WARRENDALE, REVISITED

Years ago when I first watched Warrendale, and for years afterwards, I kept wondering what bizarre backgrounds these disturbed kids came from. What happened to bring them to this experimental group home in a Toronto suburb, and what terrible society could produce such damaged, dysfunctional, lost little souls?

I first heard of this documentary, and the project it was based on, when I was in my late teens. Like many kids back then, I had heard about "free schools" and was interested in going into education but not the traditional kind. My dad was a Montreal high school teacher and back then I didn't want to be like him -- so I bought a subscription to THIS MAGAZINE IS ABOUT SCHOOLS -- what a cool name! -- published out of Toronto. Reading it made me believe new and exciting things were happening in Canadian culture and education. Such as Warrendale and its founder, John Brown.

Warrendale always struck me as wrapped in mystique. The first time I saw the documentary (in the early 70s) I found it more disturbing than anything, and I tried to forget about it. Or rather I buried my feelings about it. It wasn't the profanity that upset me. It was the atmosphere. And the disappointment of having been set up to believe it was a great documentary, when it wasn't even good.

Flash forward 35 years. A German documentary filmmaker who has investigated the CIA-MKULTRA mind control program gets in touch with me because I have written MY COLD WAR, about being involved as a child in Dr. Cameron's notorious experiments at McGill. Put together from childhood memories, certain writings I had published, strange "dreams" of being tortured as a little girl in an underground laboratory, MY COLD WAR also grew from my reading thousands of pages of documents and testimonies and books and articles about secret experiments on children that went on in North America in the 1950s and 60s.

The German filmmaker, Egmont Koch, introduced me to a German judge who had a strange story. "Judge Henry" was born in Toronto in about 1960 -- his birth certificate was falsified -- and had discovered late in life that not only was he adopted in infancy, but also that he was born at Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital. After much research, and a fact-finding trip to Toronto, Henry had learned his real father was Dr. Martin Fischer, a psychiatrist who came to Toronto from Nazi Germany in 1940 and later worked at Lakeshore. Along with came the discovery that his presumed birth father was somewhat famous.

Henry showed me an excerpt from the documentary WARRENDALE in which Dr. Fischer appears. There was a noticeable physical resemblance suggesting that Henry and Dr. Fischer could very well be father and son -- he certainly looked much more like Fischer than he resembled his adoptive parents.

There is much more to Henry's story, but for me it felt rather peculiar to be watching WARRENDALE with a German judge who believed he was the product of some strange experiment. I sympathized strongly with his predicament, but as we watched the scene with Dr. Fischer, I felt embarrassed, both for Henry and also for Canada, the country that produced this film, because it seems so utterly obvious that Dr. Fischer is a fraud, or worse, a pedophile.

It was my second time viewing WARRENDALE, and it brought back the feelings I had in my twenties. I watched it again a few months later in 2011, and once again, I had to fight an urge to switch it off. Instead of feeling moved by its "compassion" -- as so many reviews I find it an unpleasant, dark, confusing film that leaves me with an unshakeable chill. It plunges me into a world of chaos that some inner sense tells me is bogus, with no roadmap to indicate who these children are or what their real story is. I also have a nauseating suspicion that these children are also being manipulated and abused in ways that the film covers over.

Recently, I watched it for the fourth time with someone who was there and appears in the film for a few seconds as a small boy.

"Larry" wrote to me last winter to say he had been at Warrendale and had a story to tell me about "mind control." Several emails and phone calls later, I realized I needed to meet Larry in person. I travelled to his city and over two days he told me his life story and shared his memories of Warrendale. He also brought the DVD. This time we could pause it, discuss each scene, analyse it -- in the light of Larry's memory of what was really going on.

Granted, he was a little boy back then, and his life after Warrendale was no picnic. Still, he has benefited from a happy second marriage and a dedicated therapist who supports his view that he is very lucky to have survived Warrendale.

As we watched the documentary, I gradually began to see how much of it had to have been staged. Warrendale is not cinema verité, or cinema direct, but some strange hybrid that perhaps grew out of Alan King's friendship with John Brown, Warrendale's founder and director.

The final "cathartic" scene where the kids supposedly grieve for the death of Dorothy, the West Indian cook, had always left me unmoved. Watching it with someone who was at Warrendale when it happened, I understood why.

This scene, or rather sequence, was set up from beginning to end. Only one child mourns hysterically: Carol. The others appear numb, confused about what they are supposed to feel. There is a discussion in which one boy asks how Dorothy died and gets no answer. Then Walter tells the children they are not to think they "caused Dorothy's death" with their "thoughts and feelings." Then staff begin forcing kids to the floor, and manufacturing the climax that the film called for.

