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For decades, Evy, who was fifty-five, had been haunted by memories of the house, where she had been confined for several months, starting when she was eight. She remembered being wrested from bed in the middle of the night at the home of her foster family, in the Alpine valley of Kleinwalsertal. Perhaps two dozen children were living there. In the morning, Evy attended school in the villa. She was terrified of wetting the bed, because whenever she did the white coats would awaken her, even from deep sleep, and march her to the bathroom for an ice-cold shower; she would then have to stand in a corner for the rest of the night. Children at the villa were issued thick, bloomer-like underpants. Shrill alarm bells rang day and night. Orders blared from loudspeakers that hung over doorways; to Evy, the voices seemed to belong to all-seeing powers. Sometimes she was summoned to recount her dreams to an adult. Once, she was shown a set of farm animals and told to assign to each one the identity of a person in her foster family. Evy agonized—surely it was the wrong choice to make her foster mother the pig. One day, she and some other children were told to line up in front of a closet to receive a treat. Evy shook her skirt frantically, jumping up and down. White-coated adults carried her to the bathroom, where they held her down on the tile floor and administered a shot. The pervasive sense of shame and surveillance had created a blurring effect. Evy could recall almost nothing about the children who had slept alongside her, in one big room, perhaps because talking to one another was largely banned. A yellow dot had marked her bed and the location of her toothbrush, and the color had perturbed her ever since. As an adult, she reminded herself that yellow was a happy shade, and tried to overcome her aversion by bringing home sunflowers. When Evy was twenty, she moved to the United States. They relocated to D. She and Schwartzman later divorced, but over the years Evy amassed a tight circle of friends in D. In middle age, she felt more grounded than she had ever been. She was born in in an Austrian town called Feldkirch, to a twenty-two-year-old single mother who was staying in a Catholic home for women. She relinquished Evy to foster care. A family took in Evy when she was three, with an eye to adoption, but the mother, Anni, seemed to quickly turn on her. Managing the B. Anni told Evy that her mother had been a whore. Anni and her husband had a biological daughter, who was a year older than Evy. This girl was well behaved and shy; Evy was tomboyish, exuberant, and a little clumsy—the kind of kid who always had a banged-up shin or a skinned knee. At school, a priest sometimes scolded her, mournfully, for giving her delicate foster mother such a hard time. When Evy was sent to the villa, it confirmed her worst fear: nobody wanted her. After a number of months in Innsbruck, Evy was abruptly sent back to Kleinwalsertal. But Anni soon became impatient with her again, and shipped her off to an orphanage in Kempten, Germany, run by nuns. Then, one day, she saw a priest chase away a poor, mentally ill woman who was trying to give him some flowers—and she began to lose her faith. The nuns, Evy recalled, sometimes yanked her hair or slapped her. Evy aged out of the orphanage at sixteen. Evy was on her own. For a while, she worked at another local guesthouse, whose owner let her stay in a room upstairs, then moved to Vienna, where she felt lonely and unmoored. A panel slid open, and a face appeared. Evy tried to ask about her stay there. The panel closed, with a clang. Maria Nowak-Vogl, a psychologist at the University of Innsbruck. The government, Evy learned, was now doing so. So was bed-wetting. The story of the Innsbruck child-observation station, and other places like it, was entwined with the history of postwar Austria and its deeply flawed de-Nazification. Nowak-Vogl had started housing children on Sonnenstrasse in , under the sponsorship of the Tyrolean government, and had overseen the operation until At least thirty-six hundred children, most of them between the ages of seven and fifteen, had been confined for up to several months at a time. Some kids went to orphanages; others, to reformatories, where they often had to work in laundries or otherwise provide free labor. Nowak-Vogl also sent children to work with farming families. Occasionally, a kid got to go home. Evy felt a rush of validation. All of us have childhood memories that sporadically pop into our minds, like slides in a randomly organized carrousel, and it can be hard to make sense of these fragments. But most of us can check our recollections against those of parents, siblings, cousins, childhood friends. Now, as she scrolled through articles and reports about it, she confirmed, and clarified, many bewildering aspects of her experience. Evy