Only the Beautiful

by Susan Meissner

a blooming amaryllis at Christmastime has been lovingly coaxed into life by a gardener who has convinced it that it is spring, and that it will continue to bloom every year if I care for its bulb the

People will always distrust what they don’t understand. And what they distrust, they cannot love.

“But why do you get to decide what is best, Mrs. Crockett? Why do you get to decide what the best looks like? Why do you get to decide that?” The woman doesn’t have a ready answer.

“I ran a tight ship with my boys, and I run a tight ship here at this group home,” she tells me as we meet in her living room. “But it’s a ship where everyone aboard can feel safe. I don’t care about any mistakes you might have made or that were made against you, and I don’t count those mistakes as defining who you are. I know life can be unfair. I know things can happen to you that you don’t deserve. I also know there might be decisions you made in the past that you’d like to undo and can’t. But here in this house, we look to tomorrow, not yesterday. Does that sound like something you can agree to?”

They just liked to spar. They fought about everything. I think that was the only way those two

girls knew how to express how afraid they were of all the things in life they could not control.”

“Synesthetes might hear a bell and see a color or experience a taste on their tongue,” the man says. “Their minds might assign colors to names and places and numbers. The senses for someone with synesthesia overlap, sometimes in more ways than one.”

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. Amaryllis will always be my daughter. I will always be her mother.

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?

“I know of that state institution where the girl was sent,” George says when I am done. “It’s true what Celine said about it. It’s my understanding they’ve been sterilizing patients there for years.” “For years?” I can scarcely believe what he’s telling me. “How long?” “Well, let me think. California has been at it since 1910 or so.

“I remember the Supreme Court case that ruled on this. It was a while ago, in the late 1920s,

She’d gotten pregnant at seventeen while living at a foster home, and unfortunately that was seen as a sign of her low intelligence.”

“I know it sounds a bit shocking now, but the movement was quite popular years back,” George says. “There was even an extensive exhibit at the 1915 World’s Fair right here in San Francisco. It was all about education back then, teaching people that the best way to strengthen society was to bring into it strong, healthy, and intelligent children. But the focus morphed rather quickly to the practice of sterilizing those with genetically undesirable traits. It went on for years, all in the name of bettering society.

“It doesn’t really matter what I think, does it? I don’t have the power to change what is happening, and neither do you. The Nazis are the ones in control, and they have decided this is the way it will be. And so it is.” “But we can’t sit here and drink tea and do nothing! Isn’t that the same thing as being in agreement?”

“I was just following orders. None of this was my idea. None of it.”

“And you think that excuses you? That you were just following orders? My God, Johannes. You objected to nothing, you challenged nothing! Not even when your commander shouted over the phone that your own daughter was a monkey! Every Nazi order you obeyed furthered their cause. Don’t you see it? Every time you said nothing, you were saying you agreed with them. Every time you did nothing to stop the madness, you were pushing it forward!”

I realized I’d always known I could have done more to stand against the evil that was the Third Reich. And so could my homeland. We could have done so much more. America could have provided safe haven to European Jews who had been desperate for asylum. We could have done that easily.

“Because I’d learned from someone inside Am Steinhof that they were doing experiments on her. They were doing dreadful medical experiments on all the children. I could not bear it, Helen. I could not! I paid someone to take her to the place where they killed them, so that it would stop.”

They thought only they knew what was right and good and normal.”

“Power like that can’t be stopped,” and my own voice saying back to him, “Of course it can.”

They come to hear the tale of smuggling disabled children—the few that I could—out of Nazi-occupied Austria. They come to hear about Wilhelm, who survived, and Brigitta, who did not. I still have much work to do to bring audiences past the point of saying, “Isn’t it awful what happened over there?” to “Something awful is happening right here.”

More than twenty thousand people were sterilized in the state of California from 1909 to 1964, the highest number of forced sterilizations in the United States and one-third of all sterilizations nationwide. In March 2003, then governor Gray Davis issued a formal apology, saying in part, “To the victims and their families of this past injustice, the people of California are deeply sorry for the suffering you endured over the years.”