It was her second time in a children's home. And so Sabine Ludwig already counted on the humiliation and mistreatment of the kindergarten teachers, who called children like them just anxiously "the aunts".
The aunts were evil in the eyes of the home children, their strokes hard, their punishments sadistic. The food was disgusting, but should be strangled. Some children apparently had to eat their vomit.
Thin children should increase in such spa homes, fat children to slim down, sick of the healthy sea or forest air fuel. Presumably millions of children were sent in the Federal Republic starting from the fifties on advice of school doctors in child care homes; In 1963 there were 839 homes with space for 350,000 children a year mainly from disadvantaged families. The aim was to give them "courage to live" and a "special love".
What the parents did not suspect or did not want to believe: Often their loved ones were in the distance mentally and physically abused - by personnel who had probably taken his methods probably not from the Nazi period. Only recently have victims broken their silence.
photo gallery
10 pictures
Deployment Children: When the home hurt"I screamed for three weeks," remembers Sabine Ludwig on her second home stay in 1964 on Borkum. Previously, the ten-year-old had agreed with her parents a secret code, if they could not openly write in letters.
The agreement: If she painted a colorful house, everything was fine. She was feeling bad about a black house.
Drawn help cries
Sabine Ludwig sent six letters from Borkum to Berlin during the six weeks; Weekly only one letter was allowed. She always painted a dark house with a pencil-gray roof and black windows. But despite the drawn cries of help her parents did not intervene their parents. Right in the first letter, Sabine complained:
"I have a lot of homesickness, I always cry, at night and all day, I would have preferred to stay at home I want to go back home It would be nice if you were there (...) Oh, it does matter Please please!"
As a "beautiful" called the ten-year-old alone the bus ride on the first day, as "not angry" the aunts - because of course they read along. An educator noted placatingly next to the drawing of the black house:
"Dear Family Ludwig, Sabine has settled in well and also got in contact with other children, today she has not cried."
Below Sabine wrote in the PS:
"But I think the homesickness goes away, I'm coming home to you soon, do not worry about me."
Private
These sentences were in complete contradiction to the rest of the letter. They revolt Sabine Ludwig, today a successful author of children's and youth books, still 55 years later. Because then she had the scary feeling of being delivered: "The sentences were dictated to me, my writing is much neater in this passage." Suddenly her letters stood as disciplined as the aunts expected of all children.
"Indifferent brutality"
As compassionate, she has no one in mind: "They were all of an indifferent brutality." Particularly bad was her first home stay in 1961 in the Fichtelgebirge. At night, the children were not allowed to use the bathroom. This was strictly monitored, it should be strictly quiet. Sabine did not hold, wet. She was publicly humiliated the next day.
"I had to balance my mattress and clean it in the washroom with a root brush, then I had to stand in the wet mattress in front of the dormitory of the boys, who of course laughed at me." The same punishment for every enema. "What did they want to achieve? To discipline their bladder?"
Ludwig is not alone in her story, which inspired her in 2014 to the youth book "Black Houses". But well documented and researched so far is only the fate of permanently accommodated in Christian homes children of the postwar period, since 2006, SPIEGEL journalist Peter Wensierski in his book "Beating in the name of the Lord" has allowed to speak. As a result, the Bundestag dealt with this and set up a compensation fund.
Price query time:
20.11.2019, 08:59 clock
No guarantee
DISPLAY
Peter Wensierski
Strikes in the Name of the Lord: The Repressed History of Home Children in the Federal Republic
Publishing company:
German publishing house
Pages:
208
Price:
EUR 19.99
Buy from Amazon Buy from Thalia
Product information is purely editorial and independent. The so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the dealer when buying. More information here.
By contrast, little is known about similarly tormented children in spa homes. They call themselves "deportation children".
The Berlin journalist Anja Röhl - even as a child victim in such holiday homes - does not let go of this topic. All these shocking details that she learned from other victims, after she had started several years ago to collect reports on her website Verschickungsheime.de and to connect former victims. For months, Röhl has been organizing the first nationwide congress on the "misery of children". He runs until the 24th of November on Sylt, where once many children spent traumatizing weeks.
"Education tips from the Nazi era"
"The worst experiences remind them with photographic precision," says Röhl, "a criterion for high credibility." Recently reported the ARD magazine "Report Mainz", then reported to her several other stakeholders. Meanwhile, Röhl has collected about 700 eyewitness accounts. "There are only three or four positive ones among them, which are also pretty imprecise."
Often Röhl reads of shocking punishments: children, to whom one adhered the mouth. Who had to spend hours barefoot or half naked in cold washrooms. Beatings, isolation, icy showers, sometimes sexual abuse. And again and again descriptions of inedible food, of bad-tasting semolina and milk soups and forced feeding: children were tied to chairs, had to swallow down their own vomit.
Röhl tries to organize the abysses of this "extremely cold pedagogy" and "sadism against children". She hopes to initiate research.
Because so far, you know little - and then only from the victim's perspective. Most former home-managers, housemothers and educators may have died. Of the hundreds of children's cures, there are only about 50 left. They are as silent about it as the health insurance companies who paid for the stay. Were there bonuses for every child mediated by the doctors? Did former concentration camp personnel work in the homes? Röhl can not prove that, but suspects it; in a home, for example, the children had numbers written on their forearms.
Röhl can recognize a few patterns. About two thirds of their reports come from women. The children mostly came from workers or employee families. Even two-year-olds were sent for weeks, siblings often separated. And: The young educators were often overwhelmed and trembled before the housemother. There were probably too few staff and a high turnover. Thus, the violence developed its own momentum.
"Most kids had the feeling we'll never come home." Röhl knows that only too well - she had to be five and eight years old in homes on Föhr and in the Teutoburg Forest. "I was always scared, this childish fear is extremely painful, you're always under tension, how can I hide, duck away?" At that time, Röhl scratched his hands bloody, tore the skin to shreds. "It was like cracks."
The parents looked away
She also arranged a secret language with her parents. "The clouds are bad," her letter code said. But she did not use him, she felt hopelessly lost.
Sabine Ludwigs father could not overlook the black houses, but wrote in his letters rather detailed on the Berlin weather and the dusty construction site next door. Rarely did he enter the gloomy drawing:
"The gray house on your postcard, which arrived three days ago, has made us very sad, hopefully you like it now, I hope the aunts are all nice to you - and you to them."
Because the parents looked away, many children found their humiliation normal and unavoidable. They closed their memories. Who should they talk to?
Price query time:
18.11.2019, 14:19 clock
No guarantee
DISPLAY
Sabine Ludwig
Black houses
Publishing company:
Dressler
Pages:
352
Price:
EUR 14,99
Buy from Amazon Buy from Thalia
Product information is purely editorial and independent. The so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the dealer when buying. More information here.
"I was very disappointed," says Sabine Ludwig to her parents' silence. "I still am, it was not clear until I wrote my book, and then I fell into a deep hole, unfortunately my parents were not alive at the time."
In her novel, children spending six weeks involuntarily on an island reminiscent of Borkum grow into a conspiratorial community. In the end they triumph, the bad guys are punished. "That was important to me," says Ludwig.
The reality at the time looked different. Shortly before Sabine Ludwig's return to Berlin in December 1964, her mother wrote her a letter. Wordsome, she apologizes for having put together a packet of sweets too late; Unfortunately, it is no longer worthwhile to send it off. To the black houses: not a word. Instead, a reminder:
"And do not forget to thank the doctor and the aunts!"
