Behind these Limburg monastery walls, children were terrorized for decades: “Sometimes I wonder: how did I survive that?”

The former Sint-Vincentius monastery of Zelem, part of the Limburg Halen, looks peaceful. But behind the walls there was decades of terror. In other Flemish monasteries, nuns and vulnerable children with physical and psychological violence also punished. The four-part VTM documents ‘De Nuns’ brings those stories out for the first time. In Zelem it even led to suicides. “But we called those guys the happy bags. They were liberated, we were still there.”

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