Orphanage was like a Nazi concentration camp, inquiry hears

A FORMER resident of a notorious children’s home yesterday likened the nuns who ran it to Nazi concentration camp commandants.

The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry heard claims ‘systematic persecution and torture’ was a ‘way of life’, as youngsters were ‘starved and beaten’.

A witness, known as Gerry, who went to Smyllum Park in Lanark aged four in 1961, said he still remembers the violence meted out by nuns in his nightmares. He told a hearing in Edinburgh the children at Smyllum were treated like ‘inmates’.

Another witness said she saw a nun repeatedly striking a young boy’s head on a piano, leaving ‘blood everywhere’ – and she did not recall ever seeing him again.

The disclosures are the latest in a series of horrifying allegations about Smyllum, run by Catholic religious order the Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul.

Gerry said on one occasion he was chased by a nun he likened to a ‘demon’. He said he ran to the Mother Superior’s office.

Gerry noticed ‘the contrast between their living conditions and ours’. In the Mother Superior’s ‘plush’ office, a priest was drinking tea from a china cup.

He said it was ‘just like the commandant of a concentration camp’ – living in comfort while ‘the inmates were all in their barracks’.

Gerry added: ‘The priest glared at me as if to say, “What the hell are you doing here?”. There was no concern about my distress.

‘I just looked around me and I could not believe how they were living.

‘It was like stepping into another world... they were sitting in a plush environment while we were being tortured on the outside’.

Gerry, who compared Smyllum to a ‘dungeon’, said his sister, who was also at the home, told him she ate grass because she was so hungry – and the nuns had shut her inside a milk churn as a punishment.

He said ‘criminality was happening on a daily basis’, adding: ‘Abuse doesn’t really cover it – it was systematic persecution and torture as a way of life. For me, it was a concentration camp, not a care home.’

Children were segregated from their siblings, which Gerry believes was ‘orchestrated’ with the deliber- ate aim of ‘dehumanising’ them. He said: ‘We were commodities.’

He told the inquiry he reported the abuse to police in the late 1990s – but that ‘nothing happened’.

Fiona Young, who was admitted to Smyllum in 1973 aged five or six, waived her right to anonymity. She said abuse was an ‘everyday occurrence’. She said a boy defied an instruction to stop playing around on the piano and a nun ‘got him by the hair and slammed his head off the piano two or three times’. There was ‘blood everywhere’. She added: ‘I don’t remember seeing him after that. I cannot remember seeing him again.’

Commenting on the nuns, she said: ‘I don’t know how they have been able to live with themselves.’

The inquiry continues.