A Nun’s Testimony by Sister Charlotte Keckler
Continuation………
Ordinarily I would have undressed and have slipped into a muslin nightgown, and then enter my cell to be locked in for the night. For a bed we had only a slab of wood–no mattress, springs, pillow or blanket. Before we were permitted to lie down we were required to kneel on a penance prayer board. This contained hundreds of upright, sharp wires to pierce the knees. The upper section where we were to prostrate ourselves upon our arms was also a mass of sharp wires.
Another day the Mother Superior took me through a long, dark tunnel hall for my next initiation penance. As we entered the chamber, again there were seven candles. As she marched me up under the candles I spotted some ropes dangling from the ceiling with some sort of metal clamps on the ends. She made me stand very close, facing the wall and extending my arms in the air. Quickly she snapped the metal bands securely around each thumb. She then stepped to one side and began to turn a crank which took the ropes straight up until I was slowly hoisted from the floor. When I was suspended on the tips of my bare toes she fastened the handle, walked out without a word and slammed and locked the door. The weight of my body on those thumbs and my toes was excruciating.
I was already whimpering and moaning in misery. I had no idea how long I would stay there. Always in these things, you hung there wondering if you might die before they came back to free you. In the white heat of the waves of unbearable pain which wrack the body and mind, death would be a blessed way out.
As hours stretched interminably into days and nights there was no way to calculate how long you had been there. There was no sun; no sounds other than your own fevered sobbings and screams. It was like being buried alive without food or water. Torment and delirium causes you to loose track of reality and nothing seems real except the ever present torture and pain.
This was another part of their brainwashing technique. I could do nothing but to stand there, screaming and crying. No one would hear or help me or even care. Three, four, six and finally ten agonizing hours crept by and every bone, muscle and nerve in my tortured body was screaming for relief. The maddening, unending pain is indescribable and I also grew hungry and thirsty. When my hands and arms began to swell tightly I believed I was going to die.
I had desperately prayed to all the statues in the room. Eventually I realized the Virgin Mary was not hearing a word I sobbed. Hysterically I shouted and pleaded for help from my patron saint; from St. Jude, St. Bartholomew, and every other idol or saint I could ever remember hearing about. I was surrounded by an unearthly silence, broken only by my own fevered screams and groans and the sputtering candles.
There I hung, wracked with pain and saturated in my own human filth, for there was no break in the torture regime for toilet facilities. Just as I felt I was going completely insane, Mother Superior walked in. Directly on the wall in front of me was an adjustable shelf which she raised to the level of my face. On it she placed a pan of water and a pan containing one small potato.
I was starving for water and food but how was I to get it? Painfully I scooted on my toes, tilting first one arm, then the other, straining to reach the pans. When I managed to reach them, I felt the tissues in my lungs tearing with terrible pain. As a matter of fact, many nuns contract tuberculosis after going through this torture. However, only by enduring such pain and strain could I manage to get water or food. I bumped and spilled most of it.
Nine days later Mother Superior came and released first one thumb and then the other and I collapsed in a faint to the floor. My limbs were swollen and shrieking with pain. My eyes felt as if they were being pushed out of my head and my arms were swollen to three times normal size. No part of my anatomy was free from the throbbing pain and soreness.
Of course I could not move. Two nuns picked me up by the shoulders and feet and took me, moaning incoherently, into the infirmary and laid me on a slab of wood. They cut off all my clothes for I was saturated with my own urine and bowel movements. This was another part of the carefully planned brutalization and dehumanization program, designed to produce mindless robots. Following this episode I could not even walk for two and a half months and would have been happy to die.
To be continued………
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