There are many indications that Warrendale, the film, was faked for the cameras. Much like other films being made at the time, parts of it are improvised and parts are role-playing. Terry Adler and Walter Gunn play themselves interacting with kids and also demonstrating the "Warrendale method" in lengthy "holding" sessions that are both hard to watch and also fascinating.

The Warrendale agenda remains unclear, after all these years. Larry believe it failed to treat 'emotionally disturbed children' but actually taught them the lifeskills that enabled some to become drug dealers, prostitutes, small-time criminals, even assassins. Others would survive and move on to live normal lives -- although they would probably remain traumatized.

This experiment would then be passed down, remembered decades later as a milestone in Canadian documentary filmmaking. The "best ever made" according to CBC which originally refused to air it.

I have yet to find one negative review of Warrendale. It seems everyone who saw it, loved it. Nobody analysed it very closely. After all, reality is flawed -- and Warrendale is about reality. So they say. No journalist talked to the children to see what they thought about the documentary at the time. I was lucky to be contacted by one survivor, Larry, who feels the truth about Warrendale has never been told.

Warrendale kids, he says, were never taught the difference between right and wrong. It was a world unto itself, where kids did pretty much what they wanted, and were never disciplined for anything. One worker was stabbed in the stomach, another had a knife thrown at his head, a secretary was terrorized in her office -- and the kids were never even reprimanded. He says he witnessed, and participated in, extreme animal torture, with staff present.

There was more than one Warrendale. The film shows one version, designed for public viewing, but here and there the filmmakers's slipped and allowed a few glimpses into another Warrendale. Warrendale was only one of many facilities where children were abused by doctors and scientists. It just happens to have been made public at the time. We should ask ourselves: why?

John Brown ran many centres after the Ontario government closed down Warrendale. Famously, the kids "went on a rampage" insisting no one but Brown could provide the special care they needed. Several hitchhiked, others were picked up in cars by former staff, and one even walked 60 km. to be reunited with John Brown in Aurora.

Why did so many respectable people get on the Warrendale bandwagon? Why was it presented to Canadians as an exciting new model of child care? I have friends who trained with the Warrendale model. What lay behind it?

****

Scattered through this award-winning documentary are moments that don't quite make sense, unanswered questions and plot-threads left dangling. A few months ago, I had a shocking thought comprised of cold logic and gut intuition. This hunch doesn't go away -- it just keeps growing. It explains so much about Warrendale, the film, and also the place. This hunch kept thrumming in my mind as bits and pieces of the film replayed in my memory.

For reasons I will now explain, I believe Dorothy's death, near the end of the film, was not an accident. I also believe Warrendale Court was the headquarters of a trauma experiment disguised as a therapeutic environment. The makers of Warrendale needed a way to spice things up, to further traumatize the kids and staff -- if they weren't traumatized enough already.

Larry described flashbacks he has had to scenes of animal torture at Warrendale Court. He says he has asked others who were there, and some say they remember the staff laughing and egging the kids on. It doesn't sound all that therapeutic. Neither does "holding," the way Larry describes it. He says “holding” was used “all the time, for no reason” to bring a child to a state of uncontrollable rage and total breakdown. It was emotional provocation carried to physical extremes. Larry is not the only one making such claims.

"Holding" was part of "attachment therapy," whose discredited techniques have resulted in children's deaths and a number of lawsuits. Attachment therapy is really a bastardization of`the more scientific "attachment theory" developed by John Bowlby at Tavistock Institute in the early part of the twentieth century.

Tavistock should ring a few bells. It was the home of MKULTRA mind control and much else that we all need to research and learn about. At Warrendake, Dr. Martin Fischer was the expert who promoted holding as well as bottlefeeding. He came to Canada in 1940 courtesy of British intelligence (who set up Tavistock as part of their psychological warfare program). He was Toronto's first "psychoanalyst" although he never joined the professional association, never published a book or article, and went on to found the Canadian Art Therapy Institute where he is remembered for his`"legacy of harm" --according to former students who set up a website to expose him. Not such a great choice for director of Warrendale, you might think -- but Canadians are very trusting.

A therapeutic group home that subjects children to highly questionable practices like holding, while allowing them to torture cats by hanging them from clotheslines and setting them on fire -- strikes me as a wee bit more experimental than we have been told, and perhaps not the best site to make a film if your aim is to arouse "compassion" by revealing "reality." It also sounds like the sort of place where the sudden, unexplained death of a cook ought ought to have been investigated by the police, not dismissed as a tragic accident...

For all these reasons, I think Warrendale deserves some closer scrutiny.

****

.

There are reasons to think Warrendale was part of a vast program devised in the UK (and Nazi Germany) that aimed at breaking down the family, changing human behaviour beginning in childhood, and preparing a new generation to accept a New World Order.

