My name is Edino. That is the name of Edino van Dorsten’s book, brother of the Ruinerwold children, which will be released at the beginning of November. A book about the influence of his father, about life in two worlds and with answers to unanswered questions. “I sat on a bench in Ruinerwold, overlooking the farm, but didn’t ring the bell.”
“Why I didn’t do that? That cannot be answered in a sentence,” says Van Dorsten in the Radio Drenthe program Cassata. Although he was free, he still did not feel that on a spiritual level. “You have to see the process from the beginning to the end to know how indoctrination works. That all the choices you make in your life are influenced by the past. That happens to me to this day.”
Edino van Dorsten (32) is one of the brothers of the five children who lived completely protected from the world with their father for years in a farm in Ruinerwold. He managed to escape his father at the age of eighteen, after he had also been abused for years. “I am doing well. I’m doing a lot with being fit. Are you physically fit, then you are also mentally stronger,” says Van Dorsten.
Three years ago his brother Israel van Dorsten already wrote the book We were, I ama book about his life and about time in the farm. Now a new story about the Van Dorsten family follows. “My story is completely different from Israel’s,” says Van Dorsten. “I lived together with the whole family until I was thirteen or fourteenth. After that our lives were separated. I was in the same system for years to come, but we were literally separated by a wall.”
Edino and his brother Shin literally lived in another room in the business shed in Meppel. Where they were registered and went to school, that was not a case with the youngest children. “We lived in two very different worlds. At home in my father’s closed system, beyond at school, in the middle of society.” He was never allowed to tell anything that happened at home. “I played and pretended to be a normal boy, but this was by no means.”
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