had correctly recalled the consequence: a freezing shower. Only a small percentage of the children were given epiphysan. Twelve pages long and printed in a tiny font, it is perverse in its despotic specificity. Personal belongings, including books and dolls, were taken away upon arrival. The more that Evy read, the angrier she became. Nearly four thousand children? Until ? Eight or so similar facilities had operated in Austria after the Second World War. How many thousands of children had spent time in repressive psychiatric institutions like hers? We had been friendly acquaintances for years. Our kids had attended the same elementary school, in Northwest D. Evy was high-spirited, flaxen-haired, and casually glamorous, with a wide, dazzling smile. More than almost any parent I knew, she was comfortable around defiant teen-agers. When my daughter was in middle school, with purple-streaked hair and an emotional intensity that discomfited some adults, Evy made a point of telling me how great she was. She could also obtain her medical records. She was moved when she received a letter of apology from Gabriele Fischer, a Tyrolean official in charge of youth welfare. Fischer said that Evy was entitled to an immediate payout of fifteen hundred euros; upon turning sixty, she could receive a pension of three hundred euros a month. Evy requested a copy of her medical file from the villa. Her stay had lasted from December 27, , to April 17, It included a small photograph of her at eight, smiling brightly under ragged blond bangs. How had Evy ended up under her power? Had Evy been given epiphysan—and, if so, were there long-term effects? How many victims knew about the restitution program? We agreed to travel to Austria together. There were people—officials, researchers—whom Evy wanted to meet in person. She was also considering going to the villa. The country felt claustrophobic to her—a cold basement crammed with detritus from her past. Evy was a natural as a mother, but, given the deprivations of her childhood, she had to learn the lingo. When she heard a friend in D. Innsbruck is a pretty university town whose backdrop of snow-cloaked peaks can make a visitor feel dizzy. For Evy—whose every minute in Innsbruck was a Foucauldian nightmare—none of this felt familiar. Neither did the people we were meeting there. She and Evy hugged for a long time, like old friends. Moreover, Evy was a bed-wetter and a child born out of wedlock—categories that Nowak-Vogl associated with deviance. Friedmann said it was certainly possible that Evy had received epiphysan. Epiphysan had been tested on humans once before: in the nineteen-thirties, male prisoners in Vienna were given the drug, which appeared to temporarily curb the impulse to masturbate. But Nowak-Vogl was the first to administer it to children. But records of the medication were erratic, and there was evidence suggesting that Nowak-Vogl had ordered its use in less controlled settings, including private homes. Patients—who were told little, if anything, about epiphysan—often regarded the shots as a punishment. Nowak-Vogl, Friedmann told us, was willing to prescribe epiphysan even though almost nothing was known about its side effects. Ideologically, her preoccupations placed her in the mainstream of postwar cultural attitudes in Austria, especially among traditional Catholics. Bodily shame has plagued many a childhood, but if the literature of Austria is any indication, that country was particularly thick with it in the twentieth century. But, even in this context, the measures that Nowak-Vogl took were extreme. To justify the use of epiphysan, she relied on a panopticon-like system of surveillance that made it virtually certain every child would be caught touching herself. Nowak-Vogl appears to have adopted an anecdotal, after-the-fact approach to information-gathering. Whatever risks the shots entailed were worth it, Nowak-Vogl wrote in her paper on hypersexuality. In a country whose economy had been shattered by the Second World War, her approach, however brutal, had its utility for the authorities. To this day, there has been no systematic research into the long-term effects of epiphysan, but the expert commission reported that the extract has a short half-life, and is therefore unlikely to cause health issues in later adulthood. I asked Friedmann how influential Nowak-Vogl had been beyond the hermetic world of the child-observation station. It turned out that she had published and lectured widely, and had written popular advice manuals about child rearing. The Catholic Church awarded her a papal medal for her service in ecclesiastic marriage courts, which can grant annulments. Her father, Alfred, was a juvenile-court judge. When the Nazis occupied northern Italy, from to , Alfred presided over a Sondergericht , or special court, in Bolzano. During the war, Nowak-Vogl attended a Nazi-run teacher-training school. She