The Eliminated

(for Tucker's writing assignment on World II)

Doctors, nurses, and midwives
told parents of schools, of treatment centers.
Later, in letters home,
sudden, child deaths attributed to pneumonia.
All the while they carved into tiny, blameless bodies;
stealing pieces of the murdered very minds
for future medical research.

When some parents,
grown wiser at news
of another facility “pneumonia” death,
refused consent, threats abounded…
Removal of all children, even the able-bodied,
or sentencing to “labor duty” which in the Fuehrer’s era
meant a slow, starved death.

By 1941,
over 5,000 children were executed
according to Wikipedia.
Numerous other sources list death tolls
as impossible to estimate.