I felt as if I had been preserved alive in an underground safe. My prison was not entirely square, measuring about 2.70 metres long and 1.80 wide and just under 2.40 high. Eleven and a half cubic metres of stuffy air. Not quite five square metres of floor, across which I paced like a tiger in a cage, from one wall to the other. Six small steps one way, six steps back, was the length. Four steps one way and four back was the width. I could walk around the perimeter in twenty paces.
Pacing dampened my panic only slightly. As soon as I remained standing, as soon as the sound of my feet hitting the floor faded, my panic rose again. I was nauseated and I was afraid of losing my mind. What was going to happen anyway? Twenty-one, twenty-two … sixty. Six forward, four to the left. Four to the right, six back.
The feeling that there was no way out gripped me again and again. At the same time I knew that I couldn’t allow myself to be smothered by my fear, that I had to do something. I took one of the mineral water bottles, in which the kidnapper had brought me fresh tap water, and hammered with all my might against the wooden panelling. First rhythmically, then energetically until my arm went numb. In the end it was no more than a desperate drumming mixed in with my cries for help. Until the bottle slipped out of my hand.
No one came. No one had heard me, perhaps not even the kidnapper. I collapsed on the mattress exhausted and curled up like a small animal. My cries were transformed into sobs. Crying gave release to my despair at least for a short time and calmed me. It reminded me of my childhood, when I would cry over nothing – and then quickly forget the reason why.
The previous evening my mother had notified the police. When I didn’t come home at the usual time, she first called afterschool care, then the school. Nobody could explain my disappearance. The next day, the police began looking for me. From old newspaper articles I know that hundreds of police officers searched the area around my primary school and my council estate using dogs. There were no clues that would have justified limiting the radius of the search. Back courtyards, side streets and parks were combed, as were the banks of the Danube. Helicopters flew overhead and posters were hung up at every school. Every hour people called with tips, purportedly having seen me in various places. However, none of these tips led in the right direction.
In the first few days of my imprisonment I tried again and again to imagine what my mother must have been doing at that moment. How she would be looking for me everywhere, and how her hope would dwindle from day to day. I missed her so much that the loss I felt threatened to eat me up inside. I would’ve given anything to have had her with me with her power and strength. Looking back, I am amazed how much importance the media has attached to my argument with my mother in the interpretation of my case. As if my leaving without saying goodbye provided insights into my relationship with my mother. Even though I’d felt rejected and disregarded, especially during my parents’ draining separation, it should have been clear to anyone that any child in such an extreme situation would almost automatically be crying out for his or her mother. Without my mother or father, I was without protection, and knowing that they had no news of me saddened me deeply. There were days that my anxious worrying about my parents put a greater strain on me than my own fear. I spent hours thinking about how I might at least communicate to them that I was still alive. So that they wouldn’t completely despair. And so that they wouldn’t give up looking for me.
During the initial time I spent in the dungeon, I hoped every day, every hour, that the door would open and someone would rescue me. The hope that someone couldn’t possibly make me disappear so easily carried me through the endless hours in the cellar. But days and days passed, and no one came. Except for the kidnapper.
Looking back, it seems obvious that he had been planning the abduction for a long time: otherwise why else would he have spent years building a dungeon that could only be opened from the outside and was just barely large enough to allow a person to survive in there? But the kidnapper was, as I witnessed over the years of my imprisonment, a paranoid, fearful person, convinced that the world was evil and that people were after him. It could be just as true that he built the dungeon as a bunker in preparation for a nuclear strike or World War III, as his own place of refuge from all of those he thought were pursuing him.
Nobody today can tell us which answer is the right one. Even statements made by his former co-worker Ernst Holzapfel allow for both interpretations. In a statement to the police, he later said that the kidnapper had once asked him how to soundproof a room so that not even a hammer drill could be heard anywhere in the house.
