If there were ever files in the city’s archives documenting how Kentler’s project came to be approved—or how, exactly, he located the men who served as foster fathers—they have been lost or destroyed. When Kentler publicly discussed his experiment, he offered details about only three foster homes. But, in a 2020 report commissioned by the Berlin Senate, scholars at the University of Hildesheim concluded that “the Senate also ran foster homes or shared flats for young Berliners with pedophile men in other parts of West Germany.” The fifty-eight-page report was preliminary and vague; the authors said there were about a thousand unsorted files in the basement of a government building that they had been unable to read. No names were revealed, but the authors wrote that “these foster homes were run by sometimes powerful men who lived alone and who were given this power by academia, research institutions and other pedagogical environments that accepted, supported or even lived out pedophile stances.” The report concluded that some “senate actors” had been “part of this network,” while others had merely tolerated the foster homes “because ‘icons’ of educational reform policies supported such arrangements.”

Marco remembers Kentler and his foster father talking for hours on the phone about politics. The intensity of their conversations surprised him, because Henkel was laconic at home, rarely speaking in full sentences. Marco and Sven didn’t talk to each other, either. Marco spent all of his free time in his room, on an Amiga computer, playing SimCity and Mega-Lo-Mania. Both boys kept their doors closed. Once, when the neighbors played loud music, breaking the silence in their apartment, Henkel told the boys that he wanted to drill holes in two microwave ovens and then aim the radioactive waves toward each other, at just the right angle, to give the neighbors a heart attack.

Marco’s mother lost her plea for more access to her son. She was still allowed visits every few weeks at the youth-welfare office, but the meetings went increasingly badly. During the first visit after the court hearing, Marco told his mother that he didn’t want to see her, because she didn’t get along with his foster father. “While he was saying this, he did not make eye contact with his mother,” a social worker wrote. At the next visit, three weeks later, he refused to accept his mother’s gift—pens and a pad of paper—or to answer her questions. He repeatedly asked to leave, until his mother reluctantly agreed. She was “visibly shaken and cried,” the social worker wrote. “She no longer knows what to do.” The next day, Henkel called the youth-welfare office and said that he would support Marco “in demonstrating his rejection of his mother.”

A year and a half later, Marco’s father informed the youth-welfare office that he was moving to Syria and wanted to say goodbye to his son. There is no record of anyone responding. Marco’s opinion of his parents became overlaid with the insults he’d heard from Henkel and Kentler. He imagined his mother as a lazy woman who spent her days eating sausages, his father as a violent patriarch. It wasn’t until two decades later that he grasped that his parents had fought to have a relationship with him.

Some nights, when Marco was eating dinner with Sven and Henkel, he would have the sensation that he was among strangers. “Who are you people?” he asked once. Henkel responded, “It’s me—your father.”

When Marco was eleven years old, a new foster son, Marcel Kramer, moved in. Kramer was a small boy with dimples, crooked teeth, and a sweet, open smile. He was half a year younger than Marco and had spastic quadriplegia, a congenital condition that left him unable to walk, talk, or eat on his own. Marco and Sven became Kramer’s caretakers, feeding him strawberry-flavored milk with a spoon and removing mucus from his lungs with a suction hose. When they went to Henkel’s house in Brandenburg, west of Berlin, Marco pushed Kramer for hours on a tire swing. Kramer was the first person in years for whom Marco had felt love.

At school, Marco had no close relationships. Henkel encouraged him to misbehave, rewarding him with computer games if he spat, talked out of turn, or overturned chairs. He skipped class and rarely did his homework. He ended up switching schools seven times, which, he now believes, was Henkel’s plan.

For years, Marco tolerated Henkel, but, as he began going through puberty, he said, “I started to hate him.” He spent an hour each day lifting weights, so that he would be strong enough to defend himself. One night, when Henkel tried to fondle him, Marco hit his hand. Henkel seemed startled but didn’t say anything. He just walked away.