That's quite an agenda, and one we never heard about back in the sixties.

What we heard about, back then, was that the times were a-changin' and certain visionary thinkers and artists would be our guides to a better world. In Canada, Alan King was held up as a pioneer of cinema verité -- also known as "direct cinema." Warrendale was his breakthrough film, as well as a milestone in Canadian culture, gathering awards and international attention. Hard to argue with the kind of unanimous praise that surrounded this documentary from the beginning, and continued through his lifetime until his death in 2009.

King prided himself on seeking the truth behind human behaviour, although "he was quite flexible about re-arranging things for dramatic effect," according to Liam Lacey and a string of other journalists, who all parrot the same example from the documentary: "... he saved a revelation of the cook's death, which occurred earlier during the filming, as a climactic event in the film."

Let's talk about that notion, before we talk about Dorothy: that an artist can reveal "the truth" by rearranging events for dramatic effect. Obviously, it works both ways, folks. Didn't anyone ever notice that? By rearranging events in a story, you can also reinvent, or conceal, the truth. Endings are absolutely crucial in storytelling. They reveal the story's ultimate meaning, the truth we've been waiting for.

In this case, a sudden, unexplained death that triggers an absurd eruption. "Absurd" because if you watch closely, the gruelling climax of Warrendale does not flow naturally and inevitably from what has come before. In fact, it appears to be a setup.

This will be hard for some people to accept.

By the way, I've studied Dramatic Structure. I've even taught courses in it at Canadian universities. Classical dramatic structure recognizes the absolute importance of chronology. That does not mean all stories should be slavishly told in chronological order -- nobody's saying that -- just that chronology matters. That's why crime investigators make detailed notes on when events have taken place, and in what order: because when one event precedes another, or comes at the beginning of a series of events leading up to, say, a murder, there may be a causal relationship between the earlier events and the outcome.

Causality is essential to storytelling, whether the story is the "cinema verité" or fictional kind. Without causality, stories leave us dissatisfied and frustrate our need for meaning. They also tend to be boring, unless they can provide sensational moments that re-engage our alienated emotions.

Warrendale is that kind of sensationalistic film. It relies on close-up shots of suffering, screaming children to make its impact felt. A lot of people have claimed to be deeply moved by Warrendale. But the fact of the matter, Warrendale offers little in the way of story. Warrendale is a really filmed theatre of the absurd, masquerading as a socially-sensitive documentary. As a drama, it fails to deliver a sense of meaning. At the end, we have no more insight into the lives of its protagonists than we did at the beginning.

For some people, this is because Warrendale captures "the human condition." If you think the universe is fundamentally absurd, fine. Stay in your corner, I'll stay in mine. But some works of art go deeper and actually bring meaning out of the depths of human suffering. I think I'll watch those, if you don't mind.

Allan King did not conceal the fact that the final scene in Warrendale actually occurred soon after he began shooting. In fact, he even bragged about it. It was, he said, a lucky break because it resulted in heightened emotions, i.e. more drama, by which he seemed to mean "more screaming." Canadian theatre tends to equate shouting with drama. In Warrendale, as in much Canadian theatre, there is no real violence, in the sense of characters following through on their extreme feelings -- but there is an awful lot of screaming.

But in hidden ways, it's a violent film. My hunch is the violence in Warrendale occurs off camera. Someone dies. In the film she dies near the end, but in real life Dorothy died early ob. One might therefore say we are watching the film backwards. Or that the climax actually occurs at the beginning and everything that occurs afterwards is dénouement. Or, my position: Dorothy's death was the triggering incident that lies behind all the extreme acting-out that makes up the story-line of this confusing film.

This causes me to wonder -- since the children's behaviour is so extreme throughout -- if what we are actually seeing is the aftermath of Dorothy's death, played out by the children in scene after scene.

If that's actually the case, then we are being misled by the director who wants us to think these children always acted the way they do in Warrendale. His cinema verité technique -- no narration of any kind -- leaves us with the impression this is just how it is at Warrendale Court.

By moving the defining event of the film to the end, without any explanation,he lets us walk away from the movie with the uneasy impression that this is a film about disturbed children, reflecting the human condition (i.e. we are all disturbed).

The really disturbing thing about all this is that audiences (encouraged by critics) seemed to accept this explanation, and came away deceived.

Some of us, on the other hand, were just disappointed.

.......

Maybe I'm just crazy, but Warrendale: the film really gives me the creeps. I try to put myself in the position of the people who were there at the time: a group of 12 kids who have been living together in an experimental treatment centre, where "holding," "bottle-feeding" and other forms of attachment therapy (including wearing diapers, which they are required to soil) are accepted practices.

