MK Ultragirl: Anatomy of a Fraud

"Unidentified white female between the age of 8 and 10 years old. The subject underwent 6 months of treatment using heavy doses of LSD, electroshock and sensory deprivation. Experiments under codename MKULTRA about early 60s. Subjects memory was erased and her brain is that of a newborn baby."

****

The CIA-funded MKULTRA mind control program at McGill ran from 1953-64. The infamous Dr. Cameron who directed it was fired in 1964, and died mountain climbing in 1967.

Reportedly the now-famous photo of the little girl strapped down to a table under a sign saying STRAIN ALL URINE, first surfaced on a Japanese blog in 2008. I first saw it at Aangirfan blog, where it has been used repeatedly as an illustration of classified experiments done on children in the MKULTRA project.

The girl in the "Strain All Urine" photo appears to be eight to ten years old.

 

MISSING CONTENT MISSING CONTENT MISSING CONTENT 

HACKER ALERT!

 

NOTE: This blogpost has been hacked in the last couple of days, but will be restored. In the meantime the integral text can still be found here and also (for some people) at http://lunamother.blogspot.com 

Meanwhile, here is Ellen Atkin, leader of a movement of online survivors:

 

 

MORE on the "MKUltra Girl" hoax can be found at Barbara Hartwell's blog

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.

First, we take Manhattan

On the day John Lennon died, I was living on the Greek island of Hydra. Hearing “Try to See it My Way” sung by a 20-something girl sitting next to me on the hydrofoil going back to Hydra just last week, I suddenly realized that song – whose lyrics I barely remembered until she started harmonizing with the Beatles on her IPod – had once been important to me.

“Try to see it my way – only time will tell if I am right or I am wrong. Why d’you see it your way? There's a risk that we may fall apart before too long. We can work it out. We can work it out...”

It dawned on me that those half-forgotten lines were woven into my way of looking at the world. And that until John Lennon was shot, it had never occurred to me that things would not get worked out, in ways that did not include putting on uniforms and marching off to destroy other people in distant countries in order to “defend our way of life.” Or the assassination of gentle, confused souls like Michael Jackson.

But all that seems to have changed – at least in the outside world.

On the day John Lennon died, December 8, 1980, I happened to be living on Hydra. I had been in my room for days, reading, writing or trying to write. It was cold and damp and all I had to heat my room was a small electric coil heater, which Leonard Cohen had lent me two weeks earlier. I was afraid to plug it in because electricity was so expensive on that island. So to stay warm, I began taking afternoon walks. A two-hour walk up a mountain would generate enough body heat to last until evening when I could either go out to the only taverna that had a stove, or bundle up in bed and read myself to sleep.

Since the end of September, I had been visiting a few Greek islands, and travelling around Egypt and Israel. In Tel Aviv, in late November, I had hooked up with Leonard and his band, who were performing their final concerts in Israel after a two-month tour of Europe. Now I was on Hydra, and so was Leonard. I was planning to spend the winter, writing a novel. What else does one do on a Greek island in winter, and what better place than Hydra? I knew the island from a 3-month visit the previous year. And this time I had a Canada Council grant, enough to cover rent and food for the next ten months, at least.

I had been living without a radio, let alone TV, since arriving on Hydra in the third week of November, at about the time the weather changed, making it necessary to find permanent shelter and a warm haven to work through the winter.

In the early afternoon of December 9, I had had enough of writing. I needed a break from my tiny cement room, which had nothing in it but the basic necessities: bed, table, frig and hotplate. I decided to take a long walk northeast along the sea coast to the village of Mandraki. At that moment, people in New York were waking up to the news of John Lennon's death, but I had heard nothing.

It was a cold, windy day and the sky was streaked with clouds. Here and there the sun would break out without really warming the earth or the rocks. After half an hour I reached Mandraki, with its beach and scattering of houses abandoned for the winter. At the limits of the village, the road ended abruptly, so I turned right and continued on up one of the hills where I found a goat path to follow. The rocky slopes around Mandraki are known for quartz deposits, and chunks of crystal lie scattered on the ground. It’s said the crystal layer on Hydra is closer to the surface than elsewhere on earth, which gives rise to the idea that the island acts as a kind of radio receiver/ transmitter. People who come to live there often say they notice changes in their patterns of dreaming, or increased sensitivity to psychic experiences.

