By Tavia D. Green
The Leaf-Chronicle
January 11, 2010
http://www.theleafchronicle.com/article/20100111/NEWS01/1110312
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| Ziska Murphy looks at a picture of herself and her brother when they were children. Murphy says she endured 18 years in a German orphanage where she was beaten, sexually abused and tortured. Photo by Tavia D. Green/The Leaf-Chronicle |
Ziska Murphy poured herself a steaming cup of peppermint tea and sat it next to a plate of Sandies cookies.
Murphy, a west Clarksville resident, spoke loudly in her thick German accent as she told her husband, Charles "Bart" Murphy, where to look to find an old photograph and waited at the kitchen table.
Charles Murphy, 65, a 100 percent disabled Vietnam veteran, made his way to the kitchen and handed her the photo.
In silence, Ziska's denim blue eyes stared at the faded black and white picture as if she'd slipped back to the moment the photo was snapped.
She was 4 years old and with her brother, Rudolph, 12, wearing nice dress clothes and holding hands as they stood in the court of an Euskirchen, Germany, Catholic orphanage waiting to visit their "opa," or grandfather.
The cement walls of the Catholic orphanage where she grew up could not be seen in the photo, and everything appeared to be good as the children smiled.
In reality, Ziska said things were far from good as she grew up as a ward of the state in Catholic orphanages after World World II. At just 4 years old, she said she had become accustomed to sexual abuse by Catholic priests and physical beatings by nuns.
A survivor
In the picture Ziska held, if you could see beneath their clothes you'd find swollen bellies because of malnutrition and dark bruises from severe beatings, she said.
"We looked horrible," Ziska said, shaking her head. "It wasn't a children's home but a prison for children."
The picture is the only keepsake she has from spending 18 years as a ward of the state in Germany, but the memories torment her.
"I've been abused, tortured and raped by people who were supposed to take care of me," She said, tears welling in her eyes. "It's so hard to talk about ... I don't want to remember."
Some of her scars are physical, such as the knife tip embedded in her calf muscle after a nun threw a knife at her for peeling potatoes too slow.
Most of the scars she said are mental and emotional, and she kept them buried in her heart for 50 years.
She never told her four children as she raised them in the United States in the 1970s and '80s. Recently she released the pain to her husband of eight years. As a 100 percent disabled Vietnam veteran, he could relate to her mental anguish and comfort her.
"I want to see her get retribution from the church," Charles Murphy said. "I don't want do it if it hurts her, because she couldn't talk about it for a long time. She wasn't ready to share. I didn't push her."
It is estimated more than half a million children brought up in church and state institutions between 1945 and 1975 suffered mental, physical and sexual abuse, according to an article from DW-World DE, a German-based multimedia company.
Ziska is one of thousands of Baby Boomers fighting their international battle from their homes. In her west Clarksville home, she spends hours on her computer e-mailing and talking to other Kinderheim — German for "children's home" — abuse survivors who are sharing their stories.
German organization Verein Ehemaliger Heimkinder is working toward uniting abuse victims living in the United States from Kinderheim orphanages and are seeking compensation for the mental and physical pain they endured.
Finding healing and closure are what's most important to many of the survivors.
Christa Morse, 59, from Oklahoma, a survivor of abuse at a Kinderheim and one of the directors and U.S. representatives for VEH, understands the mental and physical anguish thousands experienced.
"We were robbed of our childhood," Morse said. "They stole it. It was taken from us, and we couldn't lead normal lives. I've heard stories, and some have never talked to anyone and told them this happened to them. Ziska Murphy had it far worse than some of us did."
Abuse and neglect
Ziska Murphy was born into a hard life, although she isn't sure when her birthday is because she lacks documentation. She estimates she is almost 70 years old.
Her mother, Katherina, whose name she knows but whose face she can't recall had a hole in her heart and couldn't care for Ziska or her two older brothers, Rudolph and Paul. Ziska became a ward of the state at 4 months old. Their mother died when she was 6 years old, and the state denied her alcoholic father custody.
Her earliest memories are filled with horror, she said.
"My first memory of abuse was when I was 4 years old. We all had to take naps, and we had on aprons," Ziska said. "The priest would cover our face and abuse us."
As a young girl, she walked to the priest house for First Communion, where she said she was met with more sexual abuse.
"Germany was very cold at that time. I had no pockets and socks up to my thighs," she said. "It was so cold, and the priest would go up my legs. Because his hands were so warm, I didn't know he was molesting me. When I got raped, I didn't know what it was."
Besides constant sexual abuse, Ziska Murphy said she faced mental and physical abuse and was forced to do hard labor, such as field work.
"I got beat so bad," Murphy said. "They used us as slaves hired out to farms."
Beatings were often issued with bamboo sticks, Murphy said.
She recalls the war made food scarce, and there was little to eat. She went to a cow pasture, took a tie from her ponytail, tied it around a cow's utters and drank the milk because she was so hungry.
Some orphans formed gangs and raided farms to get food. Her brothers ran away from their orphanage to avoid beatings.
Some treatment by her caregivers included humiliation.
"I was told I'd go to hell, the devil would come and get me, I was worthless, garbage and no one would love me," Ziska Murphy said. "I believed it. My dad was a drunk, and they told me every day."