Otherwise, Larry says, there were few rules. Kids frequently ran away from the centre. There were incidents of violence. One staffer was stabbed in the stomach, another had a knife thrown at him, a secretary was terrorized in her office by a band of kids. Warrendale kids -- known around the neighbourhood as "retards" -- were not welcome at the local movie theatre because they disrupted the showings. Nevertheless, he says, they were never punished, not even reprimanded, no matter how seriously they mishehaved. Warrendale did not teach kids the difference between right and wrong. Beginning when he arrived as a six-year-old he remembers being allowed to smoke and drink beer. Sex play, he says, was also encouraged and is mentioned in his records, which he obtained with great difficulty a few years ago.

Into this strange environment comes a film crew: director Alan King, plus a camera and sound person. They live with the children for a month before they start to film. And soon after they start filming, the children's favourite adult -- Dorothy, the cook -- suddenly dies.

I try to imagine how I would react, (a) if I were a child and (b) if I were Allan King. As a child I would be in shock. And then I would start to question, as one boy in the film does: How does a young healthy woman suddenly die for no reason? This question never gets answered. Instead the filmmakers focus on children being "held" in an exhausting scene that Larry and I agree appears to have been cooked up by the staff to satisfy the filmmakers' need for "catharsis."

If I were (b) Allan King, and I were shooting a documentary in a children's home, and the cook died during the first week, I might go ahead (like King) and film the children's emotional reaction to the announcement, and also the funeral a few days later. However, I think I would feel obligated to look into the cause of death. I'd make sure to record the children's conversations as they talked about it. I'd get the staff to weigh in, plus the results of the autopsy. I can't imagine this strange early plot twist not becoming part of the filming over the next seven weeks at Warrendale Court.

Of course I am not Alan King, and that's not what Alan King did. Instead what he recorded were all those scenes of (apparently pointless) emotional meltdown. Carol refusing to get out of bed. Tony climbing on top of an armoire to avoid going to bed. Children running away. Carol sitting on Dr. Fischer's lap as he coaches her in writing a nasty letter to her parents in which she expresses the wish never to see them again. Other children fighting with staff. Children spitting, crying and being "held" and bottlefed. Irene attending her "anniversary party" so drugged on Largactil she can barely walk and needs to be helped to sit down.

These are the scenes Alan King filmed in the weeks after Dorothy died. Dorothy's death never comes up until the end.

Neither am I one of those kids. But if I were, during those seven weeks I would have been wondering, from time to time, if not "Who killed Dorothy?" then "How did she die?"

Larry says they were never told anything, but that he overheard two staffers saying Dorothy had died after having an abortion. He passed this on to the other kids, although it may only have been a rumour. I can understand why, if true, the filmmakers omitted it. Abortion was illegal in Ontario in 1966, therefore it would have been the shameful, dangerous, backroom variety from which many women died.

Nevetheless. If there was secrecy about this traumatic event, these kids would wonder if it was connected to the presence of strangers on the property. How could they not? Which would tend to undermine trust, something Alan King emphasized was an essential part of the filmmaking process.

Do the kids in the film appear to trust the adults they are living with, night and day? I can't recall a single scene suggesting they do. And if I were a kid, living at Warrendale, and the one adult I could relate to mysteriously died, yes, I would be traumatized by the loss of that trusted person. And further traumatized by the presence of the film crew.

Under the circumstances, I think suspicion of "the strangers" would be a predictable reaction.

So two questions: how does most of Warrendale: the movie, avoid being about all that? If the filmmakers simply chose not to make Dorothy's death an integral part of the story they were filming for those seven weeks, what caused them to make that strange choice?

The more I think about it, the less sense it makes.

...

Maybe I'm making too much of all this. I'm really just trying to imagine that eight-week shoot as it really was. Some filmmakers are living with a group of emotionally disturbed kids whom they've previously been observing for a month, about whom by now they must know quite a lot. For instance, they must realize these kids have never been taught to tell right from wrong, and can be quite dangerous. Some have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, while others are autistic. There may even be a psychopath or two in the group.

Perhaps you've been told she died from an abortion. In that case, wouldn't you want to share this fact with the children, if only to gain their trust, i.e. so they will not start to think that you, the stranger in their midst, killed Dorothy?

....

Perhaps I'm over-reacting but I can't get over the "announcement" scene where Walter tells the kids they must not think their thoughts and feelings somehow causes Dorothy's death. A strange thing to be telling them, while Carol screams hysterically and the rest of them look stunned. The same boy who asked how she died, asks Walter what he means by that. Well, Walter explains, children often imagine they are to blame when someone dies. The boy still doesn't see why he should be devasted. "She was no relative of mine." When Walter repeats that the kids could not have killed Dorothy with their minds, the boy says "I'm aware of that." His expression seems to be saying, to Walter, "You're nuts to suggest we think we killed her."