Henkel stopped trying to sexually molest Marco, but he became punitive. At night, he locked the door to the kitchen so that Marco couldn’t eat. (“His greed when eating was noticeable,” Henkel once wrote.) He also hit Marco. “Go on, let off some steam,” Marco sometimes said, taunting Henkel. “He said he wasn’t hitting me—he was hitting the devil inside of me,” Marco told me.

When Marco turned eighteen, he was legally free to leave Henkel’s home, but it didn’t occur to him to move out. “It’s very hard to describe, but I was never raised to think critically about anything,” he said. “I had an empty mind.”

One day, Kramer developed the flu. In the course of forty-eight hours, his breathing became increasingly labored. For years, Marco had checked on Kramer several times each night, to make sure that he was breathing. Now he was so worried that he lay in bed beside him. Henkel had always resisted calling doctors for the boys. By the time he gave in, Kramer could not be resuscitated. “It happened in front of my eyes,” Marco said. “I was looking into his eyes when he died.”

The foster-care files contain only a brief note documenting Kramer’s death. “Call from Mr. Henkel, who says that Marcel died unexpectedly last night,” an employee at the youth-welfare office wrote, in September, 2001. “Previously there were no signs of an infection.” A subsequent note says that Henkel, who was sixty, was looking to take in another child.

After Teresa Nentwig’s report on Kentler, in 2016, she planned to write her habilitation thesis, a requirement for a career in academia, on Kentler’s life and work. But there were many setbacks. Relevant files in the city archives of Berlin were missing, unsorted, or sealed. Friends and colleagues of Kentler, who had died in 2008, told Nentwig that they didn’t want to talk. “Some said that Kentler is a very good man and he has done only things which are good,” Nentwig told me.

Nentwig gives the impression of being a methodical and undramatic scholar, the type who never misses a deadline. In the summer of 2020, when we first spoke, she told me, “I have no future in the university, because it is very hard to have success with this sort of subject. I am criticizing the academic world.” I assumed that, as ambitious people tend to do, she was motivating herself with a fear of worst-case scenarios. But the next time I spoke with her, this spring, she had taken a job with a regional State Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a German intelligence agency that monitors anti-democratic threats. Her university contract had not been renewed, and she blamed the premature end of her academic career in part on her decision to research Kentler. “I’m a political scientist,” she said, “and people were always asking, ‘What is political about this topic?’ ”

Nentwig and her former university are now splitting the cost, some six thousand euros, for a German academic press to publish what would have been her thesis. In the book, which comes out in September, she reveals that Kentler, the single father of three adopted sons and several foster children, appeared to be conducting his own, informal version of the experiment that the Berlin Senate had authorized. Karin Désirat, the co-author of a book called “Sex—Lust and Life,” told Nentwig that two of Kentler’s foster sons had come to her for therapy and divulged that Kentler had sexually abused them. Désirat “owed a lot to Kentler,” she said—he had helped her get her first teaching position—and she did not want to get involved. She referred the boys to another therapist. The boys preferred to keep their abuse private, she said, because they “didn’t want to lose the positives of Kentler’s care—that they had enough to eat and that they were taken care of and things like that.” Kentler’s experiment seemed to rest on the idea that some children are fundamentally second class, their outlook so compromised that any kind of love is a gift, a proposition that his colleagues apparently accepted, too. (Désirat said that she eventually broke off contact with Kentler, concluding that his behavior had been “creepy.”)

Gunter Schmidt, a former president of the International Academy of Sex Research, which attracts the field’s leading researchers, was friends with Kentler for more than twenty years. “I honestly had respect for it,” he told Nentwig of the experiment. “Because I thought, These are really young people who are in the worst situation. They probably have a long history at home, they had miserable childhoods and someone is looking after them. And if Kentler is there it’ll be fine.” He added, “And the Berlin Senate is also there.” When Kentler was fifty-seven, he wrote Schmidt a letter explaining why he was aging happily, rather than becoming lonely and resigned: he and his twenty-six-year-old son were “part of a very fulfilling love story” that had lasted thirteen years and still felt fresh. To understand his state of mind, Kentler wrote, his friend should know his secret.

