Many moons ago (high school) I wrote a paper about Nazi Germany, with which I was (and still, to some degree, am) mildly obsessed. My paper was on the very topic that so fascinated me about the Nazis, and myriad other large-scale abdications of morality. Who, in short, were the Nazis? Monsters, capable of gleefully (or at least not un-gleefully) executing one of the most intense genocides in history? Or ordinary dudes, caught up in a whirlwind of power and authority and perhaps some misguided notion that theirs was a laudable mission?
The answer, of course, lies somewhere in between. Because the question is really the point. Are people bad and if so why? Or are people good and if so to what degree?
Jack Ketchum’s The Girl Next Door is one of a series of adaptations of the 1965 case of Sylvia Lekins, an Indiana teen who was held captive in the basement of her de facto foster mother, the bouffant-ed Gertrude Baniszewski. Along with her two daughters, son, and a group of neighborhood children, Baniszewski tortured Sylvia, and at times her younger sister Jenny, in ways that I almost feel uncomfortable writing here. Sylvia was burned with scalding water, forced to eat her own feces and sexually abused with a Coke bottle. She ultimately died in the house, and Baniszewski was later convicted of first-degree murder.
Continue reading “The girl (being held prisoner and tortured) next door”
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