All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2012 ISBN 9780007369829

Version: 2014-08-18

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

Dedication

To our sister, Davida

To my sister in sorrow: Too well did I understand The look in your haunted eyes; Pain and disillusionment. You fought a losing battle, And lost. And died. I will shed for you the tears Of a lifetime you will never live. The tears you will never more shed. Madonna of suffering, Wrapped in the cold shroud of death. I wept with you. I weep for you. For I still can. The tide of tears has turned. Sleep, my sister, And weep no more.

(Written on Davida’s tombstone, Juliana 2005)

Epigraph

Lies written in ink cannot disguise

facts written in blood.

– Lu Xun (1881–1936)

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

Prologue

Part One: Celeste’s Story

Chapter One: Daddy’s Little Girl

Chapter Two: Loveville

Chapter Three: Come Union

Chapter Four: Behind Four Walls

Chapter Five: Indoctrination

Chapter Six: Torn

Part Two: Juliana’s Story

Chapter Seven: A Broken Family

Chapter Eight: The Odd One Out

Chapter Nine: The Rod of Correction

Chapter Ten: Adopt Me, Please

Part Three: Kristina’s Story

Chapter Eleven: Living a Double Life

Chapter Twelve: A Gypsy Missionary

Chapter Thirteen: Abusive Love

Chapter Fourteen: Escape

Part Four: Journey to Freedom

Chapter Fifteen: Hide and Seek

Chapter Sixteen: Searching for Celeste

Chapter Seventeen: On Opposite Sides

Chapter Eighteen: Bittersweet Reunion

Chapter Nineteen: A ‘Deceiver Yet True’

Chapter Twenty: A Tale of Two Fathers

Chapter Twenty-One: Rehabilitation

Chapter Twenty-Two: House of the Open Pussy

Chapter Twenty-Three: Anorexia

Chapter Twenty-Four: A Dream Come True

Chapter Twenty-Five: Is Justice a Dream?

Chapter Twenty-Six: Pearl of Africa

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Breaking Free

Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Chained Eagle

Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Power of Love

Epilogue

Exclusive sample chapter

About the Author

About the Publisher

Introduction

The Children of God started in Southern California in the late 1960s, among the hippies and dropouts of Huntington Beach. The founder, David Berg, was born in 1919, in Oakland, California. His mother, Virginia Lee Brandt Berg, was a celebrated evangelist with the Christian Missionary Alliance. In 1944 Berg married Jane Miller, a young Baptist youth worker. After the birth of their second child, Berg became the pastor of a Christian Missionary Alliance Church in Arizona. However, after only three years he was expelled, reputedly for a sex scandal. His expulsion began his life-long bitterness and disillusionment with organized religion.

In December 1967, Berg moved his family – his wife Jane (later known as Mother Eve) and their four children, Deborah, Faithy, Aaron and Hosea – to Huntington Beach, California, where they stayed with his eighty-year-old mother. She had started a small ministry from a coffee shop called the Light Club, distributing sandwiches to the hippies, surfers and dropouts who congregated on the pier. But when the Light Club’s clean-cut image failed to attract the longhaired hippies, Mrs Berg saw the opportunity for her son and grandchildren to minister to the youngsters with the music and fervour of their own generation. In a short time, David Berg and his family began attracting the youth in droves with the free food and anti-system, anti-war message they endorsed.

The group travelled across the United States gathering more young disciples as they went, and soon opened communities across the country. They attracted a substantial amount of media coverage, and in some articles the writers referred to them as the ‘Children of God’, a name that the fledgling group subsequently adopted.

After a string of illicit affairs with some of his young female members, Berg found a devoted companion in his young and ambitious secretary, Karen Zerby, aka ‘Maria’. Publicly branding his estranged wife Jane and late mother the ‘Old Church’, Berg endorsed Maria and the Children of God as the ‘New Church’, and himself the last prophet of the Endtime. He also started using the pseudonym ‘Moses David’, identifying himself with King David of the Bible and the prophet Moses, who had led the Children of Israel out of captivity in Egypt (the ‘System’) to the Promised Land. Berg decided to start a royal dynasty. His series of residences were designated ‘The King’s House’ and he crowned himself and Maria, the King and the Queen.

For many years a council of ministers ran the cult, mostly members of Berg’s extended family, referred to as the Royal Family. He expected Family members to obey him and the other leaders without question. The only contact between Berg and his members came through his many writings, detailing policies, beliefs and instruction on how the communes were to be run, as well as prophecies and revelations he claimed proceeded directly from God.

