Behind a Locked Door

As a girl in Austria, Evy Mages was sent to a mysterious villa where a doctor performed cruel experiments. Decades later, she learned why.

- By Margaret Talbot. Photographs by Laetitia Vançon

At the Villa, Evy had to sleep with a blanket pulled tight under her armpits, her arms ramrod straight by her sides, to insure that her hands couldn't wander. Socializing was virtually forbbiden. Nobody ever told her the reason for these rules.

One night in March, 2021, Evy Mages, a photojournalist in Washington, D.C., opened her laptop and, with trembling fingers, typed into Google the address of a villa in Innsbruck, Austria. For decades, Evy, who was fifty-five, had been haunted by memories of the house, where she had been confined for several months, starting when she was eight. She could still picture its pale-yellow exterior and the curved staircase and dark-wood panelling inside, but she’d kept what happened there a secret—even from a therapist whom she’d credited with saving her life. Evy’s memories of the place had become dreamlike, simultaneously vivid and vaporous.

She remembered being wrested from bed in the middle of the night at the home of her foster family, in the Alpine valley of Kleinwalsertal. She was hustled into a stranger’s car and driven through the mountains to Innsbruck. Nobody told her what kind of place the villa was, or how long she’d stay. Perhaps two dozen children were living there. Adults in white lab coats regularly administered shots and pills, and when it was time to eat the children were required to use weirdly abbreviated language: “bitte, Löffel ” (“please, spoon”);