studied medicine at the University of Innsbruck, and went on to receive a doctorate in educational philosophy there, in The goal of the field, which relied on close collaboration among medical experts, the courts, the state, the police, and the youth-welfare system, was less to help individual children feel understood than to turn them into productive, rule-abiding, sexually regulated members of society. They had no children. The couple apparently shared an interest in the rather grim wooden religious sculptures of a local folk artist. And in dinner situations it was not very nice to talk with her. She had learned that it was headed by a distinguished academic who lectured on a subject that interested her: measuring concentration and memory in children. Wallinger stayed for about a year. Moreover, the child-observation station was around the corner from the house where Wallinger lived with her family. When Evy and I contacted Wallinger, who is now a psychoanalyst, she was in the Canary Islands, where she lives part time, but she agreed to speak to us on Zoom. She wore pink lipstick and dangly earrings; shoulder-length silver hair framed her face. She was clearly troubled by her memories of the child-observation station and expressed worry about upsetting Evy. Her empathy made Evy cry—the only time I ever saw her do so in an interview. She was maybe five. But she typically took the morning shift, arriving at work in her white uniform just before the wake-up routine. In the early twentieth century, a punitive approach to bed-wetting was common, including in America. Most experts gave little credence to the many developmental, physical, and emotional issues that cause a substantial minority of children to wet their beds past the toddler stage. Instead, children were sometimes thought to do it intentionally, out of laziness or defiance. Inventions such as the bed-wetting alarm could exacerbate the problem, waking up an entire household and shaming the unfortunate child. By the time that Nowak-Vogl was practicing her humiliating techniques, however, stigmatizing treatments were being discredited. She was a holdout. Nowak-Vogl sometimes hit the children, too. She hit her around the face, and she fell. She hated children. In a certain way, she wanted to destroy childhood in the children. She wanted to make them robots. Wallinger told friends about the horrible treatment of children at Sonnenstrasse. They wore the brown jackets and the swastika. A psychiatric theory that sanctions ruthlessly authoritarian child rearing with the aim of producing biddable workers can license, and even glorify, the person who implements it. Nowak-Vogl exercised cruel dominion over children, but she always did so within the framework of academic expertise. Equally alarming was the thought that more women were having sex outside marriage. Politicians and journalists publicly fretted about venereal disease, particularly among women who had betrayed the fatherland by sleeping with Allied soldiers. Austrians also worried that the deprivations of the war and its aftermath had fostered misbehavior in children. Parents were busy organizing everyday survival, children had to contribute to it and sometimes participated in semi-legal activities, such as the black-market trade. In the fifties and sixties, as Austria focussed on rebounding economically, the government of Tyrol placed more children in state institutions than during any period before or since—sometimes simply because a kid had a working-class single mother. Even when Nowak-Vogl wrote about the importance of sleep for children, she managed to sound fascistic. By the seventies, Nowak-Vogl was also presenting her hypervigilant approach as an antidote to student-protest movements. In Germany, a reckoning with Nazism was hard to shirk, but many Austrians evaded responsibility by portraying their country as an Opfernation —victim nation—rather than as an enthusiastic participant in Nazi annexation. There was no substantive restitution for Austrian victims of Nazi atrocities, and the U. In the mid-nineties, the government finally began compensating victims of Nazi war crimes. By then, though, former Nazis had held positions of power for decades. Among them were doctors and psychiatrists who had run Am Spiegelgrund, the Viennese institution where Hans Asperger had consigned children and adolescents with disabilities. But these were exceptions. Hans Bertha, a key medical adviser to the T-4 program, was never called to account, and he became the dean of the medical faculty at the University of Graz. If anything, Nazi psychiatrists, including those who sanctioned the murder of children, found themselves in a privileged position after the war. Many Jewish practitioners, including Sigmund Freud, had fled Austria in the thirties, and few of them returned; this exodus had opened up professional opportunities for Nazi scientists, many