In the early 1970s, the Children of God fell under the close scrutiny of the media and law-enforcement agencies, as parents of recruited children witnessed complete personality changes in their offspring after they joined the cult. More worrying was the fact that all contact between them was severed, some of their children disappearing in the night not to be seen again for years.

Evading negative publicity and a court summons, Berg fled to Europe, advising his followers to get out of America. The group left the USA in 1972 in a mass exodus to evangelize and recruit in other countries, beginning with Europe. Berg and Maria arrived in England in 1972.

Increasingly paranoid for his personal safety, he gradually withdrew from his followers, keeping his whereabouts secret. While in seclusion, Berg and Maria experimented with a new controversial method of using sex to win converts and supporters, infamously known as ‘Flirty Fishing’. Berg gradually introduced the idea of Flirty Fishing to his members through a series of letters documenting their own encounters. He also promulgated a new revelation called the ‘Law of Love’. Berg told his followers that the Ten Commandments were now obsolete. Everything done in love (including sex) was sanctioned in the eyes of God. Adultery, incest, extramarital and adult – child sex were no longer sins, as long as they were done ‘in love’. He demanded loyalty to his radical message of the Law of Love and Flirty Fishing and every member was required to actively put them into practice or leave. Consequently, two-thirds of the group left, marking the end of the Children of God era and the beginning of the Family of Love.

In 1979 Berg wrote a letter called ‘My Childhood Sex’ in which he revealed that a nanny had performed oral sex on him as a young toddler, which he said he had enjoyed. He said that it was normal, natural and healthy and that there was nothing wrong with it, which gave anyone so inclined carte blanche to follow suit. In the following years other Mo Letters and Family publications reinforced the idea that children should be allowed to enjoy sexual contact among themselves as well as with adults – and many adults in the Family embraced and carried out these suggestions.

Christopher Jones was born in December 1951 in a town near Hamelin, Germany, to Glen, a British military officer and Krystyna, a young Polish woman he had met while stationed in Palestine. He was educated at a public school in Cheltenham, and studied drama at Rose Bruford College. He dropped out after the second year and joined the Children of God in 1973. He has fathered fifteen children, including Celeste, Kristina and Juliana, by seven different women and remains a member of the cult.

Rebecca Jones was born in March 1957 and had a secure middle-class upbringing in the south of England. Her father, Bill, was a civil engineer and her mother, Margaret, a devoted housewife. Her parents were not religious, but they sent her to the local Sunday school at the age of five. She became a Sunday-school teacher when she was twelve and two years later she was baptized. Rebecca was recruited from her school by the Children of God at the young age of sixteen, and met and married our father in 1974. They had three children together, including Celeste and Kristina, before they were separated. Rebecca left the cult in 1987.

Serena Buhring was born near Hanover, Germany in October 1956. Her father was an architect and her mother an accomplished musician, playing the piano, violin and the cello. Serena travelled as a hippie in India where she joined the Children of God. She met our father after he separated from Rebecca and had three children by him, including Juliana. Serena is still an associate member of the cult.

Prologue

In January 2005, our sister Davida died from a drug overdose. She was twenty-three. The shock of Davida’s death affected us deeply though we understood her pain and despair. Each of us in our own way has struggled with painful memories of abandonment, neglect and abuse as children born and raised under the malign influence of a religious cult, the Children of God.

We were systematically abused, physically, mentally, emotionally and sexually, from the earliest age. We were separated from each other and our parents and raised communally in this organization, which was also known as the ‘Family’.

Unlike our parents who had burned their bridges and left their former lives, we were never given a choice over the paths our lives would follow. Isolated from society, we were controlled by fear – fear of the government, police, doctors and social workers, and the even greater fear of God’s wrath if we ever left the protection of the Family.

Our childhood was dominated by one man: David Berg – a man we never met, but who was like an invisible ghost that was with us at all times. He was the warped and manipulative force behind the Children of God. David Berg liked to see himself as a benevolent parental figure, and called us, his followers, the ‘Children of David’. He saw himself as the successor of King David and the Prophet Moses – calling himself Moses David, or Mo for short. The children were taught to call him ‘Grandpa’. He was the head of our family, the prophet, the leader, our ‘light in the midst of darkness’. The rules we followed were dictated by his words. We read about every detail of his life, his dreams, his likes and dislikes, and the women he slept with and the children he abused. From a very young age we memorized his words and hours of every day were dedicated to studying his writings, called Mo Letters. ‘Word Time’ – which was the time spent reading these letters and studying the Bible – was an important part of daily life. It would be difficult if not impossible to write about our life without acknowledging the dominating influence of David Berg on our lives.

