Authors: John Strauchs
After traveling for days, the little boy was finally taken to a school for exceptionally precocious children in the outskirts of Leningrad.
The school was a large stone
building on Grazhdanskiy Prospect that once belonged to a wealthy Russian Jew who fell
out of favor with Stalin in 1951.
After the Jew’s deportation and execution his family
was relocated to a farm in the Urals and the mansion became a research facility for special projects that no formal university in the Soviet Union was willing or able to adopt.
The official name was the Institute for Biotechnology and Nanotechnology, but it was the
incipient research program for genetic and biotechnological engineering. The staff simply called it the Krebs Institute. As a mark of achievement, the Institute was awarded the
Order of the Red Flag in 1967.
As a reward, Professor Krebs was given a large apartment in Vilnius so that he
could travel weekly between Vilnius and Leningrad to personally supervise the special
children’s program. The most gifted children were plucked from their families throughout
the Soviet Union and brought to the Institute. They were studied, cultivated and shaped.
Part of the program was an extension of similar research conducted during the war by the
Third Reich in Germany. Now in his sixties, Professor Krebs was said to have managed
the German program until the end of the war. Krebs was a closet Anglophile and borrowed from British public school programs as well. In truth, some very remarkable children came out of his program. Many hold prominent positions in Russian government and
industry today. The most remarkable of all the children was, of course, Jorens Ziemelis.
The boy obviously spoke Latvian and Russian.
That was compulsory, or at least
the Russian was. In less than four months after being admitted to the Institute, he became
fluent in English and German. He had also advanced far beyond his years in mathematics,
music, and literature.
By six, he was started on college level physics and higher mathematics. He was a brilliant student. He had the gift of absolute eidetic imagery, but by no
means was he an idiot savant. It didn’t just remember. He understood. He could connect
information. Most importantly, he could create. The faculty at the Institute was amazed
by the speed of his progress.
The boy remembered everything he read and every lesson
he was taught. He forgot nothing.
His physical training was much harsher than his academic regimen.
It was clear
to the staff that he could be a future Soviet Olympian. But for the time being, this was to
be kept a secret for fear that the boy would be taken by a better funded program. Krebs
frequently warned the staff what would happen if they ever spoke of the boy outside the
Institute.
Barely six, he could have set a world record for running the mile. Krebs knew
that the world had never before seen a child like Jared.
He was made to run the track
several times a week, but it was always late in the evening when no one else could witness the tests. Krebs wouldn’t believe it until he had seen it for himself. The boy’s stride
was so much shorter than an adult’s. How was it possible? Slowly, Krebs began to accept
the unbelievable no matter what it was. He had special plans for the boy. He lost interest
in all of the other children and their well-being deteriorated as time went on.
In the British tradition, or at least as it was perceived by Professor Krebs, it was
vital that the children be inured to pain and discomfort. This would aid in focusing their
minds and strengthening their self-discipline.
The children were taken out into the Russian winter to stand at attention in the nude in the courtyard. Their small bodies were
rubbed with snow, and if there wasn’t the proper response, they were drenched with water. Doctors would stand close by to ensure that they didn’t suffer frost bite or hypothermia.
Their core body temperatures were never permitted to fall below critical threshholds. They were beaten with birch switches if they couldn’t accurately recite many pages from the Large Encyclopedia of the U.S.S.R., or even if they failed to stand at attention.
Professor Krebs was convinced that superior beings didn’t need to sleep.
Although he learned through his research in Germany during the war that they still lacked
the science to manage complete sleep deprivation, the children at the Institute must not
under any circumstances be allowed to sleep more than four hours and once a week they
must be kept up all night. Learning to endure hardship and pain would focus their special
abilities.