Come to think of it, it's the film's only mention of a possible cause: that the children killed her, with their minds.

...

If this were a murder mystery, and I were Hercule Poirot, I'd look at motives while I waited for the autopsy report. Who had a motive for killing Dorothy? Who benefited most from her death? The children? I think not.

However Alan King said himself that Dorothy's death was the unforeseen event that gave Warrendale its dramatic edge. It triggered the children's fearful, angry outbursts which impressed critics and audiences around the world. Even Jean Renoir said he'd never seen a documentary as powerful as Warrendale.

So who benefited most? To be on the safe side, let's say: the camera.

Dr. Ruth

This photo shows a group of doctors standing on the steps of a notorious Montreal orphanage, ca. 1960. Circled, from left to right, are Dr. Ewen Cameron (CIA-funded head of psychiatry at the Allan Memorial Institute), Dr. Ruth Kajander (Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital, Toronto) and Dr. Heinz Lehmann (Head of Research at McGill's Allan Memorial, Director of the Douglas Hospital, Verdun, Quebec).

A survivor of military mind control now living in Ontario helped identified Dr. Ruth, the only woman in the photo. I later learned more about her through another survivor living in Thunder Bay, where Dr. Ruth, now in her mid-80s, still practices psychiatry.

If you google her name, you can find out what her patients think of her here:

According to survivor advocate Lynne Sharman, Dr. Ruth (Koeppe) Kajander's career began in Nazi Germany where, as the grand daughter of the "father of German pediatrics," and daughter of a Nazi physicians, she studied medicine at the University of Gottingen. An auspicious beginning: Gottingen had an interesting relationship with Columbia University in NYC, where much MKULTRA research was conducted. After the war she moved to Finland where she married her husband, Arthur Kajander. She emigrated to Canada in 1951, taking a job at Toronto's Lakeshore Psychiatric Hospital, which she soon left for a better position in research.

Why does a young Dr. Ruth Kajander appear in a photo on the steps of a Montreal Orphanage in 1960, along with another Nazi-trained psychiatrist (Heinz Lehmann) and MKULTRA programmer Ewen Cameron? What kind of "research" was Dr. Kajander doing on children in Canada at the time?

Allegedly Dr. Ruth Kajander has programmed children at Lakeshore Psychiatric in Toronto, and elsewhere around Canada, including Thunder Bay where she recently celebrated her 50th year in psychiatry and was honoured for her contribution.

Lynne Sharman says: "When the False Memory Syndrome Foundation emerged, it came out of nowhere and formed in every state in the United States and also here in Canada. At the time Dr. Kajander was quoted saying she did not believe what children say about sexual abuse. She joined a breakaway group of psychiatrists in Ontario who believed the children lied and that false memories were being implanted. Therapists across Canada were being sued by the F.M.S. Foundation. I believe this foundation was a C.I.A. funded operation, because it rose up so quickly, and the funds and legal monies they had access to were unheard of."




Dr. Kajander was awarded the Order of Canada on June 30, 2011, only days after this blog post first appeared.


A NOTE ON REMOTE VIEWING

Dr. Ruth first surfaced on my radar during a remote viewing experiment I participated in with Harley Monte in Montreal. At the time, I had never heard of her -- and neither had anyone else in this remarkable remote viewing session. Harley and other remote viewers described a group photo in which a woman bearing a remarkable resemblance to Dr. Kajander appeared with several other MKULTRA doctors associated with McGill in 1960.

Harley even came up with her husband's first name: Arthur. With amazing accuracy, Harley and others described her as looking very much like Cruella DeVille in Disney's 101 Dalmations -- due to her severe hairstyle, and pronounced widow's peak. The information he and the group spontaneously channelled suggested she was involved in experiments on children, along with Lehmann (named in the session as "Leeman") and several others, possibly part of an international team of scientists conducting lethal experiments on Canadian children.

Remote viewing is used by the military for various purposes, and one of MKULTRA's covert aims was to train children as remote viewers. I view information that comes through remote viewers as a form of witness testimony, not a substitute for fact-checking. In my experience, Harley and his group score high in accuracy. Here is a sample of their work from that session:


PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF REMOTE VIEWING SESSION, November 2004.

Just let me take one more look around here. Oh! On the wall there’s a picture of six men in white coats. You want to meet the doctors?

There’s a Chinese doctor. The names aren’t there that I can see, they may have been added later but at this time when the picture was taken they’re not there.

There’s a short man, wide shouldered, blackish grey hair, glasses.

