Mother Elated by News Daughter has Been Tortured for Decades
Elba Reinshocker embraces her mother, Hilde, after being discovered in a basement where she was chained up for 22 years as a sex slave. Hilde said she “could not comprehend how happy she was” to learn that this was her daughter’s fate.
DATELINE–St. Louis:
“You know, there really can be miracles,” Hilde Reinshocker told a press conference, failing to contain her tears of joy. “I’m just so grateful Hilde has been enduring an unimaginable hell all this time.”
Elba Reinshocker, then 7, was abducted from a supermarket aisle in 1987. Previously presumed to have been raped once or twice and killed, it has recently come to light that Reinshocker was raped in excess of 5,000 times while living in the basement of her captor.
“You have no idea what a relief this is to our family,” noted Bill Harken, the guy that Hilde is dating. “When I first met Hilde, all she could talk about was how much she hoped Elba was in some basement somewhere in America, living what most people consider to be their worst nightmare. She never gave up hope that she had spent the last 22 years in misery and now our prayers have been answered.”
Elba fathered nine of her captor’s children since the Berlin Wall came down, enduring all pregnancies without anesthetics and with the bare minimum of nourishment. Most babies failed to come to term, but those that did were promptly snuffed out with a shovel.
“My only wish,” sighed Hilde toward the end of the press conference, “is that some of those children could have joined Elba in her nightmare. Maybe one of them could have grown up to catch the eye of her captor and they could have shared that experience together.”
Elba herself was mum on the issue of what a relief the last 22 years had been, though she did express happiness that she had not been raped that day. She noted that she was looking forward to a life of unimaginable paranoia and trauma as she dealt with her ordeal.
“I’m hoping to find new ways of feeling awful as I reconcile the pain of my struggle, the guilt at surviving, and the unspeakable horror of wondering if this could happen to me again.”
Hilde concluded with words of hope and encouragement for her fellow mothers who had presumed their children had been put out of a very brief misery after their abduction. “Don’t let anyone tell you they’re gone,” she said. “Keep fighting, keep praying, keep hoping, keep loving. Your child might just be chained up in the only place on Earth worse that Guantanamo Bay. And that thought should fill you with hope.”
Clever, but I’m confused…the argument is that it would have been better if everyone connected to this case (well, the case on which this “story” is based 😉 ) was dead after going through this? What other reaction did you expect the mother to have upon hearing her daughter was still alive–“Crap, wish she had bought it in year three. Now this is all so awkward…” would have been an improvement? Am I missing something?
It would seem black comedy is not for everyone, even every Mepper.
Doesn’t it seem odd to you that people are hoping their children are somewhere, out there, living through the worst imaginable pain? I guess not.
I guess the question comes down to whether there are fates worse than death. Perhaps as a humanist, you don’t believe so. But I think if anything prompts the inquiry, it’s cases like this.
True…I’m not a big black comedy fan in most cases. 🙂 As for your premise…I’m sympathetic to humanism, but as a UU I don’t buy in entirely (since I think some form of afterlife is a real possibility, even a probability, and I’d certainly prefer it to the alternative! 🙂 ). But I do think death is pretty close to the worst fate one can experience as a living human being, assuming the ability to think, reason and dream is still intact in that living being.
And as a parent, I have to say I don’t think (and strongly doubt you’ll find any other parents who do) it’s even remotely odd that parents hope their missing children are somewhere, out there. But it’s pretty unfair to suggest that they’re also hoping for the second part of your sentence (“living through the worst imaginable pain”). Be fair: do you really think the mother was referring to her happiness at being reunited with her daughter, or her happiness that her daughter suffered terribly during the years she was missing?
I doubt very, VERY much that it was option two.
Yeah, black comedy is a tricky thing, I guess. This is definitely not funny, as any parent (I think) would attest. I think it’s because this is a plausible scenario that has been twisted in an attempt to make it funny, rather than inventing something that is simply absurd, and laughing about it, even if it is gross, or morbid, etc. (Monty Python’s Black Knight, for example…..)