Krebs admired Hannibal. He kept a small plaster bust of the Carthaginian General at his desk. It was said that the mighty Hannibal never sat down during the day as he
prepared his mind and body to challenge Rome. He also slept little. Professor Krebs also
studied the Skinyokai mummy at the Dainichibo Temple in Japan. A Buddhist monk had
been able to focus his meditations to the point that he mummified himself. His mummy
can be seen in the temple to this day. He had traveled to Tibet to study the Tum-mo meditation of Tibetan monks. The monks could sit in a cave all night high on a mountain in
winter and have wet sheets placed on their naked torsos. They were able to raise their
body temperatures high enough to dry the sheets without experiencing any ill effects
from the cold. Scientific measurements confirmed that they were able to raise the temperature of their toes and fingers by as much as seventeen degrees.
Kreb’s children learned
Tum-mo meditation.
A few of Krebs’s children died. They were too weak. It was simply natural selection. Krebs admired Darwin and reflected on his writings about those that passed. Many
suffered a variety of permanent impairments. They were shipped back to their parents to
be cared for. Only Jared wasn’t bothered by the Krebs treatments.
The boy could do
Tum-mo meditation even though he had never been taught. The cold had no measurable
effect on the boy. He needed very little sleep. Krebs suspected that the boy could easily
adapt to complete sleep deprivation, but he was unwilling to risk his discovery and the
scientific accolades that were certain to follow once his paper was published. The boy’s
recuperative powers were unimaginable. Small cuts healed themselves in hours, or at
most, in a day. His intelligence was now beyond any known means of testing.
Despite Jared’ mental age, he was, after all, just a little boy.
He was frightened
and he missed his parents. He asked about them constantly. At first he was whipped for
asking, but the staff soon learned that being beaten had no effect on the boy. No one on
the staff had ever seen him cry. It was assumed that he managed to turn off pain receptors
in his body at will. He didn’t wince when he was struck. In time they stopped questioning the boy and the beatings stopped.
What was the point of beating someone who
wasn’t bothered by it?
Jared lost all privacy. The Krebs Institute was intrusive in every aspect of his life.
Even his evacuations were caught and measured. He lost all sense of modesty, not that a
boy of five or six really had a notion of what that meant. He was naked with other children for hours at a time every day.
That staff noticed that the boy was particularly interested in the girls.
Despite his young age, he knew about reproduction and sexual intercourse from his readings.
Every minute of every hour was managed. Some of the children were much older
than him. The girls seemed to have the most difficulty with the total loss of privacy, especially the older ones. A few girls began to menstruate early. Some were in their teens.
They would yell at Jared when he stared at them too long. It was difficult for anyone to
remember that he was only a little boy—a very little boy. A few of the girls gossiped that
he was actually a dwarf pretending to be a little boy.
Professor Krebs was casually amused by the boy’s curiosity about sex.
He arranged for Jared to be intimate with one of the older girls while they observed, but the
experiment was quickly abandoned once it was determined that his physical maturity had
not yet caught up with his intellectual interest in females. Still, Krebs made a journal entry to redo the experiment periodically to find out when he reached puberty.
He was
convinced that Jared would reach sexual maturity early.
Some of the staff secretly sexually abused most of the older girls and a few of the
boys.
Everyone knew that the children would never tell. They never did. The children
knew what the consequences would be.
Most of the children never thought of telling. It
was impossible to know what was prescribed by Professor Krebs and what was an invention of the staff. The children simply obeyed whatever orders they were given.
Krebs
knew nothing of the abuse until one of the older girls became pregnant. She was forced to
reveal what had been done to her and by whom.
Krebs issued a strict memorandum the
next morning prohibiting any such conduct in the future and he dismissed the offending
staffer. In truth, however, he really didn’t care.
The only time that Jared had privacy was at night. The children were allowed to
sleep from midnight to four in the morning.
They slept in small military cots. The cots
were no more than six inches apart. They slept directly on the canvas.
They were given
one pillow and one coarse military blanket. Once in bed, they were not permitted to get
up until morning. Not even bath room needs were permitted. They had use the bath room
before they slept. If they got up, they were allowed to use the bathroom, but they would
receive a beating.
