"All in all I said very little [while Asja] spoke with great animation about her work with children at the children's center. For the second time I heard the story about the child in her care who had bashed in the skull of another of her children. Curiously enough, it was only now that I understood this rather simple story (which could have had grave consequences for Asja; but the doctors were convinced that the child would be saved). This often happens to me: I barely hear what she is saying because I am examining her so intently. She expanded on her idea: that children must be divided up into groups, because it is utterly impossible to keep the wildest ones—she calls them the most gifted ones—busy with the others. They simply get bored with the things that absorb normal children. And it is very evident that Asja, as she herself says, is most successful with the wildest children. Asja also spoke of the things she was writing, three articles for a Latvian communist newspaper that appears in Moscow: this paper reaches Riga by illegal means and it is very useful for her to be read there."
~~ from Moscow Diary by Walter Benjamin
