3,096 Days

by Natascha Kampusch

  ‘From now you’ll have to cook for yourself.’

  One morning during the first week, the kidnapper came into the dungeon carrying a box made out of dark plywood. He put it up against the wall, put a hotplate and a small oven on it and plugged both of them in. Then he disappeared again. When he came back, he was carrying a stainless-steel pot and a pile of ready-to-eat food: tins of beans and goulash, and a selection of those instant meals that come in small white plastic dishes and colourful cardboard packages and are warmed using steam. Then he explained to me how the hotplate worked.

  I was happy to have got back a small piece of my independence. But when I poured the first tin of beans into the small pot and placed it on the hotplate, I didn’t know how hot to make it or how long it would take for the food to cook. I had never cooked anything before, and I felt alone and out of my depth. And I missed my mother.

  Looking back, it seems astonishing to me that he let a ten-year-old cook, especially as he was otherwise so keen to see me as the small, helpless child. But from then on, I warmed one meal a day on the hotplate myself. The kidnapper came to the dungeon every morning and then one more time, either at noon or in the evening. In the morning he brought me a cup of tea or hot chocolate, a piece of cake or a bowl of cereal. At noon or in the evening, depending on when he had time, he would come with tomato salad and cold-cut sandwiches, or with a hot meal that he shared with me. Noodles with meat and sauce, a rice dish with meat, Austrian home-style cooking that his mother had made for him.

  Back then I had no idea where the food came from or how he lived. Or whether he even had a family who was in on his crime and sat comfortably with him in his living room, while I lay on my thin mattress in the basement. Or whether the people who had supposedly ordered my abduction lived up in the house with him, only sending him down to bring me proper supplies. In fact, he made certain that I ate healthy food and regularly brought me dairy products and fruit.

  One day he brought me a couple of lemons, which gave me an idea. It was a childish and naive plan, but it seemed ingenious to me at the time: I was going to fake an illness which would force the kidnapper to take me to a doctor. I had always heard my grandmother and her friends tell stories about the time during the Russian occupation in eastern Austria after World War II, how the women avoided being raped or carried off, which was the order of the day back then. One of their tricks was to smear red jam into their face so that it looked like an awful skin disease. Yet another trick involved lemons.

  Once I was alone again, I took my ruler and carefully separated the razor-thin skin from the fleshy part of the lemon and carefully glued it to my arm using lotion. It looked disgusting, as if I truly had a purulent infection. When the kidnapper came back, I held up my arm to him and faked terrible pain. I whimpered and asked him to please take me to the doctor. He stared at me steadfastly, then with one gesture he wiped the lemon skin from my arm.

  That day he turned my light off. Lying in the darkness, I racked my brains to think of more ways I could try to force him to let me go. I couldn’t think of any.

  My only hope in those days rested with the police. At that point I was still counting on being freed and hoped that my rescue would take place before he handed me over to the ominous people who had ostensibly ordered my abduction – or found somebody else who could figure out what to do with an abducted girl. Every day I waited for men in uniform to break down the walls of my dungeon. In fact, in the world outside the large-scale search for me had been called off after only three days. The search of the surroundings had been unsuccessful and now the police were questioning all the people closest to me. Only the media issued daily requests for information, with my picture and always the same description:

  The girl is about 1.45 metres tall, weighing forty-five kilograms and has a plump stature. She has straight, light-brown hair with a fringe and blue eyes. At the time of her disappearance, the ten-year-old was wearing a red ski jacket with a hood, a denim dress with a top whose sleeves are grey-and-white checked, light blue tights and black suede shoes size 34. Natascha Kampusch wears glasses with light-blue plastic oval frames and a yellow nose bridge. According to the police, she has a slight squint. The girl was carrying a blue plastic rucksack with a yellow cover and turquoise straps.

  From the case file I know that over 130 tips had been received after four days. People said they had seen me with my mother in a supermarket in Vienna, alone at a motorway rest stop, once in the town of Wels and three times in the province of Tyrol. The police in Kitzbühel, Tyrol, searched for me for days. A team of Austrian law enforcement officers travelled to Hungary where somebody reported having seen me in Sopron. The small Hungarian village where I had spent the previous weekend with my father at his holiday house was searched systematically from top to bottom by the Hungarian police. A neighbourhood watch was set up, and my father’s house was placed under surveillance, because it was thought that I still had my child’s photo identification with me from the weekend and could have run away there. One man called the police and demanded a ransom of one million Austrian schillings for me. A copycat and a con-artist, like so many to come.

  Six days after my abduction, the head of the investigation told the media, ‘In Austria, as in Hungary, uniformed police officers are searching for Natascha by putting up posters. No one is giving up. However, the hope of finding the child alive has vanished.’ Not one of the many tips turned out to lead to a hot trail.

  And yet, the police failed to pursue the one tip that would have led them to me: on Tuesday, one day after my abduction, a twelve-year-old girl reported having seen a child abducted in a white delivery van with darkened windows on Melangasse. However, the police did not at first take this piece of information seriously.

  In my dungeon I had no idea that the outside world had already begun grappling with the thought that I could be dead. I was convinced that the large-scale search was still underway. Whenever I lay on my sunlounger, staring at the low, white ceiling with the bare bulb, I imagined the police talking to each one of my schoolmates, and played their answers through in my mind. I pictured the women who supervised afterschool care, as they described again and again when and where they had seen me for the last time. I considered who of our many neighbours would have watched me leave the house, and if anyone had witnessed the abduction and seen the white delivery van on Melangasse.

  Even more intensely, I pondered fantasies that the kidnapper had demanded a ransom after all and would let me go once the money was handed over. Every time I warmed my food on the hotplate, I carefully tore off the small pictures of the meals and hid them in the pocket of my dress. I knew from films that kidnappers sometimes had to prove that their victims were still alive for the ransom to be handed over. I was prepared: with the pictures I could prove that I had regularly had something to eat. And I could also use them to prove to myself that I was still alive.

  To be on the safe side, I chipped off a small piece of the veneer from the hotplate and placed it in my dress pocket as well. That way nothing could go wrong. I imagined that the kidnapper would drop me off at an undisclosed location after the payment of the ransom and leave me alone there. My parents would be told of my location and come to get me. Afterwards we would alert the police, and I would hand over the veneer chip to the officers. Then all the police would have to do would be to search all of the garages in Strasshof for basement dungeons. The hotplate with the missing chip from its veneer would be the vital piece of evidence.

  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. Altho
ugh 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.