On that day, I was too engrossed in my own thoughts to notice crystals or rocks, let alone a shift in energy. I was feeling lonely and anxious, wondering how I would make it through a whole winter on this increasingly gloomy island. Once I reached the top of the hill, I sat down on a boulder to ponder the view: sea the colour of iron, stretching all the way to the bleak shores of the Peloponnesus. I could have walked along the ridge all the way to the nearest monastery, but smoke rising from a distant fire told me shepherds were camped up there. I decided to stay put and just meditate for a while.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, I began thinking of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Where were they? What were they doing? I had not thought about them in years, really not since their “Bed-in for Peace” when they came to Montreal in 1969 and stayed at the Sheraton Mount Royal Hotel, talking to the media and entertaining guests. A friend of mine had gone downtown to meet them, and had spent a few hours in their room.

Since then, I had lost track of Lennon and his music, especially after the breakup of the Beatles. I much preferred Leonard’s style of music, and his songs. Still, for some reason that day, I could not get John and Yoko out of my mind. I heard the news of his shooting some hours later, either from the newspapers (which always arrived on Hydra from Europe and America the following day) or through a friend on Hydra who heard it on the radio. And then, like everyone else, I set about absorbing it.

My first thought was, it’s not true. And then: Lennon could not be dead, because I had just been talking to him on a mountaintop in Greece. Forever after, I would associate John Lennon’s death with climbing that hill at Mandraki, and sitting down on a boulder in a clearing on a remote island seeming to float between sea and sky. On the rare occasions on Hydra when I ran into someone of my generation, I told them that story. It made me feel better, to focus on that incident rather than the actual assassination.

Alone in my room, I told myself it didn’t matter that he was dead. His music would live on -- they were playing it everywhere in the cafes and bars that week and all through December. Besides, John had never been my hero, I thought, or even my favourite Beatle. I never had a favourite Beatle. The most I could say was thatI had liked him the way you might like an older boy several grades ahead of you in school, who was goodlooking and performed well on stage. I had listened to him sing, laughed at his quick, ironic wit – my friends and I had absorbed and tried to imitate his Liverpool accent and brand of humour. The Beatles had blown into our lives via the Ed Sullivan Show, and their music accompanied us through puberty and high school and later university, where it lost ground to the darker, more dangerous Rolling Stones. Ten years older than my graduating class, who in 1980 were just turning thirty, the Beatles were still too young to die. Their music defined our environment and values in ways we rarely stopped to think about.

I hadn't been following Lennon’s activities in New York, where he was becoming more political. Whatever I thought about his campaign for “Peace” – which struck me as a bit simple-minded – I never doubted Peace was worth fighting for, in non-violent ways, because it was better than the alternative. War in our time is for robots, not humans -- I still believe that, although ideologies have changed since 1980. What Mark David Chapman did that day was an act of war, and it was fuelled by a massive delusion. Whether or not he was a mind-controlled patsy – I believe he was -- Mark David Chapman failed miserably in his supposed mission. He ended a life that could have gone on to accomplish great things: we’ll never know. But he did not kill John Lennon – he shattered the vehicle in which the soul known as John Lennon was getting around at the time. It was a pointless act that accomplished nothing, unless the goal was to traumatize innocent fans and others, like myself, who were bystanders.

In death, Lennon grew larger than life. He symbolized lost hope, and the images generated by his murder worked their way into the structure of our thoughts and feelings. Thirty years later, I feel I am still processing the effects of that event which coloured the following decade in ways that were hard to fathom at the time.

Lennon’s assassination came a few weeks after the election of Ronald Reagan, about which I felt much cynicism and also foreboding. But at that time I was far from Washington, where schemes were being laid to alter the future. I was on Hydra, a paradise of isolation even in winter when it can be so cold and damp at night, you shiver till your bed rattles.

My bed had been rattling only the week before as I lay alone in my empty room, under a pile of damp woollen blankets, unable to sleep. That’s when I’d got the idea of going over to Leonard’s place for comfort and consolation. After all, we were friends. It wasn’t yet midnight. Maybe he’d still be up, reading. Maybe he would invite me in, make me a hot cup of Ovomaltine – the Greek version of Ovaltine -- as he had a few days before, with his characteristic friendly humour. His place was always warm. He could afford electricity.

I slipped out of bed, pulled on a couple of sweaters and headed up the stone road that led to Leonard’s L-shaped stone house, which stood at the top of Donkeyshit Lane, the main thoroughfare connecting the port to the labyrinth of narrow lanes that form a kind of amphitheatre on Hydra. In no time I was at his door. The upstairs windows looked dark, but I knocked anyway. Several times. I called out “Leonard! Are you there?” Finally, a muffled voice from the upstairs bed room answered, “Go away! I need my sleep!”