To me, at least, the kidnapper did not behave like a man who had been preparing for years to abduct a child and whose long-cherished wish had just been fulfilled. Quite the opposite: he seemed like someone whom a distant acquaintance had suddenly saddled with an unwanted child, and who did not know what to do with this little creature that had needs he didn’t know how to cope with.
In my first days in the dungeon, the kidnapper treated me like a very small child. I found this accommodating, as I had inwardly regressed to the emotional level of a kindergarten-aged child. He brought me anything I wanted to eat – and I behaved as if I were spending the night with a distantly related great aunt who could be credibly convinced that chocolate was an appropriate breakfast food. The very first morning, he asked me what I wanted to eat. I wanted fruit tea and croissants. In fact, the kidnapper came back with a thermos filled with rosehip tea and a brioche croissant from one of the most well-known bakeries in town. The printing on the paper bag confirmed my suspicions that I was being held somewhere in Strasshof. Another time I asked for salty sticks with honey and mustard. This ‘order’ was also promptly delivered. It seemed very strange to me that this man fulfilled my every request, given that he had taken everything else away from me.
His penchant for treating me like a small child also had its downside. He would peel every orange for me and put it in my mouth piece by piece, as if I were unable to feed myself. Once, when I asked for chewing gum, he refused – for fear that I would choke on it. In the evenings he forced my mouth open and brushed my teeth as one would a three-year-old who cannot yet hold her toothbrush. After a few days he grabbed my hand roughly and, gripping it tightly, cut my fingernails.
I felt pushed aside, as if he had taken the remaining dignity I was trying to preserve in that situation. At the same time I also knew that I was largely responsible for finding myself on this level, a level that protected me to a certain extent. Because the very first day I had realized how widely the kidnapper fluctuated in his paranoia, between treating me as if I were too small on the one hand or too independent on the other.
I acquiesced in my role, and when the kidnapper returned to the dungeon the next time to bring me food, I did everything I could to keep him there. I pleaded. I begged. I vied for his attention so that he would occupy himself with me, play with me. My time in the solitary dungeon was driving me mad.
So there we were after a few days; I was sitting with my kidnapper in my jail playing Chinese checkers, Nine Men’s Morris, Parcheesi. The situation seemed unreal to me, as if taken from an absurd film. Nobody in the world outside would believe that an abduction victim would do anything to make her kidnapper play Parcheesi. But the world outside was no longer my world. I was a child and alone, and there was only one person who could relieve this oppressive loneliness.
I sat on the mat with my kidnapper, rolled the dice and moved the pieces. I stared at the patterns on the playing board, at the small colourful pieces, and tried to forget about my surroundings and imagine the kidnapper as a fatherly friend who was generous in taking time to play with a child. The better I succeeded in allowing myself to be absorbed by the game, the further away the panic receded. I knew that it was lurking in a corner somewhere, always ready to pounce. And when I was about to win a game, I would surreptitiously make a mistake so as to put off the threat of being alone.
In those first days, the presence of the kidnap
per seemed to me a guarantee that I would be spared the final cruelty. Because in all his visits he talked about the people who had supposedly ‘ordered’ my kidnapping and with whom he had spoken on the telephone so frantically during my abduction. I continued to assume that they must have something to do with a child pornography ring. He repeatedly mumbled something about people who would come to take pictures of me ‘and do other things as well’, which confirmed my fears. The fact that the stories he was feeding me didn’t agree at all, that these ominous people probably didn’t even exist, were thoughts that went through my head sometimes. It is likely that he made up these people supposedly behind the kidnapping to intimidate me. But I couldn’t know for sure, and even if they were invented, they fulfilled their purpose. I lived in constant fear that at any moment a horde of evil men would come into my dungeon and attack me.
The images and the scraps of stories that I had snapped up over the last few months from the media coalesced into ever-more frightening scenarios. I attempted to push them to the back of my mind – and pictured at the same time everything that the kidnapper might do with me. How that was supposed to work with a child. What objects they would use. Whether they would do it right here in the dungeon, or take me to a villa, a sauna or an attic room, like in the case that had most recently been portrayed in the media.
