When They Came for the Children

It’s the middle of September in 1939. Anna Weiss, a young nurse, arrives at the Brandenburg-Görden State Hospital in Germany expecting to care for children with disabilities. Instead, she discovers an oppressive atmosphere of fear and silence. Frightened patients are separated from their families and denied proper food and medical care before they eventually disappear one by one behind a locked staff door. As Anna quietly resists her supervisor’s cruelty, smuggling food to starving children, falsifying records to buy precious time, and risking everything to save the lives of the children in her care, she uncovers the terrifying truth behind a secret Nazi program that history has nearly forgotten. Inspired by the true events of Aktion T4, the Nazi campaign that systematically murdered disabled children and adults through starvation, neglect, lethal injection, and gassing, When They Came for the Children is a moving historical fiction novel about courage, conscience, and the extraordinary power of compassion in the face of unimaginable evil. While the historical events, locations, and Nazi officials portrayed in this novel are based on documented history, Anna Weiss and the other central characters are fictional, created to honor the nearly three hundred thousand disabled victims whose stories were never fully told. A moving and meticulously researched work of historical fiction, When They Came for the Children explores what a network of resistance inside one of the Aktion T4 euthanasia facilities may have looked like. It explores themes of empathy, resistance, and the devastating consequences of dehumanization. Because the Holocaust didn’t begin with Auschwitz. It began with the disabled.It began when they came for the children.