Rachel Aviv writes about a man who, at 34, learned his abusive childhood was part of an experiment.
The two boys took on different roles in their new family. Sven was the good son, docile and loving. Marco was more defiant, but at night, when Henkel came into his room asking to cuddle, or waited for him while he brushed his teeth before bed, he had to comply. “I just accepted it out of loyalty, because I didn’t know anything else,” Marco told me. “I didn’t think what was happening was good, but I thought it was normal. I thought of it a little bit like food.
Marco’s teachers recommended that he see a child therapist, who was supposed to meet with him for two hours a week. But the therapist said that Henkel was holding Marco “prisoner”—Henkel always sat close by, in an adjacent room. Marco remembers that, once, after a session began without Henkel’s realizing it, he barged into the room and hit the therapist in the face.
A hearing was held in March, 1992, a month before Marco turned ten. The judge asked to speak privately with Marco, but Henkel stood directly outside the room and said, “If you are being threatened, call out!” Marco sounded as if he had been coached. He told the judge that his foster father, whom he called Papa, loved him, and his birth family did not. When the judge asked if he still wanted his mother to visit, he responded, “Not often.
Kentler was ten during Kristallnacht, in 1938, when Nazi Storm Troopers raided Jewish temples, stores, and houses. Kentler’s family was living in Düsseldorf, and Kentler was awakened by the noise of shattering glass. He came out of his bedroom and saw his father in a nightdress, holding the phone.
The postwar years in West Germany were marked by an intense preoccupation with sexual propriety, as if decorum could solve the nation’s moral crisis and cleanse it of guilt. “One’s own offspring did penance for Auschwitz,” the German poet Olav Münzberg wrote, “with ethics and morality forcefully jammed into them.
The trials of twenty-two former Auschwitz officers had revealed a common personality type: ordinary, conservative, sexually inhibited, and preoccupied with bourgeois morality. “I do think that in a society that was more free about sexuality, Auschwitz could not have happened,” the German legal scholar Herbert Jäger said.