When I was alone, I tried to position myself at all times so that I could keep an eye on the door. At night I slept like a caged animal, closing only one eye, constantly on the alert. I didn’t want to be surprised while I was defencelessly sleeping by the men that I was supposedly to be handed over to. I was tense every second, pumped full of adrenaline and driven by a fear that I was unable to escape in that small room. The fear of my supposed ‘true kidnappers’ made the man who abducted me at their behest appear to offer caring, friendly support; as long as I was with him, the anticipated horror would not take place.
*
In the days after my abduction, my dungeon began to fill up with all sorts of objects. First, the kidnapper brought me some fresh clothes. I had only what I was wearing: knickers, tights, dress, anorak. He had burned my shoes in order to erase any possible traces of me. Those were the shoes with the thick platform soles that I had got for my tenth birthday. When I had walked into the kitchen that day, a cake with ten candles was sitting on the table, next to it a box wrapped in shiny, coloured paper. I took a deep breath and blew the candles out. Then I pulled off the tape and tore the paper aside. For weeks I had been bugging my mother to buy me shoes like the ones everybody else was wearing. She had categorically refused, saying that they were inappropriate for children and that you couldn’t walk properly in them. And now, there they were in front of me: black suede ballerinas with a narrow strap across the instep; underneath, a thick corrugated rubber platform sole. I was delighted! Those shoes, which immediately added three centimetres to my height, would most certainly pave the way for my new self-assured life to begin.
My last present from my mother. And he had burned them. In doing so, he had not only taken from me yet another link to my old life, but also a symbol of the strength that I had hoped to glean from those shoes.
Now the kidnapper gave me one of his old jumpers and khaki-green fine-rib T-shirts that he had obviously kept from his military conscription. It mitigated the outer cold in the night. To protect myself against the cold that seized me on the inside, I continued to wear one of my own items of clothing.
After two weeks he brought me a sunlounger to replace the thin foam mat. The reclining surface was suspended on metal springs that squeaked at the slightest movement. For the next half-year this sound would be my companion during the long days and nights in my dungeon. Because I froze so – it was chilly in the dungeon all year round – the kidnapper dragged a large, heavy electric heater to the tiny room. And he brought my school things back. The bag, so he told me, had been burned along with my shoes.
My first thought was to send my parents a message. I took out paper and a pen and began to write to them. I spent many hours carefully wording that letter – and even found a way to tell them where I was. I knew that I was being held somewhere in Strasshof, where my sister’s parents-in-law lived. I hoped that the mention of her family would be enough to put my parents – and the police – on the right trail.
To prove that I had written the letter myself, I enclosed a photograph from my pencil case, of me ice-skating the previous winter, wrapped up in thick overalls, a smile on my face and my cheeks red. It seemed a snapshot from a world very far away, a world filled with the loud laughing of children, pop music from rattling loudspeakers and vast swathes of cold, fresh air. A world where, after spending an afternoon on the ice, you could go home, take a hot bath and watch TV while drinking hot chocolate. I stared at the photograph for minutes on end, memorizing every detail so as never to forget the feeling I associated with that outing. I probably knew that I would have to preserve every single happy memory in order to recall them in the darkest moments. Then I placed the photograph with the letter and made an envelope from another sheet of paper.
With a mixture of naivety and confidence, I waited for the kidnapper.
When he came, I made an effort to be calm and friendly. ‘You have to send this letter to my parents so that they know that I’m alive!’ He opened the envelope, read what I had written, and refused. I begged and pleaded with him not to leave my parents in the dark much longer. I appealed to the conscience I presumed him to have. ‘You mustn’t turn into such a bad person,’ I told him. What he had done was wrong, but making my parents suffer was much worse. I kept searching for new reasons why and wherefore, and assured him that nothing could happen to him as a result of the letter. He had read it himself and could see that I had not betrayed him … The kidnapper said ‘no’ for a long time – then suddenly gave in. He assured me that he would post the letter to my parents.
