My Story

by Elizabeth Smart

Being taken captive was not part of some great, eternal plan.

She was always irritable and whiny and as pleasant as a thorn underneath your fingernail, but she was a tiny bit better when Mitchell wasn’t leering at me or pulling me into the tent.

I am not the first one to suffer at the hand of an evil man.

I’m so grateful that my captors were strangers and in no way connected with me. I don’t have to go home every night and see them, or see pictures of them hanging on the wall, or know that even though my family is so upset with what they might have done to me, there is still a piece of their hearts that cares and loves the abusers because they are their children, or parents, or brothers and sisters.