3,096 Days (10 page)

In my head I stored every detail I knew about the kidnapper so that I could describe him after I was set free. I was largely limited to outside appearance, which disclosed little about him. When he visited me in the dungeon, he wore old T-shirts and Adidas
tracksuit bottoms – practical clothing so that he could fit through the narrow passageway which led to my prison.

How old did I think he was? I compared him to the adults in my family: younger than my mother, but older than my sisters who, back then, were around thirty. Although he looked young, one time I came straight out and said, ‘You are thirty-five.’ I didn’t find out until much later that I was correct.

But I did, in fact, find out his name – only to immediately forget it. ‘Look, that’s my name,’ he said once, annoyed by my constant questions, holding his business card in front of my face for a number of seconds. ‘Wolfgang Priklopil’ it said. ‘Of course, that’s not really my name,’ he quickly added, laughing. I believed him. It didn’t seem credible that a dangerous criminal would have such a mundane name as ‘Wolfgang’. I could hardly decipher his last name so quickly anyway. It is difficult and hard for an overwrought child to remember. ‘Or maybe my name is Holzapfel,’ he asserted, before he closed the door behind him once again. At the time I had no idea what that name was supposed to mean. Today I know that Ernst Holzapfel was something akin to Wolfgang Priklopil’s best friend.

The closer 25 March came, the more nervous I grew. Since my abduction I had asked Priklopil every day what the date and time were in order to keep from becoming completely disorientated. For me there was no day or night, and although spring had sprung outside, my dungeon became freezing cold as soon as I turned off the heater. One morning he answered, ‘Monday, 23 March.’ I had not had even the slightest contact with the outside world for three weeks. And my mother’s birthday was in two days.

That date was highly symbolic for me. If I was forced to see it go by without wishing my mother a happy birthday, my imprisonment would have gone from a temporary nightmare to something undeniably real. Until now I had only missed a few days of
school. But not being home for an important family celebration would be a significant milestone. ‘That was the birthday Natascha wasn’t here,’ I heard my mother telling her grandchildren, looking back. Or even worse: ‘That was the first birthday Natascha wasn’t here.’

It troubled me deeply that I had left her in anger and now I could not even tell my mother on her birthday that I hadn’t meant it and loved her after all. I tried to stop time in my head, tried in desperation to think of how I could send her a message. Maybe it would work out this time, unlike with my letter. I would forgo leaving any hidden hints of my location in the letter. A sign of life for her birthday, that was all I wanted.

At our next meal together, I pleaded with the kidnapper for so long that he said he would bring a cassette recorder to the dungeon the next day. I would be able to record a message for my mother!

I gathered up all my strength to sound cheerful on the tape: ‘Dear Mummy. I am fine. Don’t worry about me. Happy birthday. I miss you enormously.’ I had to stop several times because tears were pouring down my cheeks and I didn’t want my mother to hear me sob.

When I was finished, Priklopil took the cassette and assured me that he would call my mother and play it for her. I didn’t want anything more than to believe him. For me it was an immense relief that my mother would now not have to worry so much about me.

She never heard the tape.

For the kidnapper, his assertion that he had played the recording for my mother was an important manoeuvre in his manipulative bid for dominance, because shortly thereafter he changed his strategy. He no longer spoke of the people who had supposedly ordered my abduction, but rather of a kidnapping for ransom.

He maintained again and again that he had contacted my parents, but they obviously had no interest in seeing me freed:

‘Your parents don’t love you at all.’

‘They don’t want you back.’

‘They are happy to finally be rid of you.’

These statements were like acid, penetrating the open wounds of a child who had previously felt unloved. Although I never once believed that my parents did not want to see me free, I knew that they didn’t have much money. But I was completely convinced that they would do everything they could to come up with the ransom somehow.

‘I know my parents love me. They’ve always told me so,’ I told him, bravely resisting the kidnapper’s malicious remarks, the kidnapper who very much regretted unfortunately never having received an answer from them.

