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* – 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.
Even robbing children of their freedom, at least temporarily, was to me nothing outside the realm of the conceivable, although I had never experienced it myself. Back then in some families it was still common to punish unruly children by locking them in a dark cellar. And old women on the tram scolded mothers of misbehaving children by saying, ‘Well, if it was mine, I would lock it up.’
Children can adapt even to the most adverse circumstances. In the parents who beat them, they still see the part that loves them, and in a mouldy shack they see their home. My new home was a dungeon, my attachment figure, the kidnapper. My whole world had veered off course, and he was the only person in this nightmare which had become my world. I was completely dependent on him, as only infants and toddlers are on their parents. Every gesture of affection, every bite of food, light, air – my entire physical and psychological survival depended on the one man who had locked me in his basement dungeon. And in claiming that my parents failed to respond to his demands for ransom, he made me emotionally dependent on him as well.
If I wanted to survive in this new world, I had to cooperate with him. For somebody who has never been in such an extreme situation of oppression, this may be difficult to comprehend. But today I am proud of the fact that I was able to take this step towards the person who had robbed me of everything. Because that step saved my life, even though I had to dedicate more and more energy to maintaining this ‘positive approach’ to the kidnapper. He successively transformed himself into a slave driver and dictator. But I never departed from my image of him.
Still, his outward show of playing benefactor by trying to make my life in the dungeon as pleasant as possible remained intact. In fact, a kind of daily routine developed. Several weeks after the abduction, Priklopil brought into the dungeon a patio table, two folding chairs, a dishtowel I was permitted to use as a tablecloth and some dishes. When the kidnapper arrived with food, I would put the dishtowel on the table. I would place two glasses on it and put the forks neatly next to the plates. The only thing missing was serviettes, which he was too miserly to provide. Then we would sit down together at the folding table, eat the pre-cooked meal and drink fruit juice. At that time he was not yet rationing anything and I enjoyed being able to drink as much as I wanted. A kind of cosiness set in and I began to look forward to these meals together with the kidnapper. They broke up my loneliness. They became important to me.
These situations were so entirely absurd that I was unable to put them in any sort of familiar category from my world up until that point in time – this small, dark world that suddenly held me captive had in every way so little in common with any standard of normality. I had to create new standards. Perhaps I was in a fairy tale? In a place taken from the imaginings of the Brothers Grimm, far away from the normal world? Of course. Hadn’t an aura of evil already enshrouded Strasshof from before? My sister’s despised in-laws lived in a section of Strasshof called ‘Silberwald’, literally ‘Silver Forest’. As a small child, I had been afraid of meeting them during their visits to my sister’s flat. The place name and the negative atmosphere in that family had already turned Silberwald – and therefore Strasshof – into a forest under a witch’s spell even before my kidnapping. Yes, I had certainly ended up in a fairy tale, whose deeper meaning was unknown to me.
The only thing that did not sit well with the evil fairy tale was the bathing in the evening. I couldn’t remember ever reading anything about bathing in fairy tales. The dungeon had only a double stainless-steel sink and cold water. The hot water pipes the kidnapper had installed were not yet functional, which is why he brought me warm water in plastic bottles. I had to undress, sit in one of the sinks and put my feet in the other. In the beginning he simply poured warm water over me. Later I came up with the idea of punching small holes in the bottles to make a kind of shower. Because there was very little room to move about, he had to help me wash. I was unaccustomed to being naked in front of him, a strange man. What was he thinking all the while? I eyed him uncertainly, but he scrubbed me down like a car. There was neither anyt
hing tender nor anything salacious in his gestures. He attended to me as one would maintain a household appliance.
It was exactly at the time when the image of the evil fairy tale imposed itself on my reality that the police finally began to follow up the tip provided by the girl who had witnessed my abduction. On 18 March the statement of that single witness was published, together with the announcement that the owners of 700 white delivery vans would be examined over the next few days. The kidnapper had enough time to prepare.
On Good Friday, the thirty-fifth day of my imprisonment, the police came to Strasshof and demanded that Wolfgang Priklopil show them his car. He had filled it with construction debris and told the police that he was using the delivery van for renovation work on his house. On 2 March, Priklopil said, according to police records, he had spent the whole day at home and that there were no witnesses. The kidnapper had no alibi, a fact that the police continued to cover up even years after I had escaped.
The police were satisfied and decided to forgo searching the house, which Priklopil supposedly freely invited them to do. While I sat in the dungeon, waiting to be rescued and trying not to lose my mind, they merely took a few Polaroid photographs of the car I had been kidnapped in and added them to my case files. In my rescue fantasies down in the cellar, specialists combed the area, looking for traces of my DNA or tiny pieces of fabric from my clothing. But, above ground, things were different; the police did none of that. They apologized to Priklopil and left without ever having examined the car or the house any more closely.
I didn’t find out until after I had escaped how close the kidnapper had come to being arrested if only the police had truly taken the matter seriously. However, only two days later it became clear to me that I would never go free.
In 1998 Easter Sunday fell on 12 April. The kidnapper brought me a small basket with colourful chocolate eggs and a chocolate Easter bunny. We ‘celebrated’ Christ’s resurrection in the light of the bare light bulb, sitting at a small patio table in my airless dungeon. I was happy to receive the goodies and tried with all my might to push aside my thoughts of the outside world, of Easter celebrations in previous years. Grass. Light. Sun. Trees. Air. People. My parents.
