Leaving One Hell for Another
Chapter One: From the Frying Pan
For an abused child, there is no real escape. There is only a choice between one form of terror and another: the frying pan or the fire. In either place, the child remains the victim, yet somehow it is always the child who is blamed, shamed, and punished again.
In the late fall of 1991, after six months in the United States, I almost believed I had outrun my past. I had left Germany behind, and with it the true reason I had fled. For a brief time, distance felt like safety.
But trauma does not stay where it began.
A few months earlier, something had triggered a familiar fear, one I had known since childhood. It rose in me like an old poison. As I had done for years, I tried to deny it. I tried to push it down, to pretend it was not there.
This time it would not disappear.
Caught between fear and depression, I found myself overwhelmed by flashbacks I could not control. I had no help, no language for what was happening to me, and only limited English. Alone, I began to face the early wounds of my childhood and the later injuries that had grown around them.
The only way I knew to survive was to write.
I wrote down each memory I could bear to tell. For three months I worked through the psychological devastation of my childhood. Then I stopped.
It was not because I had run out of memories.
It was because shame stopped me. Guilt stopped me. Worthlessness stopped me. And so did the old stigma of having been treated as if I were the criminal instead of the child who had been harmed. I could not yet write about the years I had spent in an institution in Germany.
My first fourteen years had already been a private concentration camp. They were marked by fear, beatings, sexual abuse, oppression, and by the knowledge that my mother had sold me into what felt like slavery. Yet even then, I did not lose my sense of right and wrong.
Even as a child, I knew cruelty when I saw it.
And even as a child, I resisted it when I could.
When I was fourteen, I decided I could no longer endure the terror in my parents’ house. I ran away for the first time. I did not get far. The police caught me and the child protection agency sent me back.
I ran away again.
And again.
After the sixth time, I told the bureaucrats that if they sent me home once more, I would steal or kill. At that age, prison seemed safer than my parents’ house. That was the measure of my desperation.
Finally, they relented.
Instead of sending me home, they placed me in a girls’ home in Augsburg called Hedwigsheim. For a short time, I believed I had escaped hell.
One week later I was hospitalized with an ectopic pregnancy. The pregnancy was the result of an earlier rape. My left fallopian tube was removed.
A few months later, without explanation, I was transferred again—moved like livestock to another institution, Mädchenheim Ruth in Neumarkt/Wirsberg. I stayed there only three weeks before I ran away once more.
The Lutheran spinsters ruled through silence, labor, and fear. We worked, prayed, and scrubbed floors before breakfast. We were punished for speaking. Even during work, silence was enforced as if noise itself were sin.
The cold was constant.
The silence was worse.
One day, three other girls and I escaped by knotting bedsheets together and climbing down from a second-floor balcony.
For a while I hitchhiked across Germany. My weight dropped to forty kilograms. Then I was gang-raped by three truck drivers.
After that, I walked into a police station and turned myself in.
There was nowhere left to run.
I was sent first to a temporary holding place for runaways in Fürth, Bavaria. About two weeks later, I was transported to what would become my final destination for the next three years.
It was called Haus Weiher.
It belonged to the Rummelsberger Anstalten, a branch of the German Christian Diakonie. The housefather was Brother Buchta, a member of the Lutheran Brothers of Altdorf. The people in charge prayed constantly and spoke often of righteousness. They saw themselves as moral guardians, people without sin.
It was there that I learned abuse could wear a holy face.
At Haus Weiher, religion was not comfort. It was method. It was punishment. It was justification. What I encountered there was a new kind of cruelty: a black pedagogy that used Christianity as an instrument of domination.
I quickly understood that I was worth even less there than I had been at home.
They told us punishment and hard labor would improve our character. We were to become obedient, humble, purified, worthy of God’s grace.
I saw something else.
I saw captivity.
I said so.
I compared the institution to Nazi methods, to a system that held young people hostage under the guise of discipline and salvation. My words earned me a week of isolation. I still had to work, but I had to eat alone, at a table placed where everyone could see I was being punished.
That was my introduction to Haus Weiher.
