Not without My Sister: The True Story of Three Girls Violated and Betrayed by Those They Trusted (Hardcover)

Celeste Jones
From as early as I can remember, I never had a place I could call home. When I was ten months old our family left England for India. But soon I was not only separated from my extended family back in England, but my mother and father also separated, and I didn't see my mother, sister and baby brother again for fifteen years. My father told me that Jesus would reward me for sacrificing my family and that it would all be worth it in the end. The promise of a reward in Heaven was the carrot on the stick, the reason we were given for why we had to give up everything for the Family.
As a child, I believed everything I was told, just as a five-year-old accepts the tooth fairy or Santa Claus. But I also remember having questions as early as six. One afternoon I woke up from a nap with a burning feeling in my chest. I can still recall the dream I had vividly to this day. I dreamed that I had died and gone to Heaven. Amongst the clouds stood a tall, white statue. It was God, only he wasn't real, he was just a lump of stone, and a sense of disillusionment and anger overwhelmed me as I stood staring at it. The dream impacted me deeply and for the first time the thought entered my mind, `What if God doesn't really exist? What if everything I've been told isn't true? What if all this is just for nothing in the end?' Later on as an adolescent I questioned and at times rebelled, but after one too many knocks back, I shut down and stopped thinking.
It was only after I became a parent that I found the strength to take charge of my life and no longer let fear enslave me to a system of control that stripped me of my right to choose what was best for me and my daughter. Being reunited with my family, my brothers and sisters who were virtually strangers to me for most of my life, has been the biggest reward and source of happiness I could have ever imagined.

Juliana Buhring
I always wished to fly. I used to stare up at the sky from the confines of the cult commune walls and imagine growing wings and flying away. When I finally broke free from the cult of the Children of God/the Family, I was released from my cage, but the freedom was frightening. When I needed to get a bank account, or register my existence in order to get a job, officials looked at me like an alien from the moon. Apart from my passport, there were no records of my existence.
The most common line the Family uses against the ex-members who try and pursue justice for the wrongs they have suffered is, `Why can't they just get over it and move on? They need to leave the past behind and look ahead to the future. Forgive and forget.' I was indoctrinated to think this way for so many years. Now at last on the other side, I understand the reality. You may be able to forgive, but you cannot just `forget', nor erase a lifetime of memories.
I wanted to make sense of my life, and so I sat down and started to write my story. It was through this cathartic process that I came to understand the full implications of the power that one human can hold over another, that one narcissistic man held over the lives of thousands. This is not just the story of my family; it is the story of many families trapped beneath the deceptive facade of the cult I grew up in. It is my hope that our story will be the knife that slashes away the weeds, freeing those caught within to kick their way to the surface and breathe the air of freedom.