That day the kidnapper told me that he had given up hope of ransoming me, because my parents had still not got in touch with him. ‘Obviously they don’t care about you enough,’ he said. Then came the judgement. A life sentence. ‘You’ve seen my face and you know me already too well. Now I can no longer let you go. I will never take you back to your parents, but I will take care of you here as well as I can.’
All my hopes were dashed at a stroke that Easter Sunday. I cried and begged him to let me go. ‘But I have my whole life ahead of me. You can’t just lock me up here! What about school, what about my parents?’ I swore to God and everything that I held sacred that I wouldn’t betray him. But he didn’t believe me, saying that once free I would forget my oath only too quickly, or give in to pressure from the police. I tried to make it clear to him that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life with a crime victim in the cellar, and begged him to blindfold me and take me far away. I would never find the house again and I had no name that would lead the police to him. I even made plans for him to escape. He could go abroad; after all, life in another country would be much better than locking me away forever in a dungeon and having to take care of me.
I whimpered, begged and at some point I began to scream, ‘The police will find me! And then they will lock you up. Or shoot you dead! And if not, then my parents will find me!’ My voice cracked.
Priklopil remained completely calm. ‘They don’t care about you, have you already forgotten? And if they come to the house, I will kill them.’ Then he left the dungeon backwards, closing the door from the outside.
I was alone.
It wasn’t until ten years later, two long years after my escape and in the wake of a police scandal centring on the errors in the investigation and their cover-up that I found out I had come close to being rescued a second time that Easter holiday without even knowing it. On 14 April, the Tuesday after Easter, the police made public yet another tip. Witnesses had told them that they had seen a delivery van with darkened windows in the vicinity of my council estate the morning of my abduction. The number plate read ‘Gänserndorf’, the administrative district where Strasshof was located.
However, the police did not make public a second tip. A member of the Vienna police’s canine unit had called the police station. The officer on duty recorded the following report from him verbatim:
On 14 April 1998 at 2.45 p.m. an unknown person called and reported the following information:
Regarding the search for a white delivery vehicle with darkened windows in the district of Gänserndorf and with regards to the disappearance of Kampusch, Natasche [sic!], there is a person in Strasshof/Nordbahn who could be connected to her disappearance and owns a white delivery van, model Mercedes, with darkened windows. This man is known as a ‘loner’ who has extreme difficulties relating to his environment and problems dealing with other people. He is said to be living with his mother in Strasshof/Nordbahn, Heinestrasse 60 (single-family dwelling), which is fully equipped with an electric alarm system. The man reportedly may have weapons in the house. His white delivery van, model Mercedes, number plate unknown, has often been seen in front of his house at Heinestrasse 60 with completely darkened windows along the sides and in the back. The man was previously employed by SIEMENS as a communication engineer and may still be working there. It is possible that the man lives in the house with his elderly mother and is said to have a penchant for ‘children’ with regard to his sexuality. It is unknown whether he has any prior police record in that regard.
The man’s name was not known to the caller, who only knows him from the neighbourhood. The man is approximately thirty-five years old, has blond hair, is lanky and 175–180 centimetres tall. The anonymous caller was not able to provide any information that was more specific.
4
Buried Alive
The Nightmare Begins
The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well. [ … ] Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? [ … ]
‘Come, there’s no use in crying like that!’ said Alice to herself, rather sharply. ‘I advise you to leave off this minute!’ She generally gave herself very good advice (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. ‘But it’s no use now,’ thought poor Alice, ‘to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!’
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
One of the first books I read in the dungeon was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The book touched me in an unpleasant, spooky way. Alice, a girl probably my age, follows a talking white rabbit into its hole in a dream. As soon as she enters, she falls down into the depths and lands in a room with doors all around. She’s trapped in an in-between world under the earth, and the way up is blocked. Alice finds a key to the smallest door and a small bottle with a magic potion that makes her shrink. She has hardly gone through the tiny opening when the door closes behind her. In the underground world she has now entered, nothing seems right. Sizes change constantly, the talking animals she meets there do things that defy all logic. But nobody seems to be bothered by it. Everything is madly off-kilter, off-balance. The entire book is one single, lurid nightmare, in which all of the laws of nature have been suspended. Nothing and no one is normal. The girl is all alone in a world that she does not understand, where she has no one to confide
in. She has to buck herself up, forbid herself to cry and act according to the rules of others. She attends the Mad Hatter’s endless tea parties where all sorts of crazy guests cavort, and takes part in the Queen of Heart’s cruel game of croquet, at the end of which all the other players are sentenced to death. ‘Off with their heads!’ shouts the Queen, laughing madly.
Alice is able to leave this world deep below the earth because she wakes up from her dream. When I opened my eyes after just a few hours of sleep, my nightmare was still there. It was my reality.
The entire book seemed like an exaggerated description of my own situation. I too was trapped beneath the ground in a room that the kidnapper had secured against the outside world with a number of doors. And I too found myself trapped in a world where all the rules I was familiar with no longer applied. Everything that had held true in my life until that point was meaningless here. I had become part of a psychopath’s sick fantasy, a fantasy I did not understand. Could not understand. There was no link any more to the other world I had just recently been a part of. No familiar voice, no familiar sounds that would prove to me that the world up above was still there. How was I supposed to maintain a link to the real world and to myself in that situation?
I hoped against hope that I, like Alice, would suddenly awake. In my old room, amazed at my crazy, frightening dream that had nothing in common with my ‘real world’. But it wasn’t my dream I was trapped in, it was my kidnapper’s. And he wasn’t sleeping either, but had dedicated his life to turning a terrible fantasy into reality, a fantasy from which there was no escape, not even for him.