Edino van Dorsten (33), one of the nine children of Ruinerwold, published his book last week My name is Edino. He describes what happened to him as a child in a family that was terrorized by a religiously insane father who saw himself as the Messiah.
The book was in the bookstore on Tuesday and the first reactions Edino received were positive. “Some people had read it in one day,” says Van Dorsten in the RTV Drenthe radio program Cassata. “It’s exciting to publish a book, it’s exciting to tell your story. And you also realize how intense some things were.”
De Meppeler is the second in the family to come up with a book in which he tells what happened to him. His younger brother Israel van Dorsten published the book in 2022 ‘We were, I am. Get out of Ruinerwold’. He was the one who fled from the farm in Ruinerwold in October 2019 and sought help. After which father Gerrit Jan van Dorsten was arrested, together with handyman Josef, and the youngest six children who had lived in a closed system all their lives were liberated.
Edino van Dorsten escaped from the family just before he was eighteen, when they lived in a workshop on the industrial estate in Meppel. The eldest sister and brother, Mar Jan and Shin, had already fled. Edino had been living in seclusion in the workshop for some time, together with handyman Josef. Before that time, he was regularly severely abused and sexually abused by his father.
In the book, Edino describes, among other things, how he suddenly encountered his father on his bicycle. after having already been rejected and exiled by him. Edino saw him cycling in the distance and was happy to see him, despite everything his father had done to him.
“I had missed him, because I hadn’t seen him for a while and I still completely believed in my father at that moment. And during that period, there was nothing worse than being completely left alone, being forgotten, as if I didn’t exist. When I saw him, and saw that he was happy to see me, it meant a lot to me. And he also spoke my real name, Edino, for the first time in a long time. That touched me very much. Because when I was bad, my name was Eddie.”
Edino immediately felt the urge to follow his father’s mission, who strived for a better world, but went completely off the rails. “He started with a good cause, to make the world a better place, he wanted the right thing.”
But according to Edino, his father had ‘forgotten’ that if you want to change something, you first have to start with yourself. “He didn’t look at himself, he only looked at how he could change other people so that they fit his idea. When that didn’t work, he shut those people out, which made him go back further and further. And so the closed system started and no one could call him out on wrong behavior, because he was untouchable. But he himself could talk to everyone.”
Edino acknowledges that his story is ‘ugly and penetrating’. The fact that he wrote everything down plainly in his book serves a purpose. “What happened, happened, we can’t change that anymore.” he says about that. “We have to learn something from it, so that it doesn’t happen again. And that’s why you have to write it down as it happened. You shouldn’t make the story more beautiful than it was, that doesn’t help anyone. We have to ensure that child abuse stops.”
According to Van Dorsten, it is not just about the abuse, but also about everything behind it. “The mental oppression, the psychological oppression and how that plays on a child’s brain over the years. And what the effect is on life afterwards.”
Van Dorsten does not hate his father. “I hate what he did and I abhor and condemn what he did. I also felt anger, but the only thing that creates anger is a kind of powerlessness within yourself that you cannot do anything with.”
“I describe everything openly, it has been a scar and a heavy burden. I noticed that by talking about it and writing it down, that burden became less and I was able to give it a better place. I hope that other people who read the book can gain strength from it to do the same.”