GERMANY: The Prisoner in the Attic

As the most prominent and prosperous farmer in the district, former Mayor Johannes Steenbock occupies one of the handsomest houses in the tiny Schleswig-Holstein village of Bark. Its tall, sloping roof covers two attic floors and provides frequent shelter for refugee farmworkers streaming into Germany from the Russian-held East. The refugees, like Farmer Steenbock’s large family, find plenty of room on the lower floor and seldom, if ever, visit the attics.

An anonymous letter-writer—presumably a refugee who had wandered upstairs—recently wrote health officials in nearby Bad Segeberg, urging them in horror to hurry out and take a look in a room in Steenbock’s attic. What the health officers found there was enough to make their flesh crawl: half-dead on a filthy mattress huddled a tiny, emaciated creature that looked less like a child than some weird variety of furless monkey. It was about 3 ft. tall, weighed less than 20 Ibs. Long, black hair hung in greasy strings around its shriveled face. It was too weak to stand or even crawl. The sight was a shocker in itself, but the real shocker came with identification. The pathetic little creature was Farmer Steenbock’s own granddaughter, eight-year-old Bärbel Süfke, youngest child of his twice-married, 40-year-old daughter Rosa. On questioning, Rosa Süfke claimed that she had hid the child soon after birth because she feared it was an idiot and health officials might take it away. Grandfather Steenbock insisted that it was brought downstairs occasionally at Christmas time.

After two weeks’ care in a local hospital, eight-year-old Barbel last week would still eat no solid food and could utter no word. But for the first time in her life, she was playing—apparently happily—with other children. In a prison nearby, mother Rosa awaited trial for gross negligence (maximum sentence: five years at hard labor). “I was so ashamed. I was so ashamed,” she muttered again & again.