I hadn’t expected such blank rejection. I turned, devastated, and ran back home. The run warmed me up. Back in my clammy bed, I felt had blown things, badly. I resolved not to bother Leonard again, not to visit him, or cook him another vegetarian dinner. Instead I would wait until our next chance encounter in the port – which might be days or weeks away. In the meantime, I would keep on running and walking to stay warm. I would get down to business, write my book, survive on my own.

For the next few days I stuck to my resolution. I wrote in my room. I worked at making other friends among the tiny population of winter residents clinging to the rock called Hydra. And I made sure my walks took me away from the town and the embarrassment of another encounter with Leonard.

John Lennon was shot on a Monday. The following Sunday, I was out for another walk, this time through the port, just as a hydrofoil from Athens was pulling away from the dock. Some pieces of baggage were piled on the quayside, awaiting a donkey. And Leonard was just sitting down in one of the nearby cafes. He was dressed in black, and wore dark glasses and I saw he had been growing a beard since I last saw him, 10 days before. His children, Adam and Lorca, 8 and 6 years old, were with him.

His odd appearance, along with the presence of his two young children, made me shy so I paused some distance away. He saw me, and waved. It felt very awkward, but I went to greet him. I had thought he was still on the island, all that time, avoiding the weather by staying in his house. Were those his bags on the quay? Or were they his children’s? Had they just come from their mother’s place in Paris on their own, or had he gone to get them himself? I started to apologize for not coming to see him for over a week. I'd been in my room writing, I said.

He seemed to hesitate. “Oh, so you’ve been inside?” Then he repeated it a different way: "You've been on the inside?"

He seemed to be peering into me, as if trying to pick up on my thoughts. I found his behaviour off-putting. The last time I’d gone around to see him,he hadn't exactly been friendly. Now I wasn’t sure he even remembered shouting at me from the upstairs window to go away.

I thought he looked unwell. Thinner, almost exhausted. Was he recovering from the flu, I wondered? Maybe he'd been starving, all alone in his chilly mansion. He didn’t tell me he had been away, or where he had been. He walked me away from the cafe tables and over to the corner where a closed shop window displayed an old collection of Greek military medals. We stood there for a moment and to lighten the tension, I joked: “Leonard, you look like you deserve a medal!” He seemed startled, as if he read some other meaning into this offhand comment.

Just then the donkey driver arrived. He left me standing there as he strolled back to the cafe where his children were waiting to be taken up Donkeyshit Lane, to the house.

Leonard Cohen on Hydra with his children, Adam and Lorca, in December 1980.

 [source: the Sunday Telegraph]

A few days later, I ran into him again and we had coffee. It was two weeks since the tragedy in New York, and I had hardly spoken to anyone. I said, “Too bad about John Lennon.” I was expecting him to weigh in eloquently on the deeper meaning of that event. After all, he too was a singer. There but for fortune.

All he said was: “I never liked the Beatles."

He happened to be carrying a copy of TIME magazine, which had articles on Ronald Reagan’s recent victory, paired with news and commentary on Lennon`s death. He had me read the article that quoted a poem Reagan had written in high school. One line rang particularly sappy and ironic: “Life should be a song.” I handed it back. But Leonard appeared impressed, or at least he praised the new president for his support of Israel, his bold new vision, his approach to the economy. Seeing my opposition, he pointed out the cowboy theme in Reagan’s career – this was something they shared in common, because Leonard had been in a cowboy band at one time. He even sang a few lines from “Red River Valley” to make me laugh.

The unexpected news that he was a fan of Ronald Reagan suddenly made me want to cry. Tears streamed down my face and I wiped them away with my fingers. Maybe I was just overwhelmed by the cold and isolation, my general sense of being a castaway on an island in the middle of nowhere, or maybe I was still getting over my mother’s death the previous February.

Seeing my fragile state, Leonard tried another line of argument. According to the Kabala, he said, the Messiah would arrive either in a time of light, or of great darkness. This almost made sense. It sounded like the Leonard I knew, and calmed me down like a magical formula. I took it to mean that Reagan’s victory was a catastrophe that would end up generating a powerful reaction toward the light. Perhaps things would turn out well, in the end. Perhaps what we all needed was a jolt of Reaganomics, a return to fundamentals, a visit from the Headless Horseman to scare us into shape. Maybe my generation was spoiled and lazy. Maybe that was why John Lennon had to die...

The more I thought about it, though, the more I felt Leonard was panicked about his finances, grabbing at straws, supporting a charlatan like Reagan. He told me he was seriously embracing orthodox Judaism, and suddenly suggested I also convert – especially if I wanted our relationship to continue. A strange thing to say, I thought, and it made me uneasy.