of whom, in addition to their ethical failings, were mediocrities in their fields. Gross became the director of his own neurological institute, where he conducted research on the preserved brains of children killed at Am Spiegelgrund. He also became a highly paid court-appointed psychiatric expert. In , Gross was hired to assess Friedrich Zawrel, an Austrian accused of stealing from a supermarket. Zawrel had been held in Am Spiegelgrund as a ten-year-old, mainly because he came from an impoverished family. They are respected citizens. You never heard it—those who were murdered? From behind bars, Zawrel managed to unmask Gross to the Austrian media. In , Zawrel was released, and prosecutors eventually brought murder charges against Gross. But he was deemed unfit to stand trial, and in he died a free man, at the age of ninety. If Austrian psychiatrists who oversaw the murder of children were allowed to climb the professional ladder unimpeded, was it any wonder that Nowak-Vogl was, too? Wurst sexually abused children in his care; in the past two decades, hundreds of victims have come forward. Wurst was sentenced to seventeen years in prison but was released after four years, for health reasons. Students protested her lectures because she brought in child patients and presented them to classes as case studies. The film was broadcast over the protests of conservative Tyrolean politicians. Langbein, who is sixty-nine, grew up around concentration-camp survivors; his father, Hermann Langbein, an actor turned resistance fighter, was a political prisoner at Auschwitz and later wrote several books documenting his experiences there. But Nowak-Vogl remained an esteemed academic. Nevertheless, a new generation of mental-health professionals, some of whom had come of age with the student and feminist movements of the sixties and seventies, helped reshape the field of child psychiatry in German-language countries. But the more that her own recollections were validated the less fragile she felt. When we returned to Austria, three months later, Evy was ready to meet, and offer help to, other victims of the psychiatric regime that had harmed her. We made plans to gather with some women who had been institutionalized under Nowak-Vogl. Horst Schreiber first heard about the child-observation stations from students he taught in an adult-education program, in the mid-two-thousands. The victims he met were initially reluctant to discuss their experiences, but, after he built a rapport with them, some agreed to be interviewed for his book. He offered to introduce three of them to us. She and the other two, Heidi and Hanni, had become friends, and in front of the restaurant the women greeted one another warmly. Then they did the same with Evy. We sat down at a long table outside a traditional whitewashed building with dark-wood shutters and beams. Below us was a green meadow bright with sunshine. Rivulets of melted snow ran down the craggy mountains, glittering like silver chains. Christine was funny and outgoing and fidgety. She wore a rainbow-striped sleeveless top and bright-blue eyeliner. She showed off her book-cover tattoo—it was on her right leg—and warned me against a Tyrolean specialty on the menu, unappetizingly described as gray cheese, which she then ordered. Like Evy, the three women had, in addition to the child-observation station, spent time in other harsh institutions and in foster care. But each woman said that the villa had particularly haunted her. All three remembered the suffocating imperative of silence, the minute monitoring of their movements, the enforced lifelessness so inimical to a community of children. One day when Heidi was eight, she came home from school and found that her mother had forgotten to leave a key under the doormat. Night fell, and she and her older brother went to a police station for help. Hanni, who wore a flowered dress and pearls, had short gray hair and a soft, sympathetic face. When she had difficulty learning her colors, Nowak-Vogl beat her. Evy leaned toward each woman in turn, placing a consoling hand on hers. She had switched to German—none of them spoke English, and it was worth it to her to communicate directly. Wind rippled the shimmering leaves on birch and aspen trees. Fat bees buzzed around the sudsy glasses on the tables. One stung Schreiber on the mouth as he sipped beer, and Christine dug around in her tote bag for a salve. Somebody asked about nightmares and flashbacks. They talked about their medical charts, which were a confusing business. Nowak-Vogl had devised her own diagnostic code, using letters, and nobody had completely cracked it. The institution was seen as an objective diagnostic machine, and nobody in charge seems ever to have reckoned with the distorting behavioral impact of ripping children from their homes and dropping them, without explanation, into a frightening new reality. He came from