From birth, we were conditioned to obey and follow the way of the cult. We had no choice, and knew no other way. We never heard our father express an opinion that was his own; it was always, ‘Grandpa said…’ If we were punished it was because we had disobeyed Mo’s rules; if we were rewarded it was because we were ‘faithful followers’. Our father’s devotion to Berg and faith in his prophecies and predictions was unwavering. If he questioned if any of it was real, or if it was a chimera – smoke and mirrors – he never showed it, not even behind closed doors.

Berg taught that birth control was rebellion against God, so within a few years there were thousands of children born into the group. He boasted that we were the ‘hope of the future’ – a pure second generation untainted by the outside world. We were told it was the highest privilege to be born and raised in the Family, free from the shackles of the ‘System’, as the outside world was called. It was our destiny to become God’s Endtime soldiers, and to give our lives for the cause. Berg predicted the world would end in 1993, and we would become the leaders of the New Millennium. As our lives on earth would be short, we were never allowed to just be children. Our individuality was suppressed, and we were simply commodities used to further the collective goals of the group.

The belief that damaged us the most was Berg’s ‘Law of Love’. God was love, and love equalled sex. Sharing your body with someone else was considered the highest expression of love. Age was not a barrier in Berg’s Law of Love and Family children were made to participate in his warped, paedophilic philosophy. His own children and grandchildren suffered from his incestuous predilections.

In this book we describe the emotional journey we undertook from our earliest years, through to our teens when we secretly, then more openly questioned it – and finally, when we struggled to break free, like butterflies caught in a spider’s sticky web. This is a story of darkness and light, of imprisonment of the soul, of redemption and freedom. We survived – many didn’t. Thousands of the Family’s second generation have had to deal with the devastating consequences of their parents’ blind faith in a leader who claimed he was the voice of God on earth. Those who have bravely spoken out about their suffering have been vilified and slandered by their former abusers. Our hope is that in telling our story, you will hear the voices of the children they tried to silence.

Celeste Jones, Kristina Jones, Juliana Buhring

England 2007

Part One

Celeste’s Story

CHAPTER ONE Daddy’s Little Girl

I was playing alone in the front garden of a white house near the small fishing village of Rafina, in Greece. Our garden had three olive trees, as well as an apricot, fig and peach, all ripe with fruit. I sat under a large, old pine tree that cast deep pools of shade. The ground was bleached and bone dry from the sun, and I amused myself by drawing pictures on the parched earth with a white rock. I was five years old.

I had little recollection of my mother, only a brief memory of her playing guitar and singing, ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so’, as I played with my little sister Kristina on a bunk bed in a small room in another land. But I was fiercely loyal to Mum and talked about her every day, even though I had not seen her for two years. I still missed her and my sister, and barely remembered my baby brother David. I clung desperately to the hope that Mum would come back. Like a record that never stopped spinning, I’d repeatedly ask my dad, ‘Why did she leave us?’

Dad would hug me and explain. ‘Mum decided to be with someone else, and I couldn’t let you go. You were the oldest, and we’ve always been close, haven’t we?’

I nodded. I loved Dad just as much as my mum, but I thought it was unfair to have to make a choice between them.

‘What about Kristina and David?’ I asked.

‘They were too young. They still needed to be with their mother.’

Dad worked long hours in a makeshift recording studio set up in the basement of our house, producing and acting as DJ on a radio show, Music with Meaning. Because of this I had a nanny, Serena, a young German woman. I resented her, and made life as difficult as I could for her by not cooperating or even acknowledging her. Serena had long, straight dark hair and brown eyes magnified by a pair of thick glasses. Poor Serena. Whatever she did to try to win me round, I was determined not to like her. I thought her German accent sounded funny, and she was constantly trying to give me wheatgerm with unsweetened yoghurt and spoonfuls of cod liver oil, which I hated the smell and taste of.

We belonged to the Children of God, a deeply secretive and religious organization with tentacles that spread across the world. The leader and prophet was named David Berg. We knew him as Moses David; my Dad called him Mo, and I knew him as our ‘Grandpa’. He ordained everything we said, did, thought and even dreamed. Everything in our lives, even the smallest and most insignificant detail – including the food we ate – was regulated by Mo. He had said that our diet should consist of healthy food and no white sugar, and Serena enthusiastically embraced Mo’s healthy eating policy. ‘It will give you strong bones and teeth,’ she would tell me – but it didn’t make it taste any better. She was never cruel, but she was strict, and I saw her as an unwelcome intrusion into my life. Originally, Dad had told me she would be staying for three months, and I had been counting the days until she left.

