Final Analysis - Catherine Crier [44]
The statements were remarkable—and outrageously unbelievable. Perhaps Felix was trying to “right” his own childhood trauma when he took up Adam’s alleged cause. It is possible that Susan had made up the elaborate tales of abuse or that she simply borrowed them from the headlines and “transferred” them onto her young son. As a Holocaust survivor with his own mental issues, it may be that Felix indulged in a “shared delusion” with his wife. Perhaps his crusade to “get the bad people” was a way to right what had been so wrong when he was a small boy. It is not impossible that Felix Polk truly believed that something bad had happened to his son. After all, he purportedly witnessed men in black helmets wearing swastikas systematically round up men, women, and children for extermination. In Felix’s mind, the two incidents may have been fused; his own childhood trauma and the one he believed happened to his son. Indeed, he spoke of his family’s ordeal at the hands of the Nazis during his presentation in Berkeley.
“I am an older father,” he told those attending the workshop that day. “I am a survivor of the Holocaust. My family and I were in hiding in Europe unable to talk for one year. I have a built-in sense of survival. I have a commitment to not let anything happen to my children. It was a horror what happened to us.”
It was after this recollection that Felix vowed to keep up the fight on his son’s behalf. “I’ve alienated some people, some police and FBI. But I don’t care…. My rage is omni present. I wake up with it every morning. My fantasy, of course, is to kill them,” he said of his son’s alleged abusers. “I am a rather moral person. But I won’t stop, not now. People are not in a place to protect our children,” Felix asserted. “My son cannot be protected.”
The supposed inability of authorities to prosecute those allegedly responsible for harming his son prompted Felix and Susan to establish a new organization, “ENOUGH!” to help victims of ritualistic and other forms of child abuse. Its main goal was to change legislation so that children could testify against their alleged attackers in a public court of law.
While Felix denied charges from some in the psychological community that he was using his son as a way to gain publicity for his practice, his behavior with Adam was certainly not that of a trained therapist. He clearly exhibited poor judgment when he paraded the youngster before an audience during one presentation and detailed the abuse he supposedly suffered while in day care. Even Felix’s daughter from his first marriage had raised questions about her father’s conduct and motives in a letter to him in early 1988. Though the twenty-six-year-old Jennifer Polk had recently joined her father and his new family on a vacation in Hawaii, in the letter she made it clear that she was now estranged from her dad, expressing her frustration that during the trip she was unable to live up to either her father’s expectations or Susan’s. She expressed distaste for Felix’s crusade in Adam’s name and accused her father of always needing a cause to cling onto.
Her accusation evoked a response from Felix, who responded venomously in a return letter: “It is a lie that I need to hang onto a cause, that I need something to be upset about,” Felix replied in a four-page typewritten response on March 4, 1988. “However, I note that is true of you…. Your latest cause to refer to Adam enrages me,” he continued. “I want to shove those words down your throat. My son Adam was brutalized, and I, his father, have not been able to protect him or see that something happens to the people that raped him.”
Felix’s response was ironic and telling. Was he really disappointed in Jennifer’s comments or in himself for what he perceived as another