Jessica Villerius shot about 150 hours of film and obviously could not use everything for the 4 part documentary. Together with the four elder children, she selected material that they would like to see in the documentary anyway. Thus, part 5 was made, and broadcast online.
Part 5 starts with Israel, he explains what he felt when he ran away and went to look for help.
Israel tells that from their earliest days, they we taught to think like their father: what would HE think when he saw us do things? When Israel ran away, he had had to put that way of thinking completely aside, and now he worries that he may return to the old way of thinking when he sees his father again.
Imagine what it was like for him when
he finally had gone to the Police and they brought him back and made him promise to go inside again. Israel had lost his 'faith' two years before already.
Final episode of the Ruinerwold documentary: 'For the past ten years I have lived under a mask'
"Actually, I've always wanted only one thing and that is to be normal. Mar Jan becomes visibly emotional as she makes her point. It is March 2021. The bizarre story about the family she comes from has been known for almost a year and a half now. "I am a bit empty and looking for peace. I can start building my own life now. I have that peace now that the secret is out."
Neither she nor her brothers Shin and Edino, who left the now world-famous family in 2008, 2009 and 2010, had talked to anyone about it before October 2019. None of their friends knew their full story. Edino: "I think I've been living under a mask for the past ten years for the most part."
In the additional online episode of the documentary 'The children of Ruinerwold' by Jessica Villerius, the eldest children tell how and when they ran away in the period before the family moved to Ruinerwold in 2010. In the family, religious maniac Gerrit Jan van D. subjected his nine children to his strict regime, where fear ruled and where deprivation of liberty, violence and sexual abuse were the order of the day. At least in the eyes of the oldest four. The youngsters, with one exception, still support their father.
Apart from their past, the oldest three children have one more thing in common:
since leaving their father, brothers and sisters - their mother died back in 2004 - they had never told anyone their whole story until October 2019. That changed when Israel ran away from the Ruinerwold farm, seeking help and the younger brother and sisters with father Van D. were found.
Edino: "Everyone around me was surprised when this came out. 'Huh, you?' 'How then?' They had never expected it. "In the past I have told that my father had left for a monastery in Austria. Later I did tell them that I myself had left, because the situation was no longer tenable, but no one around me knew what was really going on."
Mar Jan (30) was the first to leave the family in 2008. "Since my mother died, I have been almost constantly isolated from the rest of the family. I was not part of it. I was sort of doing my time. I sat in a room with nothing and thought: what am I still doing here?"
She was 18 when she left. "The first weeks were survival. I was no longer a child, but I also did not know where to turn for help." Still, she ends up well, but she also still suffers from everything that happened to her, she says. "No one wants to constantly be dealing with the past, but I can't pretend it didn't happen."
"All three of us are suffering from things that we are still dealing with now, although it doesn't seem that way to many people, because we are just participating in society," Mar Jan continues. "There are things we run up against that make us lag behind people our own age. I see that with the young siblings as well. I've come to terms with it now, but certainly until well after I was 20, I felt that other people had more opportunities, allowing them to do things that I couldn't."
"I could only start an education later. That had to do with money; I had no safety net. You then feel it takes more effort to get somewhere where others have already taken things for granted. I might have had a lot more work experience, for example. And now I've been sitting at home unemployed for a year and a half, because you can't work when you have so much to deal with."
A year after her, brother Shin (31) leaves the family. He is depressed, because his father does not allow him to do anything but work and sleep. He was living with, among others, handyman Josef B. and his brother Edino in a shed in Meppel, which was also used as a workshop. Father Van D. keeps promising that better times will come, but slowly reality dawns on Shin.
"Suddenly I realised: in twenty years time I will still be doing the same thing, so I had better leave."
Despite the fear that his father will find him, he leaves one evening with a backpack with some clothes in it and some money that he steals from Josef's wallet. "At first I thought that maybe my father was right. That he was the Messiah after all and that I had ruined everything by leaving."
He nevertheless continues and that night he walks from Meppel to Zwolle, where he sleeps on a bench and in the morning catches a train to Utrecht. There he wandered around for six months. "I had never felt so free. First I slept in the bushes with my sleeping bag, I had a radio and was very happy.
Suddenly I was free of everything. I got the ultimate feeling of freedom. I've never had that since."
Through a friend, whom he met when he ended up in a homeless shelter, he eventually got a room and also found work. "I've been away for ten years now and I haven't got a job or finished an education that I liked. And only now am I starting to wonder what I want to do."
Shin has been in therapy for seven years because of his recurring depression due to the misery of his past. Most of all, he was a victim of violence and humiliation. Among other things, he lived in a dog kennel for a time as a teenager.
Seeing, hearing Shin tell about his life in the dog kennel is heartbreaking
. He was a sweet dog, he says full of emotion, about the dog. The animal would warn when the father was coming out of the house, and he also kept him warm. Video around 10-12 minutes, just listen to the sound and notice the body language.
In 2010, before the family moved to Ruinerwold, Edino (28) also fled. "I was in a panic. Josef was shopping and I thought: this is my only chance. I grabbed a bag and ran away." He first goes to his sister, with whom he has secretly made contact via Hyves, and then lives with brother Shin for a few weeks. Eventually he applied for student grants and moved to Baflo to study in Groningen.
"I knew I could pay the rent, but my school fees didn't work out and I travelled by train every day illegally. When I hear the music I listened to a lot back then, I am back in that train with that lonely feeling. I was in debt because I hadn't learned how to manage money and I suddenly had a lot of freedom, so I made quite a few wrong choices."
After some wandering, he ended up in Zwolle. Through the years, he regularly went to Ruinerwold.
"I often drove past the farm and sat at a distance on a bench with binoculars, which I had bought specially for the purpose. Then I would sit and watch. At first I was very scared that I would be spotted, but later I thought: so what if they can see me..."
Edino seems cheerful and happy, but like Shin he also suffers from depression. Shin says to him: "You are very social, you have gathered a lot of people around you and you maintain the contacts as well. Sometimes I think, where do you get your energy from? But because you are busy with your surroundings, you forget your own problems. I have gathered fewer people around me and I automatically withdraw more. Then those feelings come up more. With you it's deeper.
Edino acknowledges that. "But we were taught in our upbringing that feeling sorry for yourself is wrong. If I think of what I have had the most punishment for, it is feeling sorry for myself. I am happy with a lot of things, though. If I look at what has saved me in the last seven years, it is my children. Because of them, I haven't been able to relapse all these years."
"I think now that it's all finally out in the open, the path is clear to look at who we are and what we want," Shin concludes.
"We were in a place that was created until now, because that's how life went. Now we have the chance to say, 'This is what we want and we are free to go and do that."'
BBM
Extra online aflevering gemist? Start met kijken op NPO Start
Slot Ruinerwold-docu: 'Ik heb de afgelopen tien jaar met een masker op geleefd'