A large room, with 80 beds and concrete floors, where she often had to kneel for hours as punishment, was the place she and other little girls cried themselves to sleep most nights.
Fearing the devil would get her at night, she often lay awake crying and feared leaving her bed to use the restroom. She often wet the bed.
As punishment she was beaten and dragged under cold water by her hair. They told her to hold the urine-stained sheet in front of her until it dried. If she put it down, she was slapped.
The children cried to each other about the abuse and silently within themselves, but sadly it was a part of life.
"It was a bad time," she said.
Dying to escape
Ziska tried to escape the abuse as a teen doing hard labor in a state reform school in Oberurbach, Germany, but was met with worse hardships.
When she was 15, she and another girl ran away.
The girls were separated, and Ziska was lost. She was picked up by a truck driver. He brutally raped her repeatedly before putting her out of the truck. The police picked her up and returned her to state custody.
"I was bleeding so bad," she said tearfully. "I found out I was pregnant by that man."
Ziska said she had a miscarriage after a bully at the orphanage kicked her in her stomach.
"I lost it," she said sadly. "I thought it was something I could love and keep. They took it away, and told me they threw it in the grave where an old lady was buried. I never knew if it was a boy or girl."
Long before that devastating experience, Ziska had tried to escape the pain.
She was 9 when she laid her small frail body on a railroad track and closed her eyes. It was her first attempt to commit suicide. Through her life she tried twice more.
"A person can go through death and is still living," she said. "I wanted to die so many times because I couldn't get through the hurt."
On that day, Ziska said she was walking to the priest's house for Communion, and it was freezing cold. She remembers she had no gloves and her hands were frozen. She could not get to a bathroom quick enough and couldn't pull her pants down because of her cold fingers. She ended up using the bathroom on herself and feared the repercussions.
She'd rather die than be beaten.
"I wanted to kill myself because I was scared of the beating I'd get," she said. "I wished I was strong, but I wasn't."
A couple, walking their dog, saw her lying on the tracks. Ziska was unconscious. She woke up in a hospital with a nun at her side asking her why she'd done what she'd done.
She left the institution when she was 18.
Through the abuse, Ziska held on to the fact that her mother was the only one who'd loved her and that God would help her find a way out.
"She was a good mother. She wrote me letters. She loved me, she was just very sick," Ziska said. "I'm very strong. God gave me signs that I'd get out and make it. I believe in God, but not the Catholic Church. I felt my mother was there to comfort and put her arm around me. I don't know if it was true, I don't know ... it was hard, hard, hard," she said dissolving into tears.
Charles Murphy said she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
The mental anguish of abuse and torture surfaces at night, Ziska said.
She has spent time in a mental hospital undergoing shock therapy to try to forget and been under the care of a psychiatrist after suicide attempts.
Another victim
Ottilie Baines, a 59-year-old Clarksville resident, said she experienced abuse in a German orphanage in Koeln, Germany.
"I was born in 1950 out of wedlock," Baines said. "My mother was living in a little room where she was working in a meat store, and she couldn't have me there."
Her early childhood was marked with severe punishment and hard labor after she turned 9 years old and was sent to an orphanage in Foehren, Germany.
"That's when the torture began," she said. "When we didn't do right, or whispered to someone you came to the front. You hold your hands together and were beat ... I thought it was the right thing to do. It didn't seem bad as a child, but it was pretty bad."
Nuns often beat her fingertips with rulers, took her food away or sent her to a dark damp basement for hours at a time as punishment for not performing tasks such as scrubbing floors, mending socks or peeling vegetables correctly.
Washing dishes in scalding hot water until they were spotless also was a common task. Being in the basement for hours and at some points an entire day are hard memories for Baines.
"I was so scared I started singing loud to take the bad things away," Baines said. "I cried because I was so afraid. I still have that fear at night when it's dark."
Baines, like Ziska Murphy, had to endure the same humiliation of holding soiled sheets from urinating in the bed.
Although her brothers were in the orphanage, Baines said they never discussed what happened.
"We never talked about it. We tried to forget it," she said.
Baines never had a mother figure, but one nun was someone she believed loved her and treated her good.
"She was like a mother to me," Baines said. "I would cry, and she would say it's going to be OK."
As a teen, Baines said she was tired of being beaten and the hard labor. She climbed the brick wall of the orphanage and ran away to Frankfurt.
In 1976, she came to Clarksville after marrying a man in the U.S. Army. It's here she raised two children she adopted and became an advocate for people.
VEH representative Christa Morse, who was abused from birth to 15 years old, had similar hardships. After she refused to eat margarine because it was too thick, they threw it in the slop bucket and made her eat it from the slop bucket. She was told to eat it and if she didn't, she would have to eat her own vomit.
Another girl who refused to eat liver dumpling passed hers to another girl and when she was caught was beaten in the face so bad her ears began to bleed, Morse said. The stories are endless for Morse, including children being forced to beat other kids.
"It's a healing process, and for many years I was ashamed I was in a home ... I paid for my parent's mistakes, and many of us did, and we were called mistakes," Morse said. "I finally learned to forgive, to find inner peace. The mental cruelties, mental anguish are worse than the physical abuse, because it stays with you."
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