“I always felt that I was outside of my body and wondered why I had to carry it around” she begins. Though German is her mother tongue Leah Reitman speaks English well. Her dark eyes framed by stylish gold glasses flicker across my garden in Beit Shemesh. She settles into a chair under a canopy of bougainvillea and fruit trees and starts telling me her story candidly and unreservedly drawing me into the world of someone with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

Until her diagnosis at the age of 45 Leah didn’t understand why she was so different from other people why she could never blend into a crowd. She was hypersensitive to the most basic things — water clothing shoes jewelry. Loud noises sounded like hammer blows in her ear. If she detected the slightest side taste of something in a food it would become instantly repugnant to her.

For Leah having a simple conversation required rapt attention and concentration. If she missed a letter or word which happened often it could change the entire meaning of the sentence leaving her unable to appropriately respond. “I used to talk a lot — I was trying to make people react so that I’d understand them ” she remarks. “People often say that autistic people are expressionless; that’s because we’re concentrating so hard on what’s happening around us that we don’t have the time for facial reactions.”

As Leah recounts her life story she carefully signposts where her disability affected her actions and continues to impact her life today creating a gaping chasm between her experiences and those of others. When traumatic memories surface Leah remains fully composed: “Talking about my past isn’t painful for me. It’s history. I’m proud I survived.”

The “Children’s Jail”

Leah then Beate was born on March 8 1956. Abandoned by her mother she spent the first two months of life in a hospital in Cologne Germany. Despite her Jewish roots (she’s a relative of Albert Einstein) she was moved to an orphanage run by nuns in the same town where she remained until she was 12.

With complete equanimity she recalls a horrific childhood. Her insistence on calling the orphanage a “children’s jail” is her only emotive reference. “My detachment is part of my disability” she explains. “Even though the medicine I take helps me I still see pain and death simply as parts of life.”

The nun in charge of the children was both verbally and physically abusive: “She called us ‘garbage’ and complained that we were dirtying up Germany” she recalls. Looking back Leah sees how ASD made her enrage the nun further: “Throughout the day the nun would point out things we did wrong like not eating being dirty or not doing our schoolwork. At night we stood in line and told her how many strikes with the ruler we had accumulated. If she got tired she would stop halfway down the line but not before she had pushed me to the front. I could never remember and being very truthful another part of my disability I was absolutely unable to lie and make up a number. The nun would become wild with anger and even kick me into the corner. When she asked me if I now realized what I’d done wrong again I couldn’t lie so when I answered ‘No ’ she would beat me further.” Numerous times Leah was also locked up in a dark room and tied to a bed. While these horrors would have destroyed a lesser person they wove the first fine threads of tenacity into Leah’s persona.

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