As the other children slept, Jared would pull the blanket over his head and form a
small hidden tent.
It was his secret space.
Sometimes he wrote words in the air in this
secret space.
These were private words and thoughts that no one else could see and no
one knew they were written.
Sometimes he worked on mathematical problems.
Sometimes he wrote entire letters to his parents.
Sometimes he cried, but these were silent,
dry, private moments that no one else would ever know about. For a while he prayed just
as his father taught him, but in time he stopped praying. It had no demonstrable affect on
his life. He decided it wasn’t rational. He never made a sound in his secret space beneath
the blanket, but he would speak in his mind. Gradually, he learned that he could hear the
secret thoughts of the other children. They all had secret places they hid in.
Jared especially liked mantras. Professor Krebs taught him mantras, but Jared had
his own. He would recite a Latvian folk poem his father taught him.
He recited it hundreds—perhaps thousands—of times.
And then Professor Krebs made a life-changing mistake.
He was increasingly
impatient with his inability to measure the boy’s intellectual level. He now had no doubt
that, at the very least, he had another Newton under his control.
Perhaps the boy would
surpass Isaac Newton. Jared had just turned six and had independently invented the calculus. Krebs wasn’t certain how independent it was since someone may have shown him
a text book, but no one in the faculty would admit that it had ever happened. Perhaps it
was independent. What did it matter?
Newton was in his twenties when he developed
infinitesimal calculus. Krebs’ prodigy was barely six. What wonders would the boy discover by the time he was in his early twenties?
The problem was that the boy’s abilities began to exceed the academic abilities of
his meager faculty. They were lazy dullards. His requests for better faculty were ignored
by Moscow.
He heard about a new program at M.I.T. in the United States that specialized in educating very gifted children. If the children passed testing, they could even be
admitted to the university.
If he sent the boy to a Soviet university, his discovery would
certainly be stolen by jealous rivals. Worse, it was well known by anyone with eyes that
the program committees were controlled by Jews.
He was certain he could manage the
boy in America. He couldn’t have been more wrong.
He applied for an exchange program and his application was approved by Moscow and Boston. Krebs’ visa to the United States was not.
He led the Americans to believe that the boy was the product of Soviet genetic
engineering. He claimed the credit for the program and submitted a spurious scientific
article for publication about his accomplishments. It was a foolish boast and was the single reason why he lost control over the boy. The Americans believed Krebs and now refused to return him to the U.S.S.R. for further experimentation. The parents were deceased and the Soviet Union could not produce any living relatives. Krebs’ vanity had
been his undoing. It eventually cost him his career and his apartment in Vilnius. Krebs
was discredited by his peers. Krebs died in poverty in 1988 in a small room he rented in
Vilnius. He was 83 years old.
By the time that Leningrad was renamed St. Petersburg in 1991, the name of
Krebs had been expunged from virtually every record.
It was like he had never existed.
But, of course, all of his children remembered him for the rest of their lives.
Jared remembered him the most.
Latvia gained its independence in 1991, In 2002, Jared—he was no longer Jorens—returned to Latvia for the first time.
He visited his parents’ graves. He reclaimed
his father’s farm.
It was a lengthy legal process, but now Jared had money and hired a
renowned Latvia lawyer, Peter Jurjans, to handle it all. He accepted a Latvian passport to
establish his identity and that he was born in Latvia. That was an essential step in the inheritance process. Getting a farm that had been a collective was not an easy matter.
On the same trip he took a train to St. Petersburg and found the stone building that
had been the Krebs Institute. It had been converted to apartments. All traces of the horrible experiment were gone now. He visited some of the neighbors on Grazhdanskiy
Prospect, but no one would talk about Professor Krebs. The Institute was something they
wanted nothing to do with. Moreover, they didn’t want Jared to tell them anything about
it. As far as they were concerned, Krebs and the Institute never existed. Jared could find
no trace of Krebs.