I–The Pale-Yellow House
One night in March, 2021, Evy Mages, a photojournalist in Washington, D.C., opened her laptop and, with trembling fingers, typed into Google the address of a villa in Innsbruck, Austria. For decades, Evy, who was fifty-five, had been haunted by memories of the house, where she had been confined for several months, starting when she was eight. She could still picture its pale-yellow exterior and the curved staircase and dark-wood panelling inside, but she’d kept what happened there a secret—even from a therapist whom she’d credited with saving her life. Evy’s memories of the place had become dreamlike, simultaneously vivid and vaporous.
She remembered being wrested from bed in the middle of the night at the home of her foster family, in the Alpine valley of Kleinwalsertal. She was hustled into a stranger’s car and driven through the mountains to Innsbruck. Nobody told her what kind of place the villa was, or how long she’d stay. Perhaps two dozen children were living there. Adults in white lab coats regularly administered shots and pills, and when it was time to eat the children were required to use weirdly abbreviated language: “bitte, Löffel” (“please, spoon”); “bitte, Gabel” (“please, fork”). In the morning, Evy attended school in the villa. At night, she had to sleep with a blanket pulled tight under her armpits, her arms ramrod straight by her sides, to insure that her hands couldn’t wander. She was terrified of wetting the bed, because whenever she did the white coats would awaken her, even from deep sleep, and march her to the bathroom for an ice-cold shower; she would then have to stand in a corner for the rest of the night. She’d be shivering and it would be dark, except for the murky green light from a fish tank, which she was forbidden to look at.
Children at the villa were issued thick, bloomer-like underpants. Shrill alarm bells rang day and night. Orders blared from loudspeakers that hung over doorways; to Evy, the voices seemed to belong to all-seeing powers. Sometimes she was summoned to recount her dreams to an adult. This unnerved her: she could tell that there was considerable peril in the exercise, though she didn’t understand why. She felt clever when she told her interrogator that she couldn’t recall any dreams, but the result was punishment: she had to sit alone in a room until she came up with something. Once, she was shown a set of farm animals and told to assign to each one the identity of a person in her foster family. Evy agonized—surely it was the wrong choice to make her foster mother the pig.
One day, she and some other children were told to line up in front of a closet to receive a treat. When the person in charge dropped dates into Evy’s skirt, which she had dutifully held out, she saw that ants were crawling on the fruit. Evy shook her skirt frantically, jumping up and down. White-coated adults carried her to the bathroom, where they held her down on the tile floor and administered a shot.
The pervasive sense of shame and surveillance had created a blurring effect. Evy could recall almost nothing about the children who had slept alongside her, in one big room, perhaps because talking to one another was largely banned. A yellow dot had marked her bed and the location of her toothbrush, and the color had perturbed her ever since. As an adult, she reminded herself that yellow was a happy shade, and tried to overcome her aversion by bringing home sunflowers.
When Evy was twenty, she moved to the United States. She settled first in New York City, where she eventually got a job at the Daily News; in 1998, she married a reporter she’d met there, Paul Schwartzman. They relocated to D.C. and had three children, Sammy, Stella, and Lily. She and Schwartzman later divorced, but over the years Evy amassed a tight circle of friends in D.C. and built a close relationship with each of her kids. In middle age, she felt more grounded than she had ever been. It was time to turn the key she’d been carrying around for decades—she’d never forgotten that the villa was on Sonnenstrasse—and enter those rooms again.