a happy home, but he had developed anxieties—panicking, for example, when he sensed that his heart might be beating strangely. Georg is now an actor who runs his own theatre company. He has three adult children, and he proudly showed us photographs of them. He wore hip yellow glasses, and seemed charming and at ease on the Zoom call, though he said that he had suffered from anxiety throughout his life. He had been curious to get his chart, but reading it had taken him aback. Reading her file, she felt that she had been disparaged for being a child nicht auf den Mund gefallen —a blabbermouth. Despite this, Heidi managed to have a rewarding career, as a legal secretary. When it was time to head back down the mountain, Evy thanked each woman. Remembering Sonnenstrasse had been such a lonely experience for so long, she said. Evy told them that she wanted the Tyrolean government to make a bigger effort to find people who were entitled to an apology and to reparations. There had been a flurry of attention in Austria a decade ago, when the commission report came out, but evidently many victims had missed the news. Learning the truth about the villa soon led Evy to other discoveries, about her family and Austrian history. As Evy now recognized, she had once taken refuge in this attitude herself. For seven months, she worked as a wine steward on a cruise ship in the Caribbean. But she tired of all the drunk tourists, and when the ship was docked in San Juan she and a co-worker decided to quit their jobs and fly to Miami. When they got to the airport, the last flight for Miami had already taken off, but there was one leaving for New York. Evy got on it. She initially stayed at the Y. One day, Jimi, the bar owner from Kleinwalsertal, and her husband, Andi, had the inspiration to send Evy a camera as a gift. Evy had never had one before, but she loved it right away, and roamed the streets taking pictures. She signed up for classes at Parsons and at the International Center of Photography, and became a devotee of Dorothea Lange. Her first published picture, of striking workers at LaGuardia Airport, ran in a leftist New York weekly called the Guardian. She started freelancing for Agence France-Presse, then got a job with Reuters. In , the Daily News hired her. She won recognition for her work, and in she was named photographer of the year by the New York Press Photographers Association. One evening, on assignment for the paper, she was flying over the Brooklyn Bridge in a helicopter at sunset. Though she was determined to escape her past, it kept resurfacing. When Evy was in her twenties, she developed a profound eating disorder—she sometimes passed out from hunger. But her experience of psychiatry in Austria had been so horrific that seeing a therapist felt impossible. During this time, however, she began dating her future husband, Paul Schwartzman, a New York native who came from a family of therapists. Her name was Barbara Wespi—her friends called her Barbarella—and she was a year younger than Evy. They had different fathers, and Barbarella had met their mother only a few months earlier. Their mother was named Evy, too. The sisters agreed to meet in Switzerland, where Barbarella lived. Their relationship with the woman they soon dubbed Evy, Sr. Evy, Sr. He had also been determined, tough, and energetic—qualities that Evy, too, seemed to possess. Her father had been a Jewish wholesaler of shoes. In , he died. In those immiserated postwar years, her mother, overwhelmed by the need to make a living, sent little Evy, Sr. She died not long afterward. In her late teens, she became itinerant. When she was still a minor, the police in Marseille arrested her for prostitution—a false charge, she insisted—and sent her back to Innsbruck, where she was institutionalized for a time. Her life had continued to be peripatetic, but now she was settled down, in a village in the Italian Alps, with a retired Italian construction worker. Evy was openhearted and curious about her mother, and felt connected by their shared experience of orphanhood. But their connection soon faltered. After returning to Italy, she sent letters, but they often consisted of bland comments about the weather, and she evaded further questions about their family history. In , Evy received a call telling her that her mother had died. Evy began tentatively e-mailing and texting Barbarella, saying that she was sorry to have been such a disappointing sister. Evy asked to communicate in English, and Barbarella agreed. Evy, Stella, and Barbarella met up in Paris in November, Barbarella had worked as an art restorer and as a club d. The couple, who had previously adopted another daughter, soon divorced. The older girl had schizophrenia and was at times violent, and Barbarella had found it impossible to sustain a relationship with her. It was you. My heart told a different story. Barbarella joined Evy and me on