Children of A Lesser God

By SOPHFRONIA SCOTT GREGORY

Her new home looked warm and welcoming enough to the young Branch Davidian girl. She was fascinated with the hot running water, flush toilets, heated food. The Waco compound had no such comforts. But upon passing a door leading to the basement, the youngster froze. "Do you have a whipping room down there?" she asked her new guardians. "No," answered the woman who now cared for her, "do you have one?" "Yes," said the little girl. "When they don't want everyone to hear us, they take us down there."

With the sect consumed by fire, the tales of life in Mount Carmel come mostly out of the mouths of babes. As stories from survivors, former Davidians and a psychiatric report on the children confirmed last week, the Ranch Apocalypse experience was one of deprivation and fear. Denied traditional family bonds and exposed to Koresh's warped teachings, the children became compliant playthings, expected to live by every word issuing from the mad messiah of Waco.

When young Davidians strayed from his commands, their punishment was severe (though one survivor insisted such redress was basic "Christian discipline"). Disobedience frequently brought out the "helper," a paddle often wielded by Koresh's "mighty men" in the "whipping room" just off the first floor. The instrument left circle-shaped lesions, an inch across, on the children's buttocks. Koresh's son Cyrus, when he was three years old, once refused a command and, according to a former cult member, was starved for two days and forced to sleep on a garage floor where Koresh told him large rats prowled.

By age 12, children were usually split off from their mothers (fathers never lived with the families). Brothers and sisters were separated to live with other same-sex companions. They ate fruits and vegetables, but rarely warm food. Chocolate was prohibited, and ice cream, which Koresh enjoyed regularly, was granted only occasionally to the children. The boys were awakened at 5:30 a.m. for "gym," a series of paramilitary marching and drills; in addition, fights between the boys were staged possibly in preparation for man-to-man combat in an apocalyptic war. If they did not participate vigorously enough, discipline followed. Girls were spared the training and could sleep as late as they wanted, but they did have to help empty human waste from the white plastic pails used as toilets by the sect members.

To ensure his control, Koresh undermined family attachments. The children were told to consider him their only father -- their parents were called "dogs." When psychiatrists later asked for drawings of their families, the confused children sketched clusters of "favorite" people. "One of the most disturbing qualities observed in the children . . . was the . . . apparent weakness in their attachments to adults (sometimes including parents) in or out of the compound," says Bruce Perry, the Baylor College of Medicine psychiatrist who headed the team of 12 medical volunteers that studied the children for two months following the Feb. 28 raid.

Education consisted of home schooling and hours-long twice-daily biblical lessons taught by a rambling Koresh. Sometimes he jumped from the chapel stage to paddle young ones who were crying or being disruptive. "You never knew what he was going to be," says Kiri Jewell, 12, who was taken from the compound by her natural father in 1991. "One minute he was nice, and the next he was suddenly nasty." The children also learned songs filled with violent apocalyptic imagery. War and martial-arts films proliferated in the cult's video library. Koresh preached that the world was full of "bad guys," hurtful unbelievers out to kill the Davidians. Mistrust everyone, he said; deceive all non-believers. At Waco's Methodist Home, where the compound children were housed following their release, Perry, carrying a five-month-old child, was approached by a small girl. "Did you come here to kill the baby?" she asked him.

Girls were singled out early as Koresh's sex-partners-to-be. Some as young as 11 wore a plastic Star of David around their neck, while others wore a thin gold band on their finger. Koresh spoke openly about the details of sex to prepare them for intercourse. "Sexual themes were associated with pleasing Koresh," says Perry, "and procreating ((to fill)) the earth with his glorious seed."

All but four of the 21 surviving children have been placed with parents and relatives. Yet Koresh still looms as an ambivalent shadow, a daunting memory. In their drawings the compound is both riddled with bullet holes and depicted as the kingdom of heaven. In other drawings, they surrounded the words I LOVE DAVID with hearts. "They learned to substitute the word love for fear," Perry told the New York Times. Living a normal life will not be easy. "We were all waiting for the end to happen," says Kiri Jewell. It has -- and now life must go on.

With reporting by Richard Woodbury/Houston