The Ghost Children

Date of Graduation

5-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (MFA)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

English

Advisor/Mentor

Viswanathan, Padma

Committee Member

Connors, Sean

Second Committee Member

Jensen, Toni L.

Keywords

young adult disability Holocaust

Abstract

The Ghost Childrenis a young adult historical novel, the first fictional work in prose to tell the story of Action T4, Nazi Germany’s mass murder program targeting people with disabilities. Told in alternating chapters by a blind teenager and her older brother, this is the story of Hitler’s forgotten victims: their struggle to survive, fight back, and find love.

Seventeen-year-old Eva Schreiber is totally blind from birth and considers herself a loyal Nazi, until she learns that Hitler’s government considers people like her “life unworthy of life” and is forced to face the worst of the Third Reich’s evil. With her parents dead, she lives at St. Anna’s Home for Handicapped Girls while her older brother Dietrich, an officer in the Waffen-SS, is off at war. But in the summer of 1941, Dietrich comes home on leave and warns Eva that St. Anna’s is closing and the girls will be moved to the dangerous hospital of Sonnenstein, promising that he has a plan to protect her. Dietrich and his girlfriend, a young nurse named Greta Zimmermann, get Eva and three friends out of the killing center by faking their deaths.

In hiding with a group of teens with a variety of physical and mental disabilities, Eva wrestles with her Nazi upbringing and falls in love with Alaric Drescher, a crippled pilot who attempted suicide after an accident. The teens grow more comfortable with their own disabilities and undertake a nocturnal anti-Nazi graffiti campaign under the name Ghost Children that puts the entire resistance network at risk.

When Dietrich's romance with Greta becomes public knowledge and his best friend and fellow soldier grows suspicious, his double life as resistance leader and SS officer unravels. As he's forced toward further complicity with Nazi atrocities, Dietrich searches for a way to save his sister without losing himself. But just when the network has a plan to sneak the fugitives into Switzerland, a devastating betrayal threatens all of them.

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