It would not be the last lesson.
Chapter Two: The Holy Hell
The first thing they took from me was my identity.
Jewelry, my grandmother’s earrings, makeup, letters, personal belongings—everything was confiscated. My clothes were removed and replaced with the house uniform: a shabby blue-and-white checkered cotton blouse and skirt that smelled of age and other bodies. My long hair had to be tied back tightly.
“Nobody in this house can look like a whore,” Ms. Klose told me.
She was second in command.
The keys at her waist rattled loudly as she walked. Doors were locked everywhere. On my first days there, I asked why I was being treated like a criminal.
The answer came quickly.
“All you girls need to learn obedience and humility by being isolated from temptation.”
On my second day, I was marched into town to a doctor in Hersbruck. Every new girl, I was told, had to be examined for venereal disease and to determine whether she was still a virgin.
The exam itself was degrading enough. Worse was what followed.
On the long walk back, in the presence of one of the bitter unmarried women from the home, I was informed that I was not a virgin but a fallen, sinful girl who needed to be taught humility.
The real punishment began once we returned.
For the first four weeks, my duty before breakfast was cleaning toilets. Then I scrubbed and polished wooden floors on my knees. I told them I had severe headaches. I said I could not bend over without pain.
My complaints meant nothing.
In fact, they often meant more work.
Ms. Klose, a short, bony woman with paper-thin skin and a sharp, piercing voice, stood next me while I scrubbed, criticizing each movement as my arms weakened and my head pounded. Decades later, I would finally receive a proper diagnosis and understand why bending caused me such pain. At the time, however, pain was treated as rebellion and exhaustion as defiance.
Breakfast lasted thirty minutes, from 7:30 to 8:00.
Often it was a slice of bread with mold cut away, spread thinly with margarine and a little jam. Then came labor until five in the evening, Monday through Saturday. We worked in the kitchen, on the farm, in the laundry, in sewing, mending, weaving, or wherever we were assigned.
At first I had to cut old clothes into strips with scissors.
When blisters rose on my right hand, I was told to continue with my left.
Later I was sent to the laundry. Every new girl there had to hand-wash the bloody cotton menstrual cloths used by the others. Only after I collapsed was I moved to the sewing department, where I embroidered tablecloths and other goods that were later sold.
Our bedrooms were small and bare.
Some held four girls, some six, some eight. Each room had iron bed frames, thin foul-smelling mattresses, a nightstand, and bars on the windows. At nine o’clock the lights were turned off. We were forbidden to speak in the dark. The doors were locked from the outside.
The staff walked the corridors silently at night, listening.
We called them wardens.
Once, I was caught whispering. For that, I was made to stand in the hallway in my nightgown until after midnight. It was February, and bitterly cold.
Even going to the bathroom required permission. If we had to go during the night, we had to knock and wait until someone unlocked the door. If a girl wet herself, she was shamed publicly the next morning in front of the others.
The humiliation was routine.
What shocked me most was not only the cruelty of the system, but the way girls who suffered under it could become its helpers when someone else was being disgraced. Oppression teaches imitation. It teaches survival through complicity.
One day, while cleaning the upper hallway, I knocked on the bedroom door of Ms. Krause so she could unlock the stairwell door for me. There was no answer, so I opened it.
What I saw confused me for a moment.
Ms. Krause, at least a hundred pounds overweight, stood topless, fondling the breasts of a girl named Elke, who looked almost like a boy. I was shoved back into the hall and told to say nothing. What I had seen, I was told, was merely instruction—teaching a girl how to wear a bra.
I knew better.
From that day on, Ms. Krause vented her constant aggression on me, making sure I paid for what I had seen. She assigned me the filthiest chores and harassed me whenever she could. Later, Elke tried several times to molest me. When a bed opened up and she was moved into my room, I protested. I told Ms. Krause that if Elke stayed, I would tell Ms. Klose what I had seen.
Elke remained.
I was moved instead.