For much of his career, Kentler spoke of pedophiles as benefactors. They offered neglected children “a possibility of therapy,” he told Der Spiegel, in 1980. When the Berlin Senate commissioned him to prepare an expert report on the subject of “Homosexuals as caregivers and educators,” in 1988, he explained that there was no need to worry that children would be harmed by sexual contact with caretakers, as long as the interaction was not “forced.” The consequences can be “very positive, especially when the sexual relationship can be characterized as mutual love,” he wrote.

But in 1991 he seemed to rethink his opinion, after his youngest adopted son, the one he praised in the letter to Schmidt, committed suicide. Then he read the paper “Confusion of the Tongues Between Adults and the Child (The Language of Tenderness and of Passion),” by Sándor Ferenczi, a Hungarian psychoanalyst and a student of Freud. The paper describes how sexualized relationships between adults and children are always asymmetrical, exploitative, and destructive. Ferenczi warns that to give children “more love or love of a different kind” than they seek “will have just as pathogenic consequences as denying them love.” Children’s “personalities are not sufficiently consolidated in order to be able to protest,” he writes. They will “subordinate themselves like automata.” They become oblivious of their own needs and “identify themselves with the aggressor.”

In an interview with a German historian in 1992, Kentler spoke of his grief for his adopted son and said, “Unfortunately I only read the Ferenczi essay after his death.” He did not confess to abusing his son; instead, he said that the boy had been sexually abused by his birth mother. “He hung himself because of that,” he told the historian. “I’ve experienced it in the biggest way, in a very close way, and certainly I’m partly to blame.” He regretted that, until the Ferenczi paper, he had not read anything about the emotional aftermath of sexual abuse and had not known how to help his son process the trauma. He didn’t understand that a child recovering from sexual abuse feels split, as Ferenczi describes it: he is “innocent and culpable at the same time—and his confidence in the testimony of his own senses is broken.” “I was too stupid,” Kentler said.

By the late nineties, Kentler had stopped seeing Henkel’s foster sons, or involving himself in their upbringing. In what was likely his last recorded public statement about pedophilia, in an interview in 1999, he referred to it as a “sexual disorder,” and alluded to the impossibility of an adult and a child sharing an understanding of sexual contact. The problem, he said, is that the adult will always have “the monopoly on definition.”

When I first began corresponding with Marco, in the summer of 2020, our communication was mediated by a man named Christoph Schweer, who referred to himself as Marco’s “friend.” Initially, I assumed that he was Marco’s lawyer. Then I looked him up online and saw that he had received a Ph.D. in philosophy, publishing a dissertation called “Homesickness, Heroes, Cheerfulness: Nietzsche’s Path to Becoming a Superhero.” He worked for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), Germany’s right-wing party, as an adviser for education and cultural policy. The Party was recently investigated by Germany’s domestic-intelligence agency for undermining democracy by, among other things, minimizing the crimes of the Nazis. The Party’s co-leader has called the Nazi era “just a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.”

Last August, Marco, Schweer, and Thomas Rogers, a Berlin journalist, who also works as a translator, met at a hotel attached to Berlin’s international airport, the only place we could come up with that would be sufficiently private. I spoke with them via Zoom. Marco and Schweer sat in chairs beside the bed, and they did not appear to have a particularly familiar rapport. Marco wore a flowery button-up Hawaiian shirt and had not shaved in a few days. Schweer, dressed for the office, had a prim, businesslike manner. Like an agent helping his celebrity client, he seemed a bit bored by our conversation but occasionally chimed in, prompting Marco to share memorable details.

“When you first saw him you thought, What a crooked mouth he has,” Schweer offered, referring to Henkel.

