‘I was told at the orphanage I’d amount to nothing, but I defied them,’ says survivor

The railway tracks ahead of him seemed endless but they offered a human connection for a 16-year-old alone in the woods outside of St. John’s in the 1950s.

Each step he took was one more away from the horrors of the sexual and physical abuse he had endured at Mount Cashel Orphanage — the “holy hell” he had run away from just hours earlier.

When darkness started to close in that first night along the lonely rail line, John (not his real name, which cannot be published due to a court-imposed ban), who is now 80, says that at the time he knew he would rather risk death alone in the woods over one he felt certain would come to him if he stayed at the orphanage any longer.

“I had it in my…