Nothing about Evy’s childhood had been easy, so in some ways it puzzled her that the months on Sonnenstrasse loomed so large in her mind. She was born in 1965 in an Austrian town called Feldkirch, to a twenty-two-year-old single mother who was staying in a Catholic home for women. She relinquished Evy to foster care. A family took in Evy when she was three, with an eye to adoption, but the mother, Anni, seemed to quickly turn on her. Anni ran a bed-and-breakfast in the family’s home, a stucco chalet with carved wooden balconies, tucked into a steep mountainside. Her husband, Erich, was a postman, making deliveries on skis in the winter and often retreating to a hut that he’d built, farther up the mountain. Managing the B. and B. put a strain on Anni, who once described herself to a doctor as “nervous.” She soon became convinced that any bit of wear and tear—a scratch on a wall, a chip on a plate, a spot of missing paint on a crucifix—was an act of malice by Evy. As Evy remembers it, Anni would point out the damage, and if Evy didn’t take responsibility for it Anni would hit her until she did. As punishment, Anni would send Evy to the cellar or lock the door to the bathroom so that she couldn’t use it. Anni told Evy that her mother had been a whore.
If Evy didn’t like the treatment she was getting, Anni warned, she could always go to a “worse place.” Although Evy was afraid of Anni, she yearned for her love, and dreaded being sent away. Anni and her husband had a biological daughter, who was a year older than Evy. This girl was well behaved and shy; Evy was tomboyish, exuberant, and a little clumsy—the kind of kid who always had a banged-up shin or a skinned knee. At school, a priest sometimes scolded her, mournfully, for giving her delicate foster mother such a hard time. When Evy was sent to the villa, it confirmed her worst fear: nobody wanted her.
After a number of months in Innsbruck, Evy was abruptly sent back to Kleinwalsertal. But Anni soon became impatient with her again, and shipped her off to an orphanage in Kempten, Germany, run by nuns. There, Evy forged bonds with her fellow-orphans, who walked to school together in donated clothes and weren’t allowed to participate in after-school activities. (The nuns told Evy that people like her were “gutter trash.”) As a teen-ager, she began looking after the younger orphans—teaching them to tie their shoes, combing lice from their hair—and this came to feel like a sweet responsibility. Growing up, Evy told me, she’d trusted that God would eventually punish the cruel adults in her life. Then, one day, she saw a priest chase away a poor, mentally ill woman who was trying to give him some flowers—and she began to lose her faith.
As an adult, Evy couldn’t bring herself to tell her kids about Sonnenstrasse, but she did talk about the orphanage. When her affectionate and empathetic youngest child, Lily, became a teen-ager, she was fascinated to hear about her mother’s life at that age. The nuns, Evy recalled, sometimes yanked her hair or slapped her. Once, she’d been hit after using a pen as eyeliner—makeup was forbidden.
Evy aged out of the orphanage at sixteen. She attempted a second return to Kleinwalsertal, where she began studying hotel management at a nearby school, but Anni still couldn’t abide her. Evy was on her own. For a while, she worked at another local guesthouse, whose owner let her stay in a room upstairs, then moved to Vienna, where she felt lonely and unmoored. One day during that period, she drove to Innsbruck with an older friend, Jimi, a free spirit who’d run a bar in Kleinwalsertal and had watched out for her there. During the road trip, they sang along to a cassette of “The Threepenny Opera.” When they arrived at Sonnenstrasse, they knocked on the villa’s arched front door. A panel slid open, and a face appeared. Evy tried to ask about her stay there. The panel closed, with a clang.
When Evy scrolled through her search results for the Sonnenstrasse villa, which were in German, she noticed an unusual word: Kinderbeobachtungsstation, or “child-observation station.” She’d always assumed that the villa had been some sort of psychiatric facility. It had seemed like “a transfer hub,” as she recently put it—a place where children were monitored, classified, and then sent to other institutions. From the search results, Evy learned the name of the woman who’d headed the place: Dr. Maria Nowak-Vogl, a psychologist at the University of Innsbruck. Typing Nowak-Vogl’s name into Google, she learned that the villa had indeed been a psychiatric facility, of a very peculiar kind. In 2013, an expert commission under the aegis of the Medical University of Innsbruck had issued a damning report about the facility, saying that Nowak-Vogl had perpetrated systematic abuse under the guise of dealing with “difficult” children. The report camethree years after a muckraking Austrian historian named Horst Schreiber published a book that reported on Nowak-Vogl, “In Namen der Ordnung” (“In the Name of Order”). Schreiber had interviewed dozens of Nowak-Vogl’s victims andhad publicly demanded that the Austrian government offer them apologies and financial compensation. The government, Evy learned, was now doing so.