But the doubts that had been planted before my imprisonment cropped up.

He systematically undermined my belief in my family, and with it an important pillar of my already tattered self-esteem. The certainty of having my family behind me, a family that would do everything to rescue me, slowly faded. Because days and days passed, and nobody came to free me.

Why had I, of all people, become a victim of such a crime? Why had he picked me out and locked me up? Those questions began to torture me, and they still occupy my thoughts today. It was so difficult to comprehend the reasons for his crime that I cast about desperately for an answer. I wanted the abduction to have some kind of meaning, a clear logic that had remained hidden to me up until that point, which would make it more than just a random attack against me. Even today it is difficult to cope with knowing that I forfeited my youth just to a whim and the mental illness of one single man.

I never received an answer to that question from the kidnapper himself, although I continued to probe time and again. Only once
did he say, ‘I saw you in a school picture and picked you out.’ But then he immediately retracted his statement. Later he would say, ‘You came to me like a stray cat. Cats you are allowed to keep.’ Or, ‘I saved you. You should be grateful.’ Towards the end of my imprisonment, he was probably the most honest: ‘I always wanted to have a slave.’ But years would pass before he would say those words.

I have never found out why he chose to abduct me of all people. Because it seemed the obvious choice to select me as a victim? Priklopil grew up in the same district of Vienna as I did. During the time I accompanied my father on his delivery rounds to the bars, he was a young man at the end of his twenties, moving in the same shady circles that we did. During my primary school years I was amazed again and again at how many people greeted me so cheerfully because they recognized me from my father’s delivery round. He may have been one of the men who noticed me then.

It is possible, however, that other people brought me to his attention. Perhaps his story about the pornography ring was true. Back then there were enough such organizations in Germany and Austria which would not have hesitated to abduct children for their cruel purposes. And the discovery of a dungeon in Marc Dutroux’s house in Belgium had been made only two years previously. Still, I do not know even today whether Priklopil – as he continued to claim in the beginning – had kidnapped me on the orders of others, or whether he acted alone. It is too frightening to speculate that somewhere out there the true culprits are still free. However, during my imprisonment there was no indication of any criminal accomplices, aside from the initial references made by Priklopil.

Back then, I had a very clear picture of what abduction victims looked like. They were blonde girls, small and very thin, nearly transparent, who floated helplessly and angelically through the
world. I imagined them as creatures whose hair was so silky that one absolutely had to touch it. Their beauty intoxicated sick men, making them commit crimes of violence just to be near them. I, on the other hand, was dark-haired, and felt cloddish and unattractive. And more so than ever on the morning of my abduction. I didn’t fit my own image of a kidnapped girl.

Looking back, I know that this image was skewed. It is the nondescript children with very little self-esteem that criminals choose to prey on. Beauty is not a factor in abduction or sexual violence. Studies have shown that mentally and physically disabled persons, as well as children with few family connections, run a higher risk of falling victim to a criminal. Next in the ‘rankings’ come children such as I was on the morning of 2 March: I was intimidated, afraid and had just stopped crying. I was insecure, walking to school on my own for the first time, and my small steps were hesitant. Perhaps he saw that. Perhaps he noticed how worthless I felt and decided spontaneously that day that I was to be his victim.

Lacking any outward indication as to why I of all people had become his victim, back in the dungeon I began to blame myself. The arguments with my mother the evening before my abduction ran on endless repeat before my eyes. I was afraid of the thought that the abduction had been my punishment for having been a bad daughter, for having left without making any attempt at reconciliation. I turned everything over and over in my head. I examined my past for all the mistakes I had made. Every little unkind word. Every situation in which I had not been polite, good or nice. Today I know that it is common for victims to blame themselves for the crime perpetrated against them. Back then it was a maelstrom that swept me along and I could do nothing to resist it.