“He had no lips,” Marco clarified. He explained that Kentler, too, had this trait. Schweer demonstrated by pressing his mouth together, so that only a sliver of his bottom and upper lip were visible.

“Do you know people who have no lips?” Marco said. “They are always egotistical and mean—I noticed that.”

Schweer first contacted Marco in early 2018, after reading an article in Der Spiegel about Kentler’s experiment, in which Marco said that he’d been let down by the Berlin Senate. After the publication of Nentwig’s report, Marco wrote to the Senate asking for more information about what had happened to him, but he felt that the Senate was insufficiently responsive.

Schweer had “offered help from the AfD,” Marco told me. “I immediately said, ‘Not for political purposes, only because I want help.’ ”

From the perspective of an AfD politician, Marco’s life story was expedient, a tale about the ways in which the German left had got sexual politics wrong. At meetings of the German parliament, members of the AfD (which won more than twelve per cent of the vote in the last national election, becoming Germany’s third-largest party) rallied around the Kentler case as a way of forcing left-wing politicians to address history that did not reflect well on their parties, but also as a barely disguised vehicle for impugning homosexuality. An advocacy group affiliated with the AfD held “Stop Kentler’s sex education” rallies, to protest the way that sexuality is currently taught in German schools. “Kentler’s criminal pedophile spirit lives on unbroken in today’s sex education,” a brochure printed by the organization explained.

History seemed to be looping back on itself. Right-wing politicians were calling for a return to the kind of “terribly dangerous upbringing” against which Kentler had rebelled. In its party manifesto, the AfD states that it is committed to the “traditional family as a guiding principle,” an idea that it associates with the maintenance of Germany’s cultural identity and power. To counteract the influx of immigrants to Germany, “the only mid- and longterm solution,” the AfD program says, “is to attain a higher birth rate by the native population.”

At a hearing in February, 2018, an AfD representative, Thorsten Weiß, complained that the Senate had not taken responsibility for Kentler’s crimes. “This is a case of political importance, which also requires political action,” he said. “The Senate is double-crossing the victims, and that is a scandal.”

At another hearing, seven months later, Weiß criticized the Senate for being slow to gather more information about Kentler’s experiment. “We will not allow government-sponsored pederasty to be swept under the rug,” he said.

Two politicians from the Green Party, which has championed the rights of sexual minorities, accused the AfD of manipulating the victims. “What the AfD is trying to do, to instrumentalize this crime for its own purposes, is unacceptable,” a representative said.

Schweer, the AfD adviser, tried to find a lawyer who could advocate for Marco in a civil lawsuit. “I stand up for a friend, the victim of the so-called Kentler experiment,” he wrote in an e-mail to a large Berlin law firm. Marco had already filed a criminal complaint, but the investigation was limited because Henkel had died in 2015. The lead caseworker, who retired after working for the office for more than forty years, exercised his right to remain silent when the police contacted him. The public prosecutor, Norbert Winkler, concluded that Henkel engaged in “serious sexual assaults including regular anal intercourse,” but he could not find evidence that anyone at the office was complicit. The dilemma, he told me, was that whenever suspicions arose the employees at the office “relied on the claims from Mr. Kentler, who was at the time a very renowned person.”

Marco and Sven tried to file civil lawsuits against the state of Berlin and the Tempelhof-Schöneberg district, the location of the youth-welfare office, for breach of official duties. But, under civil law, too much time had passed. The AfD asked an expert to analyze whether the statute of limitations had to apply to this case. Berlin’s education senator, Sandra Scheeres, a member of the Social Democratic Party, wanted to see if Marco and Sven would accept a compensation package rather than pursue a lawsuit that seemed doomed. She believed that the AfD was giving them bad advice, unnecessarily prolonging their attempt to get money. She told me, “I found it quite strange how the AfD worked with the victims—how close their relationship was, and that they gave legal advice to them. Of course, it is O.K. if the AfD draws attention to injustices, but what happened here was uncommon. I’ve never experienced something like it.” (Weiß, the AfD representative, told me, “I would have been surprised if she had said anything nice about us.” He believes there is still a pedophile network in Germany, and that those connected to it “use their political influence to make sure that the network remains under the radar.”)

