At the beginning of the Netflix limited series Dear Child, we see a woman running through the forest frantically, and we don’t know at that moment who she is running from. She looked scared, and it did feel like someone was after her life. It felt like she had escaped from captivity, and whoever was after her was a dangerous person. The harrowed look on the woman’s face made us realize that probably her captor was capable of killing her. The woman got hit by a car, and soon, we saw her lying in an ambulance with a small girl sitting beside her. The little girl told the paramedics while sitting in the ambulance that her name was Hannah and that her mother’s name was Lena. Hannah said that her mother’s blood group was AB negative, which was rarely found in people. The little girl had way too much knowledge for her age, and even the paramedics were surprised by how mature she was. Hannah was very calm, and unlike kids her age, she didn’t look petrified; she did not even shed a tear, and she answered everything that she was asked in a very composed manner, making sure that she didn’t miss out on any detail.
Spoiler Alert
Why Was Jasmin Being Addressed As Lena?
Nurse Ruth Kuppers came to take Hannah with her while her mother was in the operating theater undergoing surgery. Nurse Ruth very soon realized that there was something sinister happening in the house where the mother and daughter came from. Hannah had this habit of showing her hands whenever someone came to her. Hannah said that her father liked to check whenever he came home if they were holding something in their hands or not. Ruth gave a piece of paper and some crayons to Hannah so that she could distract herself and draw something. But what she ended up drawing made Ruth realize that their lives were in danger, and there was another boy named Jonathan, who was probably Hannah’s brother, who was still stuck there as of now. Ruth realized that there was no ventilation in the house in which they were staying, and there was just one window that they used to keep closed at all times, which is why Hannah couldn’t keep her eyes open in the sunlight.
After the surgery was successful, Detective Gerd Buhling came to the hospital and met Aida Kurt. That’s when we got to know that Gerd had been looking into the case of Lena Beck for the past 13 years. Lena had been kidnapped 13 years ago, and to date, the entire police department and the special investigation unit were not able to find a single lead that could help them solve the mystery. Gerd had found the description of Lena on the online portal where information about every arrest was updated, and he had come running to the hospital hoping that it would be the Lena he knew. Gerd had also informed the parents of Lena Beck, Matthias, and Karin, and we came to know that the detective was quite close to Lena’s family. But something strange happened when Lena’s parents saw her; they said that the woman lying on the hospital bed was not their daughter. But strangely, they looked at Hannah and found her to be a replica of their own daughter. Hannah also said that she recognized her grandfather, though Matthias stuck to the fact that he had never met the little girl in his life.
This woman, whose identity was now in question, was in a very disturbed state of mind. She was constantly hearing voices in her head, and she was scared beyond any measure. She came to her senses, and that’s when she told Gerd that her name was Jasmin (Kim Riedle) and she was kept in captivity by this man whom the kids referred to as Papa. Apart from Hannah, there was another boy named Jonathan who was being kept in the house, and Aida’s team recovered him from there. Jasmin was kidnapped by a psychopath who had done pretty much the same thing with the real Lena Beck back in the day. After Lena had died, he needed a mother for his children, and that’s when he started abducting other girls who resembled Lena so that he could keep his kids under the impression that their mother had never left. That’s why he made Jasmin dye her hair and made sure that she was trained to respond to the name Lena and not her own.
Was Jasmin Able To Escape The Kidnapper?
It came to be known that the owner of a security firm called Rogner and Sons was the one who had been keeping Lena, Jasmin, and other women in captivity. He had killed Lena and every other woman he kidnapped after her until he found Jasmin. As Hannah said, Jonathan, for the first time, felt close to Jasmin, and he had started to believe that she was his real mother.
The psychopath’s name in Dear Child was Lars Rogner, and he made Jasmin go through all kinds of torture. He raped her, he abused her, and he put her under the kind of circumstances where the spirit of the poor woman broke, and she forgot her identity and accepted that she was indeed Lena Beck. Whatever Jasmin had gone through in that room had such an impact on her mind that she constantly felt that she was being seen and that somebody would come and hurt her. Jasmin realized that the only way to get over her fears was by killing this man who had made her go through hell. She knew that the perpetrator was still out there, and sooner or later, he would come for her.
Lars Rogner thought that he could deceive everyone. Jasmin wanted to break his illusion and tell him that she could get the better of him. She was infuriated from within, and she wanted to shout out at the top of her lungs that she was not Lena Beck and that he should stop addressing her with that name. She wanted to take revenge for the time he had left her handcuffed in the washroom; for the time when, as a punishment, he hadn’t given her anything to wear inside the freezing room; for the time when he had beaten and abused her and made her accept the fact that it was all so that they could stay as one happy family. Jasmin knew that she was being watched by this maniac, and just to show him, she kept a sharp object in her sleeves to make him feel like he had caught her in the act.
As expected, Rogner did come to take her with Hannah, and together, they were supposed to go to this special place that was going to be their new home. Rogner knew about the sharp object she was hiding in her sleeve, but he didn’t realize that it was just for show, and she was holding onto the shard of glass, which she had procured from that broken snow globe, too. At the end of Dear Child, Jasmin stabbed Rogner in the neck, and while he was lying there gasping for breath, she told him, with a vengeance in her eyes and a fire brewing inside her, that she was not Lena Beck. Had Jasmin not shown courage that day, Lars would have kept torturing her and she would have kept living in that misery. Jasmin finally could go back to her everyday life, and she took Hannah to the beach and made her realize what being happy felt like.