Any form of resistance—speaking up, refusing, trying to escape—could earn a girl the punishment uniform, the same blue-and-white checkered blouse and skirt, worn as a badge of disgrace. The institution kept two books. The black book recorded every act of disobedience. The white book recorded “good deeds” and obedience.
The message was simple: submit and be rewarded; resist and be marked.
We had no access to our own clothes. Underwear was issued once a week. A blouse had to last fourteen days. A skirt had to last four weeks. Pants were forbidden. I begged to wear them to cover the psoriasis on my legs.
They refused.
Washing was another theater of humiliation.
Morning and evening, eight girls at a time stood naked in a freezing washroom under supervision. The women watching us made sure every part of our bodies was scrubbed. Their eyes lingered. Their hands sometimes followed. They would run their fingers down our backs and say, “You missed a spot.”
Warm showers were allowed only once every four weeks, and only for three minutes. After that we had to stand under cold water. Hair washing was permitted once every six weeks.
I broke that rule.
The psoriasis on my scalp had become unbearable. The itching, the thick scales, the discomfort—at times it felt as though my own skin was trying to crawl away from me. I washed my hair anyway, knowing punishment would follow.
Everything was controlled.
Toilet paper had to be requested, then partly returned. Menstrual supplies were rationed. If a period lasted more than four days, a girl was expected to make do with toilet paper or reusable cotton cloths.
No radio news. No television news. No magazines. No real books. If the radio played at all, it was Christian music. In three years, I remember only a few dance evenings, and we were grateful for them as though they were gifts from heaven.
Anything that broke the monotony felt like mercy.
But mercy never lasted.
Prayer, by contrast, was endless—morning, noon, and night. Alongside it came constant lectures about sin, obedience, and why fallen girls needed punishment.
Every Sunday, the obedient girls were marched to church in Hersbruck, two and a half kilometers each way, through rain, snow, heat, or cold. This was our only contact with the outside world, but we were forbidden to speak to anyone along the way.
The townspeople looked at us with suspicion and contempt.
Some looked at us as if we were dangerous.
Others looked at us as if we were dirty.
The walk itself was painful for me because of muscle weakness, but my pain was dismissed as excuse-making. I once asked to stay behind. I said I did not believe in God and did not want part of my tiny monthly allowance taken for church donation. 40 years later, a diagnosis confirmed my pains.
That, too, became a lesson in obedience.
We were allowed to write letters only to parents and close relatives, and every letter was censored. If the contents displeased the institution, the letter simply vanished.
At the time, I wondered why so few people wrote back.
Years later, when I was fifty, I learned that my cousin had sent me many letters. I had never received a single one.
After about six months, I was permitted to begin a three-year tailoring apprenticeship. “Permitted” is the wrong word, of course. The contract was placed in front of me as if I had a choice.
I said I wanted to work in the medical field. Since I could no longer dream of studying medicine, I at least wanted to become a nurse.
Ms. Klose’s answer was immediate.
“If you don’t sign this contract, you will be sent to juvenile prison.”
I had committed no crime. But questions in my own defense were rarely answered. Fear signed the paper.
As an apprentice, I received nine Deutschmark a month, later eleven. From that money I had to buy soap, toothpaste, sanitary supplies, and save for the fabric needed for my final examination garment.
We worked like laborers and were paid like beggars.
The food was often barely fit to eat. Everything was boiled or steamed. Meat was rare. Potatoes appeared in endless forms. Bread was stale. Mold was cut away and the loaf served anyway.
The staff ate better than we did.
One Sunday, maggots crawled out of the dessert.
I picked up my plate, walked to the staff table, and said, “Here. You eat this.”
For that act of rebellion, I was ordered to stand beside the staff table during every meal for a week and eat only after everyone else had finished.
By then my psoriasis had worsened. My headaches were nearly constant. Depression had settled over me like damp fog.
The local doctor treated me with tar and other remedies while ignoring the headaches. One morning, while we stood naked in the washroom, our second tailoring instructor looked at the purple-stained patches on my body and announced to the other girls that God had punished me with psoriasis for my sins.
Shame can enter the body like a blade.
That sentence stayed in me for years.