Marco went to visit one of Henkel’s foster sons from the “first generation,” as he put it, to see if he wanted to join his and Sven’s legal efforts. The son, whom I’ll call Samir, lived in Henkel’s house in Brandenburg, where the boys had spent summer vacations. The house, which had only one room, was made from beige bricks and seemed to have been assembled too casually—uneven globs of mortar filled each crack. In photographs from the nineties, the place is a mess: a plastic bag and half-eaten bread lie on the table; outside the house, an old toaster oven, with a badminton birdie lying next to it, rests on a decaying dresser.

Samir, who is fifty-seven and half Algerian, had not had contact with his birth family for more than forty years. He had changed his last name to Henkel, and taken on a new German first name as well. His half sister, who lives in Algeria, told me that she and her sister had tried many times to get in touch with him, to no avail. He was the foster son whose interactions with Henkel sparked a criminal investigation in 1979, when he was fifteen. At the time, a psychologist had given Samir a personality test, and Samir had drawn himself as a fruit tree in winter that “lacks all contact to the nourishing earth.” The psychologist interviewed Henkel, too, and observed that he struggled to hold back his “enormous aggressive impulses” and, through his foster sons, tried to “make up for something that he missed in his own past.”

Marco drove to Henkel’s old property and walked toward the house. Five-foot hedges now surrounded it. The windows were covered with blankets. Marco said, “I wanted to offer him the opportunity to clear things up like I had with Sven, but when I saw that—no, no, no.” Another foster brother, the first to move into Henkel’s home, lived a few miles away, but Marco decided there was no use visiting him, either. He walked back to his car and drove home.

Winkler, the prosecutor, had sent investigators to Samir’s home, and he described it as a “garbage heap.” There was no running water or electricity. There was barely even clear space to walk. Yet one corner of the house was tidy and purposeful. It had been turned into a kind of altar. An urn with Henkel’s ashes was surrounded by fresh flowers.

Henkel had run his foster home for thirty years. When he finally shut it down, in 2003—he hadn’t been assigned a new foster child—Marco was twenty-one. He had nowhere to live. He spent three nights sleeping on benches in the park. With the help of a charity that assists homeless youths, he eventually moved into a subsidized apartment. He sometimes stole from grocery stores. “I didn’t know how the world functioned,” he told me. “I didn’t even know that you need to pay for the electricity that comes out of a socket.” He woke up several times in the middle of the night, a habit from his time caring for Marcel Kramer. But, instead of going into his foster brother’s room, he checked his own body to see, he said, “if everything is still where it should be and that I still exist.” He spent so much time by himself that he had trouble constructing sentences.

Sven lived alone in a small apartment in Berlin, too, but, unlike Marco, he stayed in touch with Henkel. “I always thought I owed the man something,” he told Der Spiegel, in 2017. Marco and Sven lived as they had as adolescents: they spent the day on the computer or watching TV, rarely speaking to anyone. Sven, who has experienced periods of severe depression since he was a child, still lives in what he called a “fortress of solitude,” and he did not want to talk about his past. “I don’t have any more strength,” he told me. “But I can assure you that everything my brother told you about our time in the foster home is one to one—the truth.”

Marco had also existed in a kind of hibernation. But, after five years, he felt as if he were becoming a “monster,” he said. “It didn’t go quite toward criminal actions, but there was a destructiveness, a lack of empathy.” When he was twenty-six, he was on a train in Berlin and noticed three men staring at him. Without making a conscious decision, Marco found himself beating them up. “I should have said, ‘Hey, what are you looking at?’ ” he said. “But, instead, I immediately fought them. I noticed I actually wanted to kill them.” One of the men ended up in the emergency room. Marco realized how much his behavior resembled that of his foster father. “It was a Henkel reaction,” he said. “I was a product. I was turning into the thing he had made.”

