At the beginning she could only weep. Her tears, an appeal for help as well as an expression of misery, only aroused impatience in the teachers and mockery from the pupils. Sympathy between the children was suppressed by competition for rare favours; a harsh self-sufficiency was the norm. Anyone who betrayed weakness was derided and ostracised. The admired ones were strong, those who never showed emotion, who were ostentatiously dutiful in their religious observance and their demeanour to the sisters. They ruled their classes as miniature tyrannies, in imitation of the authority above them, taxing their companions for admiration, hair ribbons, or bread saved from their meals.

Sabine was a victim from the moment they saw her. Every instinctive gesture she made, seeking friends, exposing her weakness, was wrong. In the secret life of the long, vaulted dormitory where twenty girls slept in order of age and status, she was the runt. When the lights were out, they took it in turns to run silently to her bed and tweak her hair, to seize the pillow she had pulled over her head, to take one of her shoes and throw it to the other end of the room, to lift the covers and pour water onto her sheets.

Over time the tortures evolved, becoming more creative once they were taken in hand by Antoinette, one of the older girls who had been absent for some months, as the result of having had appendicitis. When she returned from hospital and convalescence, all things medical had become her obsession and Sabine was her patient. The sisters esteemed modesty highly and the girls took their weekly baths clad in their voluminous nightgowns. So the fascination for the whole dormitory of Antoinette’s operations was greater than simple defiance of the rules of the night. Over and over again she scored in chalk on Sabine’s skinny abdomen the line of her own scar, while two others, designated as nurses, held the patient’s nightgown over her head as a visual anaesthetic. From this the surgeon progressed to further examinations. Sabine was turned on her face for the administration of injections with needles from the sewing baskets; pencils were inserted into her anus for a length of time carefully monitored by Antoinette, before being removed and read as a thermometer. Sabine’s childish body made the modelling of ribs and spine, the muscles of buttocks and thighs a lesson in anatomy and reaction to pain. The experimentation took a new form in the summer when Antoinette acquired a knife from the dining room to make her work as surgeon more real. Unfortunately, it was not sharp and its effect was little different from that of the chalk, so Antoinette was able to carve and butcher her patient for some weeks, until by sawing too hard, in a cut that was to slice Sabine from the slit between her legs to the breastbone, blood was drawn. The surgical team and its audience fled, expecting to awake to a corpse in Sabine’s bed. However, the patient survived and did not even complain, for she could think of no one among the sisters that she could speak to on such a subject, as the body was an area of the strictest taboo.