A news article about the commission’s findings described the villa as a combination of “home, prison, and testing clinic.” The commission had reviewed medical records and reported something shocking: children had been injected with epiphysan, an extract derived from the pineal glands of cattle which veterinarians used to suppress estrus in mares and cows. Nowak-Vogl, a conservative Catholic, had wanted to see if epiphysan would suppress sexual feelings in children, as well as discourage masturbation, thus rendering her charges more “manageable.” Masturbation—among both adolescents and young children, who use it to self-soothe—was a preoccupation of Nowak-Vogl’s. So was bed-wetting. Her staff was instructed to keep charts documenting urination and bowel movements, and to check children’s underwear “with the eyes or the nose.” Schreiber described her as being “on a crusade against masturbation and sexual excitedness.”
The villa’s staff, Evy learned, hadn’t focussed on treating individual children. As Michaela Ralser, a University of Innsbruck professor who worked on the commission’s report, wrote, Nowak-Vogl’s goal was “protecting society from psychologically conspicuous children and adolescents.” Ralser described the villa as “a closed system... characterized by the authoritarian leadership style of its unrestricted leader.” As Evy later discovered, there was a pronounced Nazi lineage to the practices of child psychiatry in Austria that shaped Nowak-Vogl’s approach. The story of the Innsbruck child-observation station, and other places like it, was entwined with the history of postwar Austria and its deeply flawed de-Nazification.
Nowak-Vogl had started housing children on Sonnenstrasse in 1954, under the sponsorship of the Tyrolean government, and had overseen the operation until 1987. At least thirty-six hundred children, most of them between the ages of seven and fifteen, had been confined for up to several months at a time. Nowak-Vogl, who had close ties to Austria’s child-welfare system, determined each child’s next placement. Some kids went to orphanages; others, to reformatories, where they often had to work in laundries or otherwise provide free labor. Nowak-Vogl also sent children to work with farming families. Occasionally, a kid got to go home.
Evy felt a rush of validation. All of us have childhood memories that sporadically pop into our minds, like slides in a randomly organized carrousel, and it can be hard to make sense of these fragments. But most of us can check our recollections against those of parents, siblings, cousins, childhood friends. Evy hadn’t been able to speak with anyone about the villa. Now, as she scrolled through articles and reports about it, she confirmed, and clarified, many bewildering aspects of her experience. Staff members, she learned, had been alerted to bed-wetting by alarm-bell sensors lodged in children’s mattresses—and sometimes in their bulky underwear. Evy had correctly recalled the consequence: a freezing shower. The commission report noted that the silence pervading the villa had been easy to maintain in part because the children had frequently been given psychotropic drugs and tranquillizers, often in response to “disciplinary difficulties.” Medical records showed that they had also been dosed with potent sedatives, including Rohypnol. Only a small percentage of the children were given epiphysan. Evy wondered if she’d been one of them.
The commission report also mentioned “bans on speaking” and a “criminalization of feelings” when residents tried to socialize. Schreiber, who contributed to the report, wrote, “Friendships and expressions of affection for other children and young people were frowned upon and prevented, often interpreted as sexualized behavior.”
The report included a document that listed Nowak-Vogl’s house rules from 1979 and 1980. Twelve pages long and printed in a tiny font, it is perverse in its despotic specificity. Personal belongings, including books and dolls, were taken away upon arrival. Children had to clean their plates scrupulously: “Only bones, cartilage, and bay leaves may be placed to the side.” Unfinished food was to be presented at the next meal, and the next, until it was eaten. “Romping, whistling, screaming, and singing” were forbidden. “There is absolute silence when the soup is served,” the document noted. “Even marginal remarks or seemingly justified questions are not allowed to pass.” Staff members were instructed “to make mealtimes as short as possible and not to sit down with the children out of inertia.” The monitoring of toilet habits was described in exhaustive detail, and there was even a rule about how toothpaste should be “sparingly pushed between the bristles” of a child’s brush.