The older woman, the shape of her face. You know the 101 Dalmations? The actress? Very similar there, the eyes... there is a situation in her own family at the present time and she’s not bearing up very well, rumour has it she will be leaving in the next month or so.

She’s not Canadian is she?

She looks very British but it’s more just how she has made herself up to be, and her shoes are weird, I have never seen shoes like that before, you know the old type that button up the side, she has a mark on her hand, right here.

Birthmark?

No it’s an injury. I don’t know if she had her hand crushed or something to an extent, and when she writes she writes like this. And there’s something happening to a child in her family at the present time. The time, wherever I am (1960).

I’m getting a name Leeman...

Arthur. There’s an “Arthur” here.

Cold, very cold. A lot of cold air around him. A mean person. I just feel he was totally disconnected, had no empathy, no, just cold, no feelings for these children.

Was he doing a job or was he out to make a name for himself?

I’m not sure, I just know whatever happened did not bother him at all. They weren’t human to him. They were like animals. They were like subject for tests.

I’m getting Russia. I think one of the people, maybe Arthur, I’m seeing a coat with long, buttons all the way down the front, double breasted. I think experiments, lots were going on there, I see snow, I see very wide steps, a very large building, very big square stones and very wide stairs where there are railings not just two on the side, more railings, going on, I got the word “government” -- whoever, someone wore that coat, it’s like an army green. Drab green and brass buttons wool coat

Indications are this was an international program involving secret factions of government and military, that targeted minority children in Canada, especially aboriginal and French Canadian orphans. Since so much of the evidence has been hidden, remote viewing seems a legitimate way to try to gather information. Dr. Ruth is still alive, still honoured by her peers for her pioneering work -- part of Canada's secretive elite which has never been called to account for crimes against humanity. This needs to change.

An interview with Duplessis Orphan Silvio Day

An interview with Duplessis Orphan Silvio Albert Day

November 2005
Interview and translation by Ann Diamond

Q: When you were working at St Jean de Dieu, you were responsible for –

When I worked at St Jean de Dieu, I was there as a patient. I worked in the Vestiaire des Morts -- the Locker Room of the Dead, where they wash the bodies and put them in the refrigerator. One bathroom was for washing the dead bodies. That was the washroom. And all around were refrigerators.

Q: And there were corpses of children--

Yes. I worked for a year and four months in the Vestiaire des Morts. All I did, I went to get the bodies from the operating room. I didn’t go into the operating room, but the nuns and the doctors there had masks on their faces.

A nun said to me, “Monsieur Silvio.”

“Yes, sister.”

“Could you stay there, and wait in the hallway?”

My buddy and I waited.

And the nun said, “Okay, Mister Silvio, would you please go get the stretcher?”

I said, “Yes, sister.”

So then they got the person, and it was a child. They put the child on the stretcher. They rarely covered it with a white sheet. So I went towards the elevator, to go down to the basement. The Locker Room of the Dead was down in the basement there.

Once I arrived, the nun said, “Mister Day.”

And I said, “Yes, sister.”

“Mr. Silvio, you took your time.”

I said, “Sorry. The elevator wasn’t working well, and I had to wait.”

So then the nun took charge of bringing the body to the washroom. There was a big sink where they put the dead bodies to be washed.

I took the arms and my partner took the legs and we put the body in the big flat sink, it was a flat sink which had a drain for the blood to run out.

In the beginning, she had said to me, “Go ahead, do your work, and I don’t want you talking!”

So I used to put the body down in the sink, but very rarely I removed the bonnet, because these patients who were operated on always had a blue bonnet and a blue jacket, and a pair of white socks. So anyway, this time I took off the bonnet, I removed the bonnet, and there was a flap of skin, and then the flesh of the brain was hanging there in the sink in front of me. It just sort of poured out like a tap, and it was all over me.

I let out a scream. There was no hair, it had been shaved all around, which was why the skin was hanging like that, swinging back and forth.

I was shocked. “Mother of God!”

My partner didn’t do anything. We had an orphan there, and he was supposed to take care of that.

“Silvio, you better not make any noise.”

It was my job to wash the bodies. But I didn’t know there had been an operation. Once I saw that flap of skin, which hung there, moving and getting soft, and then I saw the brain, I didn’t say a word, I took the bonnet, and I picked up the piece of brain, and I put it back in the bonnet.

In fact, there was a paid worker there who said, “Listen, stay where you are and don’t open your mouth, don’t talk about this. Everything here, stays in here. It doesn’t go outside.” He was the one who put on a bandage to hold in the brain. I started washing, and when I finished, I put the body in the refrigerator. The freezer.

Later, in the evening, the telephone rang. A nun said, “Well, Mr. Silvio?”

