinion probably would not.

This kind of thinking, that one person can say he or she is a better human than another, is not only cruel, it is dangerous. I saw with my own eyes what can happen when this way of thinking flourishes without restraint.”

A book is always in many places at once. That is its singular wonder. A book takes one voice speaking and makes it many. A book can shine far brighter and longer than I ever could on my own.

With giving, there is cost, isn’t there? There is always cost. Sometimes it is an easy sum to hand over. And sometimes it exacts from you the whole measure of your heart.

When I began the research to write Only the Beautiful at the start of the pandemic, I confess I didn’t know what the eugenics movement was. Many people I mention the term to now don’t, either. It’s a movement that has thankfully gone by the wayside, but sadly the ideology, I believe, is still with us, and that’s why I think the movement itself should not be forgotten. If we forget our history, we are more apt to repeat it, aren’t we? Hence this book.