I turned on her and shouted. The doctor called it aggression. Little blue pills were prescribed to calm me down.
Each morning I had to report to the office, where Ms. Klose handed me the pill and watched to make sure I swallowed it.
I took them for a few weeks.
Then one Sunday, while we were walking to church, my friend Gerda pointed to a dead deer on the roadside. I felt nothing. She looked at me and said, “Since you started taking those pills, you have no feelings anymore.”
She was right.
After that, I hid the pills in my cheek and spat them out later. When I was caught, I was sent to peel potatoes in the kitchen. All other privileges were suspended.
Then the doctor tried something else: a salt-free diet. He believed it might cure psoriasis. Instead it made the little food we had even more awful, and my skin worsened so badly that fluid began to seep from some places.
Still I completed my second-year exam and again earned one of the best grades.
Eventually, my condition became so severe that I was hospitalized in Nuremberg.
For the first time in a long while, I felt something close to relief.
The dermatology department was under Professor Weber, a specialist in psoriasis. There I could walk freely on the hospital grounds. I could smoke cigarettes when someone offered me one. I had no money of my own, but I had air, distance, and temporary release from Haus Weiher.
Then came another experiment.
A new ointment from Russia was being tested. After it was applied, ultraviolet light was to follow. I heard one doctor say ten seconds. An assistant administered ten minutes.
The result was catastrophic.
I suffered second-degree burns from face to toes. I lay for days with high fever, covered in sheets, receiving Volon A 80 and vitamin injections. When I was finally able to look at my leg, I saw that the area treated with the ointment had lost its pigment entirely. White patches remained there for nearly thirty years.
I also remember hearing doctors say that I was immune-compromised, though at the time I did not understand the meaning.
A nurse later told me that Ms. Klose had given permission for the experimental treatment.
Six weeks later I was sent back.
The work had piled up, and the other 12 apprentices were glad that I was back. Mondays often stretched until three in the morning because garments had to be prepared for customers in Nuremberg. The headaches continued. The exhaustion deepened.
Then Brother Buchta, the so-called director—a very short-statured man who never looked anyone in the eye—struck me.
He had caught me smoking in the attic and demanded the names of the other girls who had been with me. When I refused, he hit me so hard that I fell backward and struck my head against a chair.
That was the moment something in me hardened.
I told a few girls I was going to escape and report everything—the long hours, the humiliations, the bad food, the violence.
Three agreed to come with me.
At dusk we climbed over a balcony and fled.
Chapter Three: To Hell and Beyond
We separated after escaping, each of us hitchhiking back toward the city we had originally come from. The plan was simple: report the abuse to the authorities who had sent us there.
I did exactly that.
I described the mistreatment in detail. The forced labor. The degrading conditions. The endless workdays. The humiliation. The food. The violence.
I was promised a change.
The only change was that they sent me back.
When I arrived again at Haus Weiher, my long hair was cut short. I was dressed in the punishment uniform, the familiar blue-and-white checkered blouse and skirt. Ms. Klose beat me severely.
Then they put me in isolation.
For four weeks, I was locked in a small room beneath the roof. It had a tiny window with iron bars outside. At night I was given a mattress to sleep on, but during the day even that was removed. There was no blanket, no pillow, no sheet.
No books. No writing materials. No reading.
No one was allowed to speak to me.
Twice a day a woman from the staff brought food. She opened the door only wide enough to push the plate and a glass of water inside with her foot. She did not speak. She did not look at me. Then she locked the door again.
Time changed in that room.
After two weeks, I fell into depression and began thinking of suicide. By the third week, I felt madness drawing near. Something inside me was splitting—my reason on one side, my emotions on the other.
To keep from disappearing, I invented rituals.
I measured the room by placing one foot in front of the other and counting. I counted the floorboards. I cleaned the walls with my fingers. When there was no dirt left, I moistened the cracks in the plaster with spit and pressed them closed.
Even sleep became terrifying.
Sometimes I woke in panic, certain someone was in the room speaking to me. Other times I could not fall asleep unless I rocked my body back and forth.