Around that time, he was walking on the street when a female photographer complimented his looks and asked if he’d like to do what Marco called “hobby modelling.” He agreed and sat for a series of photographs, adopting a variety of poses: in some pictures, he looks like a chiselled lawyer off to work; in others, he is windswept and preppy. The photographs never led to jobs, but he began hanging out with the photographer and her friends. He compared the experience to being a foreigner in an exotic country and finally meeting people who are willing to teach him the language. “I learned normal ways of interacting,” he said.

The modelling work inspired him to get a haircut, and, at the hair salon, a glamorous woman with a sprightly, cheerful presence, whom I’ll call Emma, trimmed his hair. Marco tends to credit his appearance for the pivotal events of his life: he believes his looks were the reason that Henkel chose him—many of Henkel’s sons had dark hair and eyes—and, twenty years later, the explanation for his first serious relationship. “I was pretty, and she didn’t leave,” he told me, of Emma. He added, only partly joking, “Some women are just really into asshole types, and I was one of those asshole types.”

At first, he was resistant to a relationship, but gradually he found Emma’s devotion persuasive. More than once, she slept outside his apartment door. “I noticed that she really loves me, and that in life there’s probably only one person who comes along who will really fight for you,” he said. He tried to blunt his antisocial impulses by remembering that they were not innate but had been conditioned by his upbringing. “I reprogrammed myself, so to speak,” he said. “I tried to re-raise myself.”

When I visited Marco, in May, he and Emma had just moved from Berlin to a new development on the city’s outskirts that he asked me not to name or describe, because he didn’t want his neighbors to know about his past. He now has two children, and they were playing with Emma in their large back yard. Inside, Marco listened to meditative lounge music and drank water from the largest coffee mug I’ve ever seen. I had the sense that with a different childhood Marco might have aged into a fairly jolly middle-aged man. He was playful and earnest and spoke poetically about his view of the afterlife. He shared his children’s developmental milestones with nuance and pride. In a gust of hospitality, he asked if I wanted Emma to cut my hair, before apologizing profusely and saying that my hair looked just fine.

A few days before my visit, the Berlin Senate had announced that it would commission scholars at the University of Hildesheim, who had published the preliminary report in 2020, to do a follow-up report about pedophile-run foster homes in other parts of Germany. Sandra Scheeres, the senator for education, had apologized to Marco and Sven, and the Senate offered them more than fifty thousand euros—in Germany, where compensation for damages is much lower than it is in the United States, this was seen as a significant amount.

Christoph Schweer, the AfD adviser, had urged Marco and Sven to keep fighting, but Marco couldn’t understand why. “We have gotten our wishes, so there’s no point in further irritating or tyrannizing the Senate,” he told me. But Schweer kept pushing him, Marco said. (Schweer denies this.) “Then I slowly got suspicious. I asked myself, What else should I want? That’s when I got the feeling that the AfD just wants to use me, to play me up. And I said, ‘I don’t want to be a political tool. I don’t want to get pulled into an election campaign.’ ” He dropped his lawsuit and accepted the Senate’s offer. His only remaining goal is that, in the upcoming report, all the names of people involved in carrying out Kentler’s experiment be revealed. (Schweer said that he had been supporting Marco as a “private person,” not on behalf of the AfD. He also told me, “I have new ideas, but for [Marco] it’s over.”)

Marco and Emma were getting married at the end of the month, and he didn’t want to think about his past. “I just wanted to end the whole thing, to have this chapter closed,” he said. He planned to take Emma’s last name. He hadn’t spoken with his birth parents or his brother since he was ten, and now he would become nearly untraceable. He had tried to Google his brother once, but he considered the idea of a reunion to be a waste of emotional resources that he could devote to his children. “It wouldn’t bring me anything, anyway,” he said. “The period of being shaped by my mother is over.”

