Author and poet Penny Pepper has written a new piece of creative non-fiction (below) for Holocaust Memorial Day 2026, which has the theme of ‘Bridging Generations’. You can also watch a video where Penny talks to Together! 2012 CIC’s Artistic Director Dr Ju Gosling about the work, her life, the issues that cross generations today, and the contemporary threats to Disabled people.
The Dark Door Opening. How I came to know about Aktion-T4.
Miss J called me a brain box. The other kids in class teased me about it, but I didn’t mind. Dad said I was clever, too, and I liked that. I was at Special School on the rural Hertfordshire side of the Chiltern Hills and overflowing with curiosity and nascent storytelling urges.
This was in the late-‘60s, and I have vague memories of Miss J talking to us about the Six-Day War in the Middle East. Of course, at the time I didn’t know anything about such things. I was scarcely seven years old. And in September of that year, my father died at the age of twenty-nine. I don’t remember the detail of the day-by-day, but with it came a slow, perhaps premature, dawning of consciousness that people killed people.
Miss J wore her necklace all the time, a six-pointed star. It was only much later that I came to realise in Hebrew it’s called the Magen David—the Shield of David. In English, it’s the Star of David, which is what Miss J told me. Against this backdrop, and likely revealed not in one afternoon, but in many over the next few years at this school, Miss J told me about the Holocaust.
And the lesser-known atrocity of Aktion-T4.
She told it: simply: some bad people killed disabled people. Disabled children.
Like me.
Miss J came from a large family. She had a sister. But none of them were here anymore. I knew about the war—the Second World War—because my great-uncles had done things in it. And my dad had books about it that he wouldn’t let me look at.
I might be sixty-five, but the chill of that realisation clings in my memory, an icy burden of reality that I doubt will ever thaw. It told me at that young, vulnerable age, that there were others who believed I had no value as a person, and that I was an unnecessary expense within the world.
In Nazi propaganda, I was a ‘useless eater’.
I have a vague feeling Miss J might have mentioned that her sister was disabled, and exterminated. If this is part of a false memory created out of sudden fear in a suddenly dark world, I don’t feel I need to apologise. My fear was real. It pulled away the already uncertain grounding in my life as a disabled child in the Special School system, where the concept of othering operated at every level.
Miss J elaborated at times about how they killed children. How the Nazis claimed it was better for everyone. I remember her anger. And her sorrow – no doubt magnified by the fact she was working as a teacher in a school for ‘the physically and mentally handicapped’ (its official title).
Outside of this revelation, I remained Miss J’s star pupil. Eager to learn, and eager to write—I won a competition as a baby poet, and received a copy of The Complete Nonsense of Edward Lear as a prize.
Miss J laid foundations inside my brain box that resonate today. She was a wonderful teacher. As my chronic health worsened, I was less able to take part in some of the sporting activities that other kids could still do, like horse riding. As a consolation, Miss J would take me to her flat where I would gape in pleasure at all her bookshelves. Paintings on the wall. Intriguing ornaments. And a menorah, which I know she explained to me as important to her, and Jewish people. Though, it wouldn’t be until I became an adult that I fully understood this.
Miss J told me to always fight my corner. To know that I was precious, and that being brainy was a great thing, even if I didn’t fully believe I was. These kind and encouraging words were most beautiful to me during the time I grieved desperately for my beloved father, and as the fallout from my medical conditions grew. I was often ill, which underpinned my sense of growing uselessness, at a time when concepts of disability – other than being a pitiful burden – had yet to evolve into any sense of self-determination and activism.
Against this backdrop, by the time I got to see the photos in Dad’s old war books (which had passed to my younger brother), I fell into a troubled adolescence, adrift in identity and purpose. Only my curiosity and passion for storytelling offered an occasional light.
But once into my fraught teenage years, there was no freedom or capacity in my life to research T4, even while I made myself look at those photos of endless, nameless murdered people. Wondering, always, about the children killed for being disabled. And, as years passed, discovering the lies that were told to justify these abominable abuses, even to the children’s parents.
When I was a teenager, I felt the very real presence of similar threats coming from within my own family. I realised that it is not always the case that adults – caregivers – around you have your best interests at heart. How easily I could have been one of those poor disabled children, some of whose parents were brainwashed into believing that my ‘merciful’ extermination was in the best interests of the Fatherland. After all, wouldn’t it have ‘lessened my suffering’ too?
So much for being a brain box…
It was through Miss J’s revelations that I realised I had a connection to all of those victims – even if the details of T4, of ‘useless eaters’, would not come into sharper focus for me until I discovered disability arts activism, and such things were finally exposed.
There was the band, the provocatively titled Simon Smith and the Useless Eaters – Simon was an early activist with disabled people’s Direct Action Network. And Liz Crow’s film 2008 Resistance: Which Way the Future?, which was a fierce act of defiance I was proud to see – Liz, a wheelchair user, in a Nazi uniform unsettling, and incendiary. The performance featured in The Guardian’s Trafalgar Top Ten on the plinth, and to me it’s still as powerful today as it was in 2009. It exposed Aktion-T4 to a wider public, and deepened my commitment to making sure this underrepresented aspect of the Holocaust story is never forgotten.
Writing, art and activism gave me the tools to see how I was linked to this history. I still am, as I continue to be part of the fight against legalising assisted suicide in the UK – euthanasia does not come without context or consequence, no matter how ‘common sense’ and ‘humane’ it seems on the surface.
I feel it is my duty – in memory of Miss J; of T4’s disabled victims – and an act of defiance and self-respect, to keep using my brain box to tell the disability narrative amidst the current, ugly rise of fascism across the world.
Days ago, I was on the receiving end of right-wing anti-disability hate on social media. These things are linked, but thanks to Miss J I’ll survive, as I have much worse, using the best weapon I have – my voice.
Penny Pepper is an award-winning author, poet, and activist whose stories explore the disability narrative through provocation and humour. Her memoir, First in The World Somewhere, was published in 2017; her poetry collection, Come Home Alive, in 2018. Her work features in Elemental (2024), Hemingway Shorts (2021), Poet Town (2025) and Mslexia. Besides her column for Byline Times, Penny’s articles have also featured in The Guardian and, more recently, The Bookseller, in which she highlights the lack of disability representation in fiction. Last autumn, she finished her latest novel, The Widow of Rock-a-Nore, which is currently out on submission while she develops a new folk horror novella. Penny lives in St Leonards-on-Sea and is represented by Abi Fellows of DHH.