That sunny day as I played under the pine tree, I glanced up to see Dad and Serena walk out on to the front veranda. They were standing very close together and, instantly, I sensed a kind of electricity between them.

‘Honey, I have something exciting to tell you,’ my father called to me. As he spoke, my tall, handsome Dad, whom I adored more than anybody in the world, turned and embraced Serena.

As I walked towards them, I noticed their faces were lit up with beaming smiles. Oh no, I groaned. This did not look good.

‘We’ve decided to get together, sweetheart,’ Dad pronounced, in a far too happy tone of voice for my liking. ‘Serena is going to be your new mother.’

‘Not her!’ I shouted. ‘I hate her!’ I could not even bear to speak her name. ‘I want my mother. Why can’t she come back to live with us? It’s not fair!’ I sobbed. I turned and ran off to a corner of the garden and stood with my back to them.

Dad followed me and bent towards me, concerned. He put his hand on my shoulder. ‘Sweetie, you know your mother has gone for good. She’s not coming back.’

‘But I want my sister and brother here. It’s not fair.’ I stuck out my bottom lip in a pout.

‘But you have so many brothers and sisters here you can play with,’ Dad said.

‘It’s not the same,’ I complained.

‘Honey, we’re all one family. Now watch that lower lip…or you’ll trip over it if you’re not careful.’

I half smiled, if only to make Dad feel better.

Mo said that we weren’t supposed to have individual families. Our brothers and sisters in the Children of God were our true family. We even referred to ourselves as the ‘Family’. But I refused to forget my mother or Kristina and baby David, though I was scared I was beginning to forget what they looked like.

The only photograph Dad had of Mum was of her standing behind a double buggy, with me sitting in one side and my baby sister next to me. I studied the photograph carefully. Mum had long, sandy blonde hair down to her waist, blue eyes and a wide smile.

‘She’s beautiful,’ I said. ‘And that’s my sister?’ I couldn’t see her face clearly because of the picture’s poor quality. Kristina was just a toddler, aged about a year old, with two little pigtails. I was eighteen months older and very like her. We were both dressed in pretty cotton frocks and had sun hats on. As hard as I stared, I couldn’t summon up the slightest memory of them and mourned, feeling a gaping hole in my being.

Dad described how he and Mum used to take us with them when they went out witnessing in the streets. ‘I’d manoeuvre the pushchair in the way of someone walking the opposite direction and then hand them a leaflet and witness to them, telling them about Jesus and how they could be saved. Indian people love children and you were so cute and pretty. They’d pinch your cheeks and chat to you. They felt they couldn’t be rude with you two sitting there gazing up at them like two little angels.’

‘Do you have a picture of David?’ I asked.

‘This is when he was just three months old,’ Dad replied, producing a small black and white photograph.

‘He’s so cute. Look at those cheeks!’ I said proudly. He was lying on his tummy lifting up his head with his chubby arms, and had a big grin on his face.

My own early memories were brief, seen in a series of quick little snapshots, like windows opening in my mind’s eye. Much of what I gleaned, Dad told me in our rare quiet times alone. I’d cuddle up on his lap and he’d tell me selective vignettes that gradually built into a bigger picture. But it was always half a picture; he never told me much about Mum.

Perhaps as a way of keeping her alive, and forlornly holding on to the remnants of a family life, I often asked Dad to tell me the story of how he and Mum had first met and then married, and my birth. He didn’t tell me a lot about it; it wasn’t until I had grown up that I heard the full story.

‘Your mum was young and beautiful – just seventeen years old when we married. I was twenty-two.’

I was always full of questions. ‘And what about your dad?’

Dad told me his father was a lawyer and military judge in the British army. He had no recollection of his mother, as she had died when he was four and his father had remarried soon after. He and his half-brother were sent to a boarding school in Cheltenham.

‘I was a rebel at school. I was even expelled after I led a protest where a group of us locked ourselves in the main hall.’

‘Why – what did you protest about?’ I asked.

‘The school prefects used to beat us for almost anything, no matter what. They’d come in at night with their flashlights and shine them in our faces to wake us up. We got fed up with the injustice and stood up against it.’

Thrown out, he enrolled at a drama school in London and in his holidays travelled throughout Europe. ‘I was searching for the meaning to life,’ he explained.

I listened earnestly as he described how, in pursuit of life’s meaning, he read many spiritual books and dabbled in the occult and meditation.

I shivered. It had been relentlessly drummed into us by Mo that drugs and Ouija boards were dangerous, because they could open the door of your mind to the Devil.