It was completely naive of me, but I so wanted to believe him. I lay down on my sunlounger and imagined how my parents would open the letter, how they would find the hidden clues and rescue me. Patience, I just had to have a little patience, and then this nightmare would be over.
The next day, my fantasy came crashing down like a house of cards. The kidnapper came into my dungeon with an injured finger, claiming that ‘someone’ had torn the letter from him in a dispute, injuring him as he fought to get it back. He hinted that it had been the people who supposedly had ordered my abduction and who didn’t want me to contact my parents. The fictitious ‘bad guys’ from the pornography ring became threateningly real. At the same time, the kidnapper donned the role of protector. After all, he had wanted to grant my request and had made such a great effort that he had been hurt in the process.
Today I know that he had never intended to post that letter and had probably burned it, just like all the other objects that he had taken from me. Back then I wanted to believe him.
In the first few weeks the kidnapper did everything to avoid destroying his image as my purported protector. He even fulfilled my greatest wish: a computer. It was an old Commodore C64 with very little memory capacity. But it came with a few floppy disks with games I could use to distract myself. My favourite was an ‘eating’ game. You moved a small man through an underground labyrinth in order to avoid monsters and ‘eat up’ bonus points. It was a somewhat more sophisticated version of Pac-Man. I spent hours and hours scoring points. When the kidnapper was in the dungeon, we sometimes played together on a split screen. Back then he often let me, the small child, win. Today I see the analogy to my own situation in the cellar, where monsters were able to penetrate at any time, monsters that you had to run away from. My bonus points were rewards, like the computer, ‘won’ by ‘impeccable’ behaviour.
When I got tired of that one, I switched to Space Pilot, where you had to fly through space and shoot alien spaceships. The third game on my C64 was a strategic game called Kaiser, or Emperor. In it, you ruled over people and challenged others to become Emperor. He like
d that game best. He would send his people to war with enthusiasm. He would also let them starve or make them perform forced labour as long as it served to increase his power and wouldn’t decimate the hordes he needed for his armies.
All of this still took place in a virtual world. But it wouldn’t take long for him to show me his other face.
‘If you don’t do what I tell you, I will have to turn your light off.’
‘If you’re not good, then I’ll have to tie you up.’
In my situation I had absolutely no chance of not being ‘good’, and I didn’t know what he meant. Sometimes a sudden movement on my part was enough to cause his mood to change. Or when I looked directly at him, despite his order that I should keep my eyes strictly on the floor. Everything that didn’t fit the fixed template that he had prescribed for my behaviour spurred his paranoia. Then he would berate me and accuse me time and time again of only wanting to trick him, deceive him. It was in all likelihood the uncertainty about whether I really could communicate with the outside world that drove him to abuse me verbally like that. He did not like it when I insisted on my point of view that he was wrongly accusing me. He wanted recognition when he brought me something, praise for the effort that he had had to undertake on my account – for example, in dragging the heavy heater down into the dungeon. Even back then he began to demand gratitude from me. And even back then I tried to deny it to him as much as I could, saying, ‘I’m only here because you’ve locked me up.’ Secretly, I couldn’t do anything but rejoice when he brought me food and other items I desperately needed.
Today, as an adult, it seems amazing to me that my fear, my recurrent panic, was not directed towards the kidnapper’s person. It may have been my reaction to his nondescript appearance and his insecurity, or his strategy aimed at giving me as much of a sense of security as possible in this unbearable situation by making himself indispensable as an attachment figure. The threatening part of my situation was the dungeon under the earth, the closed-in walls and locked door, and the people who had supposedly ordered my abduction. The kidnapper himself created the impression sometimes that his crime had been merely a pose that he had struck, but which did not fit with his personality. In my childish imagination, he had decided at some point to become a criminal and commit an evil deed. I never doubted that his actions constituted a crime that had to be punished. But I separated the crime distinctly from the person who had committed it. The bad guy was most certainly a role he was only playing.
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