our two trips to Austria. After gathering in Innsbruck one afternoon in July, we headed to a building that houses the Tyrolean state archive. The archive had a fat file on Rudolf Mages, the maternal grandfather of Evy and Barbarella. Rudolf had held one of the highest honors the Party accorded—membership in the Blutorden, or Blood Order—for his devotion to the cause. Later that year, during the November pogroms that broke out across the Reich, S. These were bewildering discoveries. Had Evy, Sr. With horror, Evy realized that the course of her childhood was partly attributable to the fact that her troubled mother had been raised by active Nazis. It was not a hereditary burden, of the kind that Nowak-Vogl had believed in. It was a historical burden. In , the file revealed, Rudolf had served a short time in prison for war profiteering—selling shoes without the proper ration certificates, and hoarding goods. But you do go to jail for selling shoes without a voucher. He believed that Herta had divorced Rudolf after the war because she no longer wanted to be married to a Nazi. A few months later, we got closer to an answer. The cache included a file on Herta. Evy might not like what she learned, Hofinger warned. Evy asked to see a copy, and a PDF arrived in her in-box. Like Maria Braun or Veronika Voss, Herta seemed to have traded on her looks, curried favor with Nazi leaders, and aggressively worked the black market. She married Rudolf, who was fourteen years her senior, in , when she was twenty. She had nothing left for her children. They were a burden. After the war, Rudolf was held in an Allied prison. Herta divorced him, and placed their kids in the French convent school. She travelled often to Milan and to Paris, where she sometimes visited her children. In , Rudolf killed himself, slashing his wrists in a guesthouse in Innsbruck. Herta died three years later, at thirty-five, apparently of a heart attack. Negligent parents come in all ideological stripes. And Evy, Sr. Moreover, they had both been abused by doctors. After Evy, Sr. Electroshock was widely practiced in Europe and the United States in the postwar years, though it was usually indicated for intractable depression or schizophrenia, not for young women who might have been engaged in sex work. She remembered a Dr. Rodewald and a Dr. Evy and I tracked down a journalist named Hans Weiss, who, as a psychology student conducting research at Valduna in the seventies, had known both doctors and had witnessed electroshock procedures. He confirmed that patients awaiting treatment could see and hear what was in store for them. Shortly after we returned from our first visit to Austria, Evy learned that her foster mother, Anni, was still alive. Evy had decided to confront her on our second trip. She initially hesitated about including her kids in this particular encounter. But they were growing up, and they were curious. To get to Kleinwalsertal, we took a train from Vienna to Munich, then a smaller train to Memmingen, a third train to Oberstdorf, and, finally, a bus over a mountain pass. It was high summer, and hikers with walking sticks passed through the town on their way into the Alps. Anni sat teetering on the edge of a bed, a small, thin woman with lank white hair and a creaky, plaintive voice. You treated me terribly. You locked me in a cellar. For Evy, the encounter was draining and disorienting. Evy briefly veered away from dark topics, informing Anni that she was now a photojournalist in the United States. Suddenly, Anni wept, dabbing her eyes with her shirt. Lily was kneeling next to her mother, with an arm around her. Stella sat at a distance, tears streaming down her face. You have it, and I have it. He said that he wished his family had done more to stop it. Earlier this year, Niko Hofinger, the archivist in Innsbruck, informed Evy that a city archive likely contained a file documenting her time as a ward of the state. Evy successfully pushed for permission to see it. On these terms, she was returned to Anni, who, Evy recalls, made a point of telling other children in the village that she had just come back from a mental institution. As we read through the assessment, Evy told me that she had skied recklessly as a kid. Once, she was entrusted with bringing a tall votive candle home from church; she dropped the candle, breaking it. This, apparently, is why Evy ended up in the orphanage in Germany: she had been too smart for her own good, and her high spirits had proved incurable. One morning, she texted me a photograph of a handsome, brooding man who bore a resemblance to the actor Joaquin Phoenix. He was Othmar Zechyr. On the document, Evy, Sr. Looking him up, we saw that, just as Evy, Sr. Zechyr had become a well-known artist in Austria, with work in major galleries and museums. He had made moody, crosshatched pen-and-ink drawings—of knolls and haystacks, of fantastical machinery. Zechyr, who