At the end of my visit, Marco’s wedding ring arrived in the mail. Emma shrieked with joy, but Marco held the ring in his hand dispassionately and joked that he had to marry eventually, so he might as well do it now. He disguised his obvious tenderness toward her with a show of indifference that Emma apparently knew not to take seriously. “These are just the deficits that I have,” he said, referring to the lack of emotion. “I’ll get through it. It doesn’t matter.”

Three weeks later, on the eve of his wedding, he e-mailed me. “In an hour around 10 a.m. we will drive to the registry office,” he wrote. “Symbolically, a new life begins.”

After leaving Henkel’s home, Marco had contact with him only two times. The first time, when Marco was in his mid-twenties, Henkel suddenly called. He appeared to have developed some sort of dementia. He asked if Marco had remembered to feed their rabbits.

The next time was in 2015, when Emma was pregnant with their first child. Marco drove to a clinic in Brandenburg where he’d heard that Henkel was in hospice, dying of cancer. Marco opened the door to Henkel’s room. He saw Henkel lying in bed, groaning in pain. He had a long, wizard-like beard and looked to Marco as if he were possessed. Marco gazed at him for less than five seconds, long enough to confirm that he was actually dying. Then he turned around, closed the door, and walked out of the hospital.

After Marco got home, the radio in his kitchen was playing, but he didn’t remember having turned it on. A singer repeated the phrase “I’m sorry.” He felt as if Henkel were trying to get in touch with him. “I became a little bit crazy,” he told me. “I thought Henkel was a ghost who was following me, haunting me. It was definitely him: he was trying to apologize.”

Henkel died the next day. Marco entered a state of grief so fluid and expansive that, for the first time, he cried over the death of his foster brother Marcel Kramer. He had lain in bed with Kramer for an hour after he died, holding a kind of vigil; then he cut off one of Kramer’s curls, so that he’d have something to remember him by. But he had never properly mourned him. Suddenly, “the blockage disappeared,” he said. He realized why he hadn’t left Henkel’s home when he turned eighteen. “I was bound to the family by Marcel Kramer,” he said. “I would have never left him behind.”

A few weeks after Henkel’s death, the sense of being haunted began to recede. “The freedom came slowly,” Marco told me. “It was like a hunger that grows stronger and stronger. I don’t know how to say it, but it was the first time that I figured out that I am living a life with a billion different possibilities. I could have been anything. My inner voice became stronger, my intuition that I don’t have to live my life the way he taught me, that I can keep going.” ♦

♦  ♦  ♦  ♦  ♦

{ADDENDUM: Bear uppermost in mind — To stifle the truth-telling found at this site, FB’s censors have “zeroed-out” all of my articles via their “Boom and Ban” censors ala their ubiquitous “Community Standards” — as they hunt me up and down the internet like rabid dogs to their prey! No kidding. This is just some of FB’s modus operandi, what is now deemed their “love notes” to yours truly:This URL goes against our Community Standards on spam:adinakutnicki.files.wordpress.comACTIVITY

About your post Today at 4:34 PMNo one else can see your post.And so on and so forth. In fact, just recently, each article at my “parent site”, ADINA KUTNICKI: A ZIONIST & CONSERVATIVE BLOG, had its FB registered shares go from the hundreds, with some up to the many thousands, to a big, fat ZERO. In other words, all my shares have gone down the rabbit hole. Just like that. Poof. Gone. As such, take it to the bank that each and every conservative voice which reaches a wide readership will, sooner than later, be CENSORED. MUTED.} MESSAGE FAILED:This message contains content that has been blocked by our security systems.If you think you’re seeing this by mistake, please let us know. Yes, additional “proof-in-the pudding” as to why “BANNED: How Facebook Enables Militant Islamic Jihad” had to be written!}