‘Laura Winham was left to die because the disabled aren’t thought worth saving’

Eighty years after the atrocity, most of its survivors, perpetrators and storytellers have died. The books and films have been done, and staff at the concentration camps that remain as memorials say in the past decade awareness among younger people when they arrive is almost non-existent. A Bad Thing Happened So Let’s Move On.

Hopefully those visitors know more when they leave. About the industrialisation of slaughter, and the fact that those who carried it out were ordinary people who saw nothing wrong with picking up a baby by the ankles to dash its brains out against the wall, because it wasn’t worth feeding.

But our schools and wider society have forgotten how it all began to the extent that, when someone says “watch what you’re saying, that’s how the Holocaust began”, the politician or other prat who said it is outraged at perfectly-accurate comparison.

But let me tell you about Laura, the beautiful young woman pictured above. Because what happened to her, happened at the start of the Holocaust too.

Laura was one of thousands of babies born with disabilities. She was deaf, had a heart condition, and something called Goldenhar Syndrome which also affected her eyes and spine. She still made it through school and university, and earned a degree.

But she struggled with mental health, and developed schizophrenia. She heard voices telling her that her family wanted to kill her, so rejected them. Loving her deeply, they kept their distance, and trusted the authorities to get her the help she needed.

Laura was left to die. She lay on the floor of her council flat from 2017 until 2021, when her family decided to try again, and persuaded police to break in. They found her mummified remains, and a calendar on which she’d scrawled ‘I need help’ 4 years earlier.

It turned out ‘the authorities’ had repeated warnings that Laura was struggling, and malnourished. They ignored the red flags, and posted her a letter about food banks. When she didn’t turn up to benefits meetings they axed her disability benefit. When she didn’t let in the gas man, they cut off her gas. For two years. And never wondered why she didn’t need it.

Laura was 38, capable, determined, but got a rough hand at birth. With only a little help, she’d have been fine. She didn’t get it because millions of people in this country believed the politicians when they said that the welfare system cost too much, and voted for a decade of cutbacks. Laura – and millions like her – simply weren’t worth saving.

When the dodgy dealers who formed David Cameron’s government were told in those early days that sort of rhetoric was rooted in Bad Things, they shouted it down. When they announced a need for “reform” to “streamline” benefits we all knew it was to pay less to people who mattered less; them, not us.

Laura wasn’t a Tax Generating Unit, but then neither is Nadhim Zahawi, or Rishi Sunak’s wife. Yet they’re socially acceptable, whereas the Lauras of the world are considered best shuffled into a pile of paperwork, where an overstressed, underpaid public sector operative can lose track of them.

In 1930s Germany, likewise suffering economic crisis, and blaming others for it, the Nazis began by saying the disabled cost too much. They used eugenics – a belief that the human race could have its weaknesses weeded out, which was popular in the UK and US as well – to promote the idea, first, of sterilising the disabled so they didn’t breed.

Then forcibly sterilising them. Then euthanasia, except that it was parents encouraged to put their own ‘defective’ children forward for a deadly injection. And, finally, it became just plain murder.

The official name for the programme was called Aktion-T4, and I only know about it because after I developed epilepsy in my 30s and was Googling things I fell down an internet wormhole and landed on a site which said that, if the Nazis had got hold of me, I’d have been sent to the gas chambers as well, along with those who had schizophrenia, Down’s, and dementia.

No school told me. No person. No-one, until you tell them, knows how the Holocaust began.

Killing the disabled meant the Nazis had to find ways of killing dozens at once. They invented a gas, and starting herding people onto sealed trucks. Then they had to find methods of disposal, and one step at a time – while the public was literally nominating members of their own families for a ‘merciful release’ – they managed to manufacture death.

Around 300,000 disabled were killed. Many were, like Laura, born with disabilities. And as 80% of disabled people, like me, developed a problem in later life, many would have been perfectly normal, once.

From there it was an easy step to say 200,000 Roma, Traveller and Sinti people should be exterminated. That 6million Jews should be rounded up. That homosexuals should join them. And why not throw in trade unionists, Polish or Soviet prisoners of war, and any Communists, too?

Imagine a trench, dug today, filled with the bodies of Mick Lynch, Sam Smith, striking nurses, David Baddiel, a few Russian tennis players, the Zelenskyy family. Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe would be in there, along with Indiana Jones, Elton John, Gandalf, Clare Balding and Stephen Fry. And let’s chuck in some disableds – opera singer Andrea Bocelli, actor Michael J. Fox, oh and Harry Potter again, because he has dyspraxia as well as Judaism.

That trench would not be acceptable to you, I hope. Not least because I’d be in it as well. But if people don’t point out what the Holocaust was, who it took, and how it happened, then that trench is still out there, somewhere, waiting. For you to fill it, at one end of the spade or the other.

Since the end of the Second World War, mass graves have been filled with ‘undesirables’ on almost every continent, including Europe. Genocide is a habit humans don’t seem able to break. Which is why it matters when those who find themselves at the bottom of the pile don’t get helped to fend for themselves. Refugees, immigrants, disabled, poor, sick, disadvantaged – they’re us, and we’re them. We’re richer when they’re helped, financially, socially, and morally. And the price we pay for abandoning them makes us poorer in every way.

When welfare becomes about cost, rather than what we gain, it is the first step. When politicians talk about people who take more than they give, that is the second step. The third is arguably fulfilled when someone scraps the idea of a migrant commissioner, and expects the Royal Navy to watch people drown.

Government policies in the UK since 2010 have killed thousands of Lauras. Because the bodies weren’t in a pile, we didn’t see them. But austerity is eugenics by another name, and those who die at its hands have value.

So let’s be clear: the Holocaust was not a Jewish thing. It is a you and me thing. People like you and me did it, people like you and me were victims of it, and people like you and me are the only ones who can stop it happening again. That’s what the Jews have been shouting about for the past 80 years, and there is no better time than Holocaust Memorial Day to point out they are right.

We must remember it all, and forever. I’m not Jewish, but I know that much. And so do you.