When he was telling me about those years, Dad said, ‘I ended up deeply depressed and disillusioned with life.’

‘Wasn’t drama school what you wanted?’

‘It was empty. Without the Lord, it’s meaningless. Just husks, sweetie.’

It was at this low point that one day he received a call from one of his mates who had just returned from Istanbul. This friend had planned to walk on foot to India, but instead had been converted by the Children of God en route, and had returned to England to spread the word.

Dad was taken aback by the dramatic change in his previously disturbed and doped-up friend. He now seemed confident, with purpose and direction. ‘He told me it was all thanks to the Children of God. I was curious.’

In the hippie era of peace and love, the message proclaimed by the Children of God seemed exciting: find a new life in Christ, drop out, live communally, forsake materialism and share all things, just like the early disciples. But this was not just another zealous evangelical group from America – it was God’s Endtime Army, the elite, who would lead a lost world in need of salvation during its darkest hour.

The Children of God believed that with the end of the world looming near, pursuing anything else in life seemed pointless. Dad was convinced. He gave away most of his possessions and turned up at the doorstep of a commune in Hollingbourne in Kent with just a small suitcase, ready for his new life as a disciple.

His eyes lighting up at the memory, Dad told me, ‘It was amazing. Everyone lived under the same roof and shared all things just like the Early Christians in the Book of Acts. It was the family I had been searching for.’

New members were told to choose a Bible name to reflect their new life. Dad chose Simon Peter. His full-time job was now to go out on to the streets and witness – the name they used for trying to win converts. Handing out literature for a donation was called ‘litnessing’.

Always full of new ideas, Dad came up with a novel way to litness. He laughed as he described it. ‘I dressed up as a clown, with a bright red nose and a funny hat that had a bouncing little plastic birdie on top.’

He wiggled his fingers on top of his head and made a face. I giggled. ‘I bet you looked silly!’

‘Oh, I did – but I was a clown. Clowns are allowed to look silly. I’d jump in front of passers-by and make them laugh before handing them a tract and asking for a donation. I became a star litnesser and fundraiser – I made hundreds of pounds a week for the Family.’

I laughed as I tried to imagine my dad clowning it up in London, a city I didn’t remember, although I’d been born there. Street solicitation was against the law, however, and Dad had run-ins with the police. Of course, he didn’t see anything wrong in what he was doing. He was obeying God.

Dad told me he met my mum in Hollingbourne, as they both joined the same commune as new disciples on the same day. She was just sixteen and had been recruited straight from school. Young and idealistic, she thought the Children of God was a bona fide missionary society. My parents were ‘married’ by the group, before being legally married in church. After a three-day honeymoon in the Lake District, they squatted in a large house in Hampstead that the Children of God had taken over.

Dad used his training as an actor to do stage performances, dramatically reciting whole portions of the Mo Letters – missives from the prophet that were mailed regularly to every commune as a guide for us disciples to follow and live by. He loved the thrill of acting, and his talent soon set him apart as a sort of celebrity within the group. Spurred on by his success, he recorded more of these Mo Letters in a series of cassette tapes called Wild Wind, which were distributed across the communes for disciples to listen to. While Dad was busy and fulfilled, Mum, who was pregnant, was terribly ill, and it must have been a great relief when, on 29 January 1975, after three days of difficult labour, I was born in the small attic room on the third floor of the Hampstead Home.

Becoming new parents did not stop Mum and Dad from pursuing their new-found mission to save the world. Missionary teams were being set out and my parents received a ‘prophecy’ to go to India. A disciple was not supposed to have a will of his own, but had to follow God’s will by praying and hearing from Him in a prophecy. These prophecies gave the stamp of Divine approval on any plans or decisions that needed to be made.

In reality, the British authorities had begun to investigate the Family’s activities, especially their aggressive proselytizing and soliciting of donations, and Mo told everyone to move from the UK and go on to greener pastures, such as India, South America and the Far East – places where the authorities would be far less likely to care about what a group of Western dropouts did.

When our little family first arrived in India we went to an apartment in a block in Bombay designed for the middle classes, although it was about the size of an English council flat. It had three bedrooms, which we shared with two other couples and two single brothers. After a few weeks my parents found a two-bedroom ground floor flat in Khar, a subdivision of Bombay. There were so many people staying there, disciples coming and going from other parts of India, it was always crowded. They had very little furniture except two single beds and a table and chairs in the living room.

12 İz.

Not Without My Sister: The True Story of Three Girls Violated and Betrayed by Those They Trusted

Bu kitabı arayanlar okuyor