died in , had three children. Evy is now in correspondence with one of them, an art historian in Vienna. She has broached the idea of confirming their mutual paternity with DNA tests, and of meeting in Austria. Evy had Austria, and the German language, back in her life now. She had befriended advocates, historians, and former victims who were dedicated to an honest reckoning with the past. She had a renewed relationship with Barbarella. She had a probable candidate for her biological father, someone whose art she very much liked. She felt greater sympathy for her biological mother. There was only one more thing she wanted to face. From the outside, the villa on Sonnenstrasse was basically as she remembered it: a rather grand and solid-looking structure from , painted pale yellow. It was now divided into private apartments, with a locked front entrance, and to get inside we haphazardly pressed the buzzers. An older man named Peter, who lived on the top floor, let us in. Trash piled up inside. Then, one day in , the villa underwent a strange rebirth. A group of young punks started squatting there. They cleaned it up, showed movies and put on concerts, and took in anarchists, homeless people, and runaways, including kids fleeing abusive families from all over Europe. One day, a young punk named Ingo spotted a man in his forties lingering in the garden, staring at the windows. Ingo invited him in and let him see his room. The man began trembling and crying. Although many of them had lived in more decrepit places, this one had the air of a haunted house. Ingo now works for an organization in Innsbruck that helps homeless people. When Evy and I found him, we were back in the U. He showed us photographs from his time in the villa. The transformation of the villa seemed to Evy like a benediction. When Evy and I entered the building on Sonnenstrasse, she felt afraid but also ready. In the foyer, shafts of sunlight illuminated white walls and an imposing curved staircase, which looked very familiar. She touched the walls. Then we turned around and walked back out to the street, where her children were waiting. In order to function properly, Democracy needs the loser. What happens to all the stuff we return? When the piano world got played. The Vogue model who became a war photographer. The age of Instagram face. Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker. Save this story Save this story. Evy at eight years old, after her First Communion. Later that year, she was sent to the villa. Photograph courtesy Evy Mages. Cartoon by Sarah Kempa. Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon. Link copied. Cartoon by Kendra Allenby. Maria Nowak-Vogl, who oversaw the Innsbruck child-observation station, appeared in a Austrian TV documentary about the abuse of children in institutions and defended her practices. Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen. Cartoon by Roz Chast. Cartoon by Pia Guerra and Ian Boothby. Victims of the child-observation station gather at a restaurant in the Alps. From left to right: Hanni, Evy, Christine, and Heidi. IV—Family Secrets Learning the truth about the villa soon led Evy to other discoveries, about her family and Austrian history. Cartoon by Teresa Burns Parkhurst. In Innsbruck, Evy embraces her daughter Stella. New Yorker Favorites. Margaret Talbot joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in Don Luigi Ciotti leads an anti-Mafia organization, and for decades he has run a secret operation that liberates women from the criminal underworld. Is It Time to Torch the Constitution? By Louis Menand. Annals of Psychology. By Eren Orbey. The Lede. The A. Tammy Kim. News Desk. The Pursuit of Gender Justice. For the first time, the International Criminal Court has concluded that an armed group specifically targeted women. By Jina Moore Ngarambe. Treating political violence as a contagion could help safeguard the future of American democracy. By Michael Luo. The Political Scene. Among the Gaza Protest Voters. Will their tactics persuade her, or risk throwing the election to Trump? By Andrew Marantz. Tim Walz and J. Duelling visions of fatherhood will define the Vice-Presidential debate. By Molly Fischer. Annals of Zoology. How Scientists Started to Decode Birdsong. Language is said to make us human. What if birds talk, too? By Rivka Galchen. The Relentlessness of Florida Hurricane Season. For residents still picking through the destruction caused by Hurricane Helene, the arrival of Milton was met with anxiety, horror, and, in some cases, weary acceptance. By Carolyn Kormann. At first, scientists just wanted to figure out the best way to kill these pests. Then they decided that studying rat society could reveal the future of our own. By Elizabeth Kolbert. Three months ago, the Vice-President was fighting for respect in Washington. Can she defy her doubters—and end the Trump era? By Evan Osnos.