I said, “Yes, my dear sister.”

“Would you go to the operating room again? Yes, again! And keep quiet. If you’re late, you will be punished. You’ll be sent to the cells.”

I took the stretcher, and made a dash for the top floor. The operating room was on the fifth floor. We got the stretcher, and headed for the elevator to the fifth floor, and then we went down a passage which led to the operating room.

“Well, well. Hello. You sure took your time.”

“I did my best. There were people in the elevator.”

“Please leave the stretcher there. Go sit down.”

“Pardon?”

“I said, take a seat and don’t touch anything.”

“No, I won’t touch anything.”

The stretcher rolled away all by itself. We didn’t say a word. We sat down. And it took a long time. I watched the clock in the hallway. And eventually, it was 3:30 am.

The two nuns said, “Mr. Silvio, would you mind…”

The doctors wore gloves and green uniforms, and there was a man there, and some others, and there was a lot of blood.

So I got up and I was going to take everything away.

“No, don’t touch those!”

I backed off, and waited for the other guy, and then I headed down to the Locker Room of the Dead, and once I was in there, I said “Oh, Lord, not another one!”

I removed the white sheet, and started pushing the stretcher toward the sink. I took off the jacket – another child, around 10 or 11 years old.

Anyway, I took the patient, and put him on the stretcher or the big flat sink, and I said, “Okay, I’ll take off his jacket and his pair of white nylon socks.”

I took off the cap, and the other guy said, “Hey, those are holes, as if a machine had drilled through his head like that …”

I froze. That’s when our boss said, “Mr. Silvio.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t say a word and do your job.”

So I washed the body, and I took the bonnet and put it back on, and then I took the jacket. And I used the method the other guy used: I stapled a ticket to the jacket, to identify them by name.

Q: And how many times did you have to transport dead bodies from the operating room?

Around 60 times. I worked a lot of hours per week.

Q: And what year was this?

In the 1960s, 50s.

Q: You were how old?

I was born in 1942. And at that time I was about 18, 19.

Q: Did you undergo any experiments yourself? Were you drugged?

Well, one thing: I was treated with Largactil, 25 mg. After that, you’re like a vegetable. We were like mummies; we walked like mummies. At one point they wanted to send me for electroshock, but they said I wasn’t ready yet. So then they said they would give me a new treatment, Largactil pills, 25 mg. After that I became a vegetable. Later on, they changed the pills so I would be better.

That’s when the doctor asked me, “Mr. Silvio, would you come to the office?”

“Yes, Doctor.”

This was Dr. George Gravel, a psychiatrist. He was the one who first asked me if I would like to work in the Locker Room of the Dead.

I said, “Yes, Doctor.”

If I refused, I would get punished, I’d be put in the cells, like the others.

I said, “Am I obliged to accept?”

He said, ”Yes. Do you agree?”

I said, ”Yes.”

They sent another guy to watch over me. “You will be accompanied by a worker and a guardian.”

A guardian and a guy who worked in the Locker came to get me. I didn't feel good about it – we went straight to the Locker Room of the Dead.

He said, “Well, here we are. That’s a dead body. Whatever happens, I want you to keep your mouth shut. I don’t want anything repeated outside this place.”

I said, “Okay.”

“If you speak, you’ll be punished.”

I said, “Okay.”

Up to that point, on the first floor, we'd taken the elevator. But now we took the staircase.

Once I was downstairs, I took the passage that went to the Locker. I noticed there were coffins in every compartment, like in a funeral parlour, and on the left was where they put the dead patients in refrigerators.

Then he said, “Now we’ll show you how to wash a dead body.”

They started washing a child, a really small child about 4 years old.

I let out a scream.

They looked at me. “Are you afraid of corpses?”

I said, “No, but it’s the first time I ever saw something like this.”

Then, once they had washed it, they said they were going to put it in the fridge. I opened the door, so they could put the child inside. Once it was inside, it moved on rollers, so then they said “Okay, that’s just the first step. Now you’ll go with him – the other guy -- follow him.”

“Okay.”

“Just one thing: we’ll show you how to clean up.” I would be in charge of moving the coffins and washing the floors.

But then the other worker told me, “No, I’m not going to train you to clean up. I’m going to send you where they transport the bodies and wash them.”

So the nun said, “Mr. Silvio, take the stretcher and go to the rooms in the back.”

“All right.” I knew that meant the operating room –

“I want you to understand -- you are not to do any dishes.”

“No, sister. I promise.”

So off we went.

Q: She meant, no touching the dishes after handing the corpses?

Exactly. So when I got to the room, I hadn't realized the doors were locked and I needed a key.

“Excuse me, can I have the key ???”

