Where are you taking us?

We've driven past it a hundred times on our way to pick up our daily bread. In the shadow of the baroque Basilica in Weissenau, it pokes out onto the sidewalk next to tree-lined grounds of the Heilanstalt--literally "healing place"--or sanatorium. 

But the grey bus didn't mean anything to us until we read the plaque nearby:

"The so-called “Euthanasia-Action” (Aktion T 4) of the National Socialists claimed about 200,000 mentally ill victims during World War II. They were considered 'not worthy of living.' At least 90,000 patients died of hunger or inadequate nourishment, or were murdered with drugs in state-run sanatoriums. More than 70,000 men, women, and children were murdered in gas chambers during the secret operation 'T4' in 1940/41. The mass murder was centrally organized at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin - thus the abbreviation 'T4.' Grafeneck, Brandenburg, Bernburg, Hartheim (near Linz), Sonnenstein, and Hadamar were the towns where the murders took place. Some of the staff of these killing institutions later worked in extermination camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. There is hardly a region in Germany that was not affected by this organized mass murder. Mentally and physically handicapped people were the first victims of a systematic, well-organized annihilation plan directed against the ill and those regarded as “racially inferior” by the Nazi regime. The 'Monument of the Grey Busses' serves as a reminder of the transports of the patients to their deaths. Artists Horst Hoheisel and Andreas Knitz designed the monument for the Weißenau Psychiatric Centre near Ravensburg in 2006. A bus based on the same model as the one that drove from the hospitals to the death centres in the years 1940 and 1941, in its original size and concrete form, commemorates the mass murder. 'Where are you taking us?' – The question of one of the patients -- is inscribed on the monument." 

Years before, after taking in the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., we had entered the family surname in the database. One name popped: Lorenz Hellstern--in Weißenau. 

Lorenz was born August 26, 1878, in the village of Betra, the tenth and last child of Ambrose and Maria (née Maier) Hellstern. He was baptized at 3 days of age in the Catholic church there. Both his parents died before they turned 50; he had seven living siblings, so presumably the family cared for him. The next record found for him is in 1939, in the German Minority Census: he is a patient in the Heilanstalt Weissenau. The last mention of Lorenz is found is March 2, 1940 in a list of NS euthanasia victims in Grafenek. He was 62.