The Whole Class Started Yelling at Me

My name is Sibylle. I have been called Billie my whole life. I grew up in Germany.

I grew up in Munich, of course, a true Munich native. I went to school in Munich. I went to an all-girls school and attended Protestant religious classes with a nice religion teacher, who one day decided—so it must have been seventh grade—who decided to show us a film. And in this film there were some totally horrific scenarios, people screaming and running down the hallway, just completely absurd, and somehow this was run under the caption or heading of Scientology. At the end of this film, the teacher called me to the front and said, “So, Sibylle is a Scientologist or she has something to do with Scientology and she can answer your questions now.” You can hardly imagine the chaos. The whole class started yelling at me. Some of them stood up. They made their opinions known with their fists. They really reacted with a lot of intensity and a lot of hatred. It cost me all my friendships, or almost all of them. I was no longer invited to parties. Birthday parties were over, too. And that was a truly traumatic experience, I have to say. It was a really nasty, insidious thing. So, this event shaped me. It really disturbed me.

I have three children, three sons, and my youngest son started school in 2007. And at the beginning of first grade, there’s always a parent representative election. The previous parent representative was gone. Then a new one came to replace her. And one afternoon, when I wanted to meet with her, when an evening meeting was scheduled, she called me completely distraught and said as a Scientology member, she didn’t want me at the parent council that evening. Anyway, I received several warning calls that afternoon from friends who said, “Watch out, this Angelika, she’s really wound up and she will definitely oppose you and she’ll say nasty things.” And well, I then decided to take my husband with me or, my husband didn’t want me to go alone. Together we went to the school at the time of this meeting. We were met on the stairs and were told to leave the building immediately, otherwise they’d call the police. We stood in the schoolyard and as we looked up, we saw the others standing upstairs pouring themselves champagne and they were toasting each other—clearly happy they’d gotten rid of those terrible Scientologists. Regardless, the story went a bit further. Shortly after that, there was a bazaar. Anyway, I went into the schoolyard for this bazaar. In fact, several parents rushed at me and tried to push me away, to shove me back out—they were grabbing my hair. At least one of them was. That was a scene I found really, really intense. It was a moment when I asked myself where I actually was and what was really going on here because that really is just too absurd.