Beginning of Lea’s trip from an American religious court to a Russian penal colony:
“Inside the crowded compartment, a robotic arm dragged Lea’s jerking body along the rail then dumped her onto a wooden bench beside a vertical window-slit. Corroded stirrups reached out from under the bench in front of her and firmly clamped Lea’s feet to the gritty, aluminum floorboards.
Several paces in front of Lea’s smudged window-slit, a pair of padded dark blue arms showing the forest-green sleeve chevrons of the Lost Sheep League held a frightened child above the angry crowd, her yellow snowsuit standing out over the dowdy crowd. A sudden gust of wind blew a tattered false-fur hood back from the youngster’s face. It was not Clara but that child’s beautiful corn-blue eyes (like Clara’s) were red from crying. Lea was horrified! Her only child, older than the youngster she could see, in the hands of the League? It dawned on Lea that the government bureaucracy must now officially consider Clara’s mother to be dead! According to the “authorities,” Clara no longer had a mother! An orphan! Even in this time of great emotional turmoil, it didn’t escape Lea’s understanding that her fate had been decided long before her hearing before the female judge with the voice distorter.
The little girl Lea could see kicked and flailed with her chubby arms, trying with all her might to get away from the gloved hands lifting her over the mumbling sea of anxious faces. The distraught little girl looked frantically up and down the long row of nearly identical train cars. Lea hoped against hope that her own daughter was trying to catch at least one final glimpse of her mother. But did she did know if Clara was even outside the train? She pressed both palms hard against the thick, darkened glass, trying to let Clara know where she was. Suddenly, Lea felt a hot flash of embarrassment as she noticed that almost all the other prisoners were doing the same thing, also to no avail. Through the soles of her feet, she could feel the uneven growl of the train’s Fairbanks-Morse diesel engines, their tempo increasing. Wildly casting about to escape her keeper, the little girl Lea could see showed no sign at all of having seen her mother. The little girl’s lonely terror burned itself into Lea’s desperate brain, to be replayed in almost endless loops of sleepless days and nights to come…”
@https://www.pewresearch.org › religion › 2013 › 04 › 08 › applying-gods-law-religious-courts andmediation
#religiouscriminalcourts, #unlawfulprocedures, #humanrights, #fightingforfreedom