I later heard he had started hanging out with a group of drinkers and gamblers on the island. One was a former mercenary who, when drunk, would boast of killing blacks in the Congo in 1962. It was easy to see why such people would seek out Leonard’s company, but what could possibly draw him to theirs? By then, I had made other friends to help me through the terrible Greek winter. I saw Leonard rarely, and feared our relationship was over. Part of me wanted it to be. He used to read me snippets from the libretto he was composing for Lewis Furey, who came for a visit later that spring.  He often reassured me that this peculiar situation on Hydra was only temporary, and that I should just be patient and wait. Wait for what? Meanwhile, other women sometimes stayed at his house, and kept coming and going all winter.

I survived the next several months,alternating between hope and misery. When I stayed away from Leonard, and just wrote, things went back to normal. But social life there was so sparse, I often withdrew into my own world, and in such places that can be dangerous. I was turning 30, having to face many unpleasant truths. I saw Leonard occasionally, and he would talk, or rather lecture, on various subjects: the Bible, the Kabala, Sufi poetry. Once he said the world was created 6,000 years ago, from a collision between black and white fire.

He never told me about being in New York on the day John Lennon was shot. If I brought up the assassination, he changed the subject to Ronald Reagan’s victory, how it signalled the start of a brand new era.

“I never liked the sixties," he said, although his career began in that decade. Or was he the anti-Beatle? Had he come along to lead a lost generation back to the straight and narrow path of religious and political orthodoxy? I found that thought embarrassing. I lay awake, sometimes, asking myself what sort of future awaited me with a man who adored Ronald Reagan.

It was 15 years later that I reviewed Ira Nadel’s biography where I found a line stating that on December 11, 1980, Leonard Cohen had been in Manhattan, “putting on phylacteries” and attending a religious ceremony. John Lennon’s assassination that same week is not mentioned. In 1995, when I reviewed the book, I thought the biographer had got his facts wrong. I was a witness to the fact Leonard could not have been in Manhattan, because he was staying on Hydra at that time and I saw him often.

I forgot about the second week in December, when I hid out in my room, writing, purposely avoiding Leonard, or the odd encounter in the port a few days after Lennon’s death, when I saw him arriving with his children from some unknown destination – possibly Athens airport, or Paris, as I imagined at the time.

And why would he leave Hydra and travel to New York that week, when his kids were living in France with their mother? Unless he had some special business in New York.

Sylvie Simmons, in her 2012 biography (I'm Your Man) puts Leonard in a room at the Algonquin Hotel on Central Park, 2 km. from the Dakota, on December 11 1980. She has him buying candles in preparation to celebrate the holiday with his children. The problem with that alibi is: in 1980 Hannukah began on December 3 and was over on December 11. 

Most of all, I wonder why he kept his New York trip a secret? Unless he did not want people to know he was there when Lennon was shot. On Hydra, where any item about Leonard was precious currency, such tantalizing news would have been the talk of the island. Leonard in Manhattan on the day Lennon died? What a coincidence. Like the time he was in Cuba just in time for the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Or in Israel two weeks ahead of the Yom Kippur War (said to have been a "surprise attack" but possibly orchestrated ahead of time by Henry Kissinger.)
 
Over Christmas, Alberto Manzano visited Hydra and interviewed Leonard. He also took photos. I have one he took of me at Kamini beach on a cold, windy day in December 1980, and also the one I took of him, using his camera.

I kept a notebook in those days, where I sometimes recorded encounters with Leonard and others on the island. It was mainly an exercise to get me working on my novel. I lived just down the lane from a man who used to be such amusing company, but seemed to have lost his sense of humour. Now he was pressuring me to change my thinking and climb on the neo-conservative bandwagon because “Money is the long hair of the eighties.” Sometimes he hinted he might soon be creating his own religious movement, and wouldn’t mind having me as a disciple. It seemed we no longer had a personal relationship, or perhaps I had imagined that -- although he implied we would again if I would quit being a child of the sixties, and grew up. I could help take care of his children, and gain readmittance to his household. But even that would not erase the 17-year age difference that separated me from his generation, and its way of thinking.

All these questions and differences played havoc with my mind. As winter dragged on, I began having nightmares, and what seemed an intense flashback to my death in a past life in Nazi Germany. It was as if time were shifting backwards. A huge gulf had opened between my old life in Montreal, and the one I was living on Hydra. The shift began with John Lennon’s death, which was a turning point. It was as if a crack had opened allowing much darkness to flood my world – although Leonard might have preferred to call it “light.”

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 …