The more that Evy read, the angrier she became. Nearly four thousand children? Until 1987? Eight or so similar facilities had operated in Austria after the Second World War. How many thousands of children had spent time in repressive psychiatric institutions like hers? At all the facilities, confused children were brusquely evaluated for “misbehavior.” But only the Sonnenstrasse villa was so consumed with stamping out sexuality.
In September, 2021, Evy approached me to see if I’d look further into her story. We had been friendly acquaintances for years. Our kids had attended the same elementary school, in Northwest D.C., and I’d occasionally run into her in the neighborhood, or at a demonstration that we were both covering. Evy was high-spirited, flaxen-haired, and casually glamorous, with a wide, dazzling smile. Her accent, full of trilled “r”s and “v”-like “w”s, reminded me of the Velvet Underground’s Nico. In a D.C. milieu crowded with former student-council presidents, she stood out. Sometimes I’d see her in the middle of the day leaning into deep conversation with a friend at the local Starbucks; it was as if she’d transformed the place into a Viennese coffeehouse, the way dropping a colorful scarf over a motel-room lamp can make the drab space look dramatic.
Though we hadn’t had many one-on-one conversations, I’d been struck by Evy’s emotional directness and impetuous generosity. “The outside matches the inside with Evy” is how her friend Keltie Hawkins, a therapist, put it. I’d noticed, too, that Evy genuinely liked and fiercely defended kids. More than almost any parent I knew, she was comfortable around defiant teen-agers. When my daughter was in middle school, with purple-streaked hair and an emotional intensity that discomfited some adults, Evy made a point of telling me how great she was. I learned later that Evy would take in her kids’ friends, and friends of her kids’ friends, when they had conflicts with their own families. Hawkins called Evy’s house “the wayward station.” She recalled seeing Evy cross a playground to tell a man who’d hit his daughter, “How dare you—that’s your child, not your property.” And Evy had once confronted some cops who’d caught friends of her teen-age children shoplifting at a local store. “I’ve known these kids since they were this tall,” she told the officers. “They’re good kids.” The teens got off with a warning. Evy liked to describe herself as “deeply anti-authoritarian,” and the more she told me about her past the more sense that made.
A few days after Evy learned about Nowak-Vogl, she e-mailed one of the commission’s lead researchers, Elisabeth Dietrich-Daum, a professor at the University of Innsbruck. “Never did I imagine there would be a reckoning,” Evy wrote, adding that she was “overwhelmed with gratitude to you and your team for... bringing these atrocities to light.” In another e-mail, she wrote, “I am immensely grateful that I somehow had the strength to create a life after growing up in Austria as a freak, a reject, and a test object.” Dietrich-Daum replied to Evy, noting that she could apply for financial compensation from the State of Tyrol’s office for Opferschutz, or victim protection. She could also obtain her medical records.
By the time Evy told me about the Kinderbeobachtungsstation, she’d reached out to other scholars and had submitted testimony to the commission. She was moved when she received a letter of apology from Gabriele Fischer, a Tyrolean official in charge of youth welfare. Fischer said that Evy was entitled to an immediate payout of fifteen hundred euros; upon turning sixty, she could receive a pension of three hundred euros a month. “What happened to you should never have happened,” Fischer wrote. “I can only promise to learn from your story.”
Georg is now an actor who runs his own theatre company. He has three adult children, and he proudly showed us photographs of them. He wore hip yellow glasses, and seemed charming and at ease on the Zoom call, though he said that he had suffered from anxiety throughout his life. He had been curious to get his chart, but reading it had taken him aback. All the things that he remembered as most salient about the place—being locked in the cellar, being forced to eat bits of fat he’d left on a plate, watching a boy who had difficulty dressing himself be paraded around and humiliated by the staff—went unnoted.