The excruciating brightness that had kept me awake during my first few nights had given way to total darkness. When the
kidnapper unscrewed the light bulb in the evening and closed the door behind him, I felt as if I had been cut off from everything: blind, deaf from the constant whirring of the fan, unable to orientate myself spatially or sometimes even sense myself. Psychologists call this ‘sensory deprivation’. Being cut off from all sensory input. Back then the only thing I knew was that I was in danger of losing my mind in that lonely darkness.

From the moment when he left me alone in the evening until breakfast the next day, I was trapped in a state of uncertainty, completely devoid of light. I could do nothing other than lie there and stare into the darkness. Sometimes I still screamed or beat against the walls in the desperate hope that somebody would hear me.

In all my fear and loneliness, I had to rely only on myself. I tried to buck myself up and fight back my panic using ‘rational’ means. These were words that saved me back then. Like others who crochet for hours and have a fine doily to show for their efforts, I wove words together in my head, writing long letters to myself and short stories that nobody would put on paper.

The point of departure for my stories was mainly my plans for the future. I imagined every detail of how life would be after my rescue. I would do better at all of my subjects at school and overcome my fear of other people. I promised myself to exercise more and lose weight so that I could take part in the other children’s games. I pictured myself going to another school once I was freed – after all, I was in fourth grade
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– and how the other kids would react to me. Would they know me from the reports of my abduction? Would they believe me and accept me as one of their
own? What I liked best was to imagine myself reuniting with my parents. How they would take me in their arms, how my father would lift me up and toss me through the air. How the intact world of my earlier childhood would return, making me forget the period of quarrelling and humiliation.

Other nights, such visions of the future were not enough. Then I took on the role of my absent mother, in a way splitting myself into two parts and giving myself encouragement: ‘This is just like a holiday. Although you’re away from home, on holiday you can’t just call on the telephone. There is no telephone on holiday, and you can’t interrupt a holiday just because you’ve had one bad night. And when the holiday’s over, you’ll come back home to us, and then school will be starting up again.’

During these monologues I pictured my mother in front of me. I heard her say with a determined voice, ‘Get yourself together, there’s no point in getting all worked up. You have to get through this, and afterwards everything will be okay again.’ Yes. If I could only be strong, everything would be okay again.

And when none of that helped, I tried to recall a situation in which I had felt safe and loved. A bottle of
Franzbranntwein
that I had asked the kidnapper to get for me helped. My grandmother had always rubbed it on her skin. The sharp, fresh odour immediately transported me to her house in Süssenbrunn and gave me a warm sense of security. When my brain was no longer enough, my nose took over, helping me not to lose my connection to myself – and my mind.

Over time I tried to become accustomed to the kidnapper. I intuitively adapted myself to him, the way you adapt to the incomprehensible customs of people in a foreign country.

Today I think the fact that I was still a child may have helped me. As an adult, I don’t think I would have been able to get through, even partially intact, this extreme form of being told exactly what
to do and the psychological torture I was subjected to as a prisoner in the cellar. From the very beginning of their lives children are programmed to perceive the adults closest to them as unquestioned authorities, who provide orientation and set the standards for what is right and what is wrong. Children are told what to wear and when to go to bed. They are to eat what is put on the table, and anything undesirable is suppressed. Parents are always denying their children something they want to have. Even when adults take chocolate away from children, or the few euros they received from a relative for their birthday, that constitutes interference. Children must learn to accept that and trust that their parents are doing the right thing. Otherwise the discrepancy between their own desires and the discouraging behaviour of their loved ones will break them.

I was used to following instructions from adults, even when it went against the grain. If it had been up to me, I never would have gone to afterschool care. Particularly to one which dictated to children when they were allowed to take care of their most basic bodily functions, i.e. when they could eat, sleep or go to the toilet. And I would not have gone to my mother’s shop every day after afterschool care, where I attempted to stave off boredom by eating ice cream and pickles.