“Yes.”

“Is it all right if I hold on to it?”

“Yes. Oh, excuse me – I have to answer the phone.”

He took a look at the stretcher, and went away.

Once I was inside, I continued towards the cells. They opened the door, and I saw someone hanging from the bars. The person in charge, who had let me in, said: “You have no business looking at that!”

It was an adolescent, 14 years old.

Later, another one hanged himself, I think he was about 25. When I got to his cell, they said, “You’re not allowed to look!”

I said, “Well, but I saw him.”

They let it go.

“All right, okay. Don’t say a word about it. Take the stretcher.”

I came back with the stretcher. The nun said, “Mr. Silvio, late again?”

I said, “Sorry, Sister. This door isn’t big enough to get the stretcher into the cell. It’s not my fault you’re fat.”

She said, “Watch what you say, or you’ll be punished.”

I'd expected her to say that. So I got my coworker and we went into the cell. We picked up the body, and put it on the stretcher. That’s when I saw traces of acid in the hole. But I wasn’t allowed to touch the linen. They took away the linen and threw it in the garbage can.

Q: I’d like you to tell us the story about when you met Father Joseph, aka Dr. Mengele, in the hallway of St. Jean de Dieu hospital.

Oh yes. Yes yes yes. I was getting to that.

Well, one day when I’d finished working in the Locker, the nun said, “We’re giving you three days’ off."

So I was off work, I had three days to rest, and for the first time I had time to wander around the halls. I was drugged, because of these pills, and so I was walking like a mummy.

Also, there were a lot of doctors, for example there was Dr. Camille Laurin. I saw him one time but I wasn’t sure if it was him that I saw. There was a Dr. Archambault and Dr. LaRoche, and there were other doctors. But the doctor I saw that day was only so tall, with his hair combed back like this, and he had a moustache. Well, since I had seen so many war films, when I saw his face I thought, “My God, he looks like Hitler!”

So when I saw this doctor, I raised my arm and said: “Heil … Hitler!”

He blinked his eyes at me, and made a sign with his hand: “Take this guy and go lock him up.” So they grabbed me and this time they put me in a cell. Then they said “Go to the doctor’s office.”

Not the same doctor who had been there in the hall. Another doctor. A French Canadian. We went into his office and I said, “Is anything wrong?”

“Would you repeat what you said?”

So I repeated it. “Heil Hitler!”

“Stop saying that! Why are you talking that way? Why are you walking and moving your feet like that?”

I realized it was because I had been watching war movies. So then the doctor – I think it was the one who had invented the 25 mg. drug – Largactil.

Q. Dr. Heinz Lehmann?

Yes. You had these people there, who studied children, orphans, and did experiments, operating on the patients and using these patients like guinea pigs. Besides practicing on animals, they practiced on human beings. He was the one.

Q: But the first doctor, the one in the hallway. You said he had a moustache. Did he speak French?

Yes, he spoke French but not much. He always held his hands like this (straight down at his sides). He had … his hair was always combed back, you know?

Q: And how tall was he?

I would say about 5 foot 6. Yes.

Q: Dr. Mengele was 5 foot 8.

Well, he was slim. Black hair, brown eyes.

Q. Mengele was slim, with black hair and brown eyes.

I used to talk to him, and he talked to me, but I didn’t understand him. Still, he made an effort to speak French. He gestured to the other doctor, who was his assistant, Dr. Georges Gravel. Gravel spoke to me so that I could understand, because he also understood me. Dr. Gravel spoke English, German and Russian.

So finally he said, “Why did you insult him? What did you think you were doing? Why do you say he’s the one who is doing the experiments?”

I said, “Listen to me, Dr. Gravel. I wasn’t going anywhere, it was my day off. I saw him in the hallway near the operating room. He wasn’t wearing a mask. He had on a blue jacket, you know, like a uniform. I saw him leaving, but he was alone and didn't speak to me, but he still looked at me like this, with his great big eyes, you know…”

Q: But do you think Mengele was doing operations there, himself?

Yes. Yes. Yes. Well, he was the one who talked to the others, to the surgeons. He used to walk around in -- the place where I went when I got sick (the infirmary) and he would walk around with a tall doctor, a surgeon with a mask, and the conversation went like this:

“Does this boy have a family?”

The nun answered, “Yes.”

“We won’t touch him for now. What about him?”

And the nun said, “No, he is an orphan. He has a file, this orphan.”

“Okay, that’s good.” He’d found one. “We’ll study this one.”

That’s how they did experiments, studying the ones who had epileptic seizures – not really epileptics, but they passed them off as epileptics. They did experiments, but instead of on animals, they used humans instead of animals, and I saw it, but not with my own eyes …