Years ago I bought an old pair of children’s shoes on a flea-market in Berlin. They looked like two of a pair: same make, same leather, similar degree of wear and tear, but the left shoe was remarkably bigger than the right one.Greičiausiai šis atsitikimas ir paskatino M.M. kalbėti per batus.
The shoes moved me. They had obviously been worn extensively and repaired and repaired, with tears and cracks in the leather and tiny nails hammered in their soles. The way their confident asymmetry was so perfectly wed with two-of-the-kindness, without making a ‘proper’ pair, pierced me. But what derailed me is their link to war-time, fascism in Germany.
[...]
The crumpled newsprint I found in the shoes was from a German newspaper, 1941. Why were the shoes put aside at this time? Had the child outgrown them? Died? Had she been taken away? German history weighed in. War. The horror of the holocaust; and fascism’s denial of an imperfect body which found its terrifying expression in the elimination of ‘unwertes Leben’, of those who were deemed socially, physically and mentally unfit, a measure from which children were not excluded. On the contrary, children’s euthanasia was only stopped with the end of the war. (p. 126)