When they finally let me out after four weeks, I was no longer the same.
I could not bear noise. I could not bear people. My concentration shattered easily. Irritation lived just beneath my skin. Yet even then my condition was dismissed as laziness or bad attitude.
For another eight weeks I was required to wear the punishment uniform, as if to remind me that resistance itself was the offense.
After that, something shifted in the institution’s attitude toward me. I was offered the chance to finish my tailoring certificate six months early. At the time, I thought it was because of my strong grades.
Now I know they wanted me gone.
I completed my certification and left Haus Weiher at nineteen.
My future mother-in-law came to pick me up. I had a paperback bag with some belongings and a suitcase filled with the clothes I had made during those years. My jewelry and watch were gone.
At the train station in Hersbruck, she told me she had been forced to pay sixty Deutschmark because I supposedly had debts and would not have been released otherwise.
Debts.
After years of unpaid labor, I was told I owed money.
The trail of degradation did not end when I left the institution.
My tailoring certificate betrayed my past. Anyone who saw it knew I had come from a home like Weiher, and some businessmen did not see a qualified employee, only an opportunity.
One employer told me plainly that girls from Weiher were “little whores” and that my job depended on how willing I was to obey him.
To save myself from these mental and physical violations, I left job after job.
After my divorce in 1972, neighbors learned about my past in the institution. Once again I was watched, judged, harassed, and controlled. It was as if I carried an invisible brand that other people could always smell.
I was emotionally mutilated, burdened with a destroyed sense of identity and deep feelings of worthlessness, yet expected to prove over and over that I was useful, respectable, and whole.
During my years in Haus Weiher, I had endured not only religious cruelty and psychological degradation, but forced labor without wages. Later, when I approached retirement, I learned that I would receive no social security credit for those years.
My records had disappeared.
On paper, it was as though I had not existed between 1964 and 1968.
And yet there were insurance records proving I had worked.
Early retirement was denied. The diagnosis that best described the damage—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—was not recognized in Germany the way it should have been, despite all the evidence of trauma’s lasting effects.
Those effects remained with me.
The four weeks in isolation left me with phobias that still shape my life. Small rooms, windowless spaces, places with too little light—they can still trigger panic. Aggressive voices or verbal attacks can hurl me back into flashbacks and depression. Noise disrupts my concentration. Crowds exhaust me. Evening activities remain difficult because fear rises with darkness.
The institution ended, but it did not end inside me.
My youth, like my childhood, was another stage of inhuman exposure to terror. It could leave only one legacy: fury toward abuse, and resentment toward every system that protects the abuser while condemning the wounded.
For forty-two years I hid much of that pain. I hid the mistrust. I hid the rage. I hid the shame that had never belonged to me in the first place.
What I did not understand then, but understand now, is this:
The child was never guilty.
The guilt belonged to those who abused the child.
On April 4, 1991, I emigrated alone to the United States.
I knew no one there. Still, a strange country felt less threatening than the one I had called home. I had been born into a culture still marked by black pedagogy, the legacy of domination, shame, guilt, and worthlessness handed down through generations.
In 1992, I finally understood that if I wanted to live, I had to begin healing.
I had to name my fears.
I had to recognize my dysfunctions.
I had to understand them as the consequences of trauma.
That was when I began to write my book.
Writing became the place where silence ended.
it became the place where memory, once buried under shame, could speak.
And in speaking, it became the first act of reclaiming a life that others had tried to erase.
In 1998, before publishing my book, I made this excerpt public in the hope that others who had been at Haus Weiher between 1964 and 1968 would find the courage to speak out.
Luise, Jolanda, Brunhilde, Sigrid, and others responded. They wrote to me, sharing their experiences and confirming what I had documented.
The Long Shadow of Abuse
A child has no real choice in the face of abuse. The choice is an illusion: it is either the frying pan or hell. A child is powerless, while the adult holds absolute authority.
For many survivors, that imbalance does not end with childhood. When healing is denied or never made possible, the same patterns follow us into adulthood. We learn early not to resist injustice, and that lesson becomes deeply ingrained. As adults, we may remain silent when cruelty is directed at us—or even when we witness it inflicted on others. Some, like my friend Gerda, died by suicide, while others become complicit; some, tragically, become abusers themselves.
What we were forced to endure as children becomes the template for our adult lives.
Depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and recurring flashbacks can come to feel like an unavoidable destiny rather than the consequences of trauma inflicted upon us. Our biology begins to change: genes become methylated, systems malfunction, and a path toward compromised health can take hold as cortisol levels remain chronically high—or collapse entirely. The guilt, shame, and blame planted in us during childhood cloud our vision just enough that we cannot see the door leading toward healing and mental freedom.
Eventually, we may even deny our own need for wholeness—just as we were once denied the chance to grow into healthy children.
Understanding the true meaning of human rights often takes us far longer than it should.
The Brain Remembers
Trauma does not disappear with time. It settles deep within the amygdala, the brain’s center for fear and emotional memory. Long after the events have passed, the body and mind may still respond as if the danger were present. A sound, a smell, a place, or a sudden movement can awaken those buried memories, and the past returns in an instant.
In 2008, I was diagnosed with Chiari I malformation and later with post-polio syndrome, a condition linked to the poliovirus I had contracted during childhood.
Further medical examinations in 2013 revealed severe structural problems in my spine, including an extreme curvature in the lower section, the presence of Tarlov cysts, and deterioration in the T11 and 12 vertebra.
In 2016, I underwent surgery on the L4 and L5 vertebrae. The procedure, however, resulted in hardware-contaminated sepsis. Despite treatment with Ciprofloxacin and a PICC line delivering intravenous vancomycin to control the infection, the damage left me with progressive muscle weakness.
In 2021, doctors diagnosed me with von Willebrand disease, a genetically inherited bleeding disorder that in my case is associated with recurring thrombosis.
The following year brought additional diagnoses: lupus, antiphospholipid syndrome (APS), and post-polio syndrome.
Further genetic testing also identified a marker for spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). This discovery finally explained the persistent muscle weakness I had experienced since childhood.
For decades, I had struggled with tasks that others seemed to perform effortlessly—walking long distances, climbing stairs, or maintaining strength in my arms and legs. Yet instead of understanding or compassion, I encountered ridicule.
Parents, teachers, and people in my community frequently dismissed my difficulties as laziness.
Only much later did the medical truth emerge.
Appendix
Some details of the abuse and torture I experienced are not yet included in this account. Certain memories remain vivid but still require confirmation before they can be presented with the accuracy this story deserves.
As further documentation becomes available, those missing episodes will be added.
Book Review
by – John A. Speyrer, Webmaster, The Primal Psychotherapy Page – September 04, 2010
In A Never-Ending Pain, Sieglinde Alexander recounts the true story of her early life in Germany—a childhood marked by severe physical and sexual abuse, including being sold into exploitation by her own mother.
Later, after being labeled “incorrigible,” she was placed in an institution run by Lutheran sisters. There, the abuse continued under the guise of discipline and moral correction.
Layer upon layer of mistreatment left lasting psychological scars, including severe claustrophobia, persistent anxiety, and other symptoms commonly associated with long-term trauma. The cruelty she endured created an enduring burden of shame, anger, and emotional pain.
Recent investigations and public reports have revealed the widespread nature of institutional child abuse in several European countries, including Germany and Ireland. The experiences described in this memoir reflect the same mentality and systems that allowed such abuse to occur for decades without accountability.
The human spirit cannot endure such deprivation of love, safety, and care without consequence. Trauma, when left unacknowledged, shapes a life in profound and lasting ways.
At the age of forty-seven, Sieglinde Alexander wrote and published her autobiography, Haunting Shadows from the Past, in which she recounts the psychological and physical abuse that shaped her early years.
Writing became both testimony and resistance—an act of reclaiming a voice that had been silenced for far too long.
– John A. Speyrer, Webmaster, The Primal Psychotherapy Page – September 04, 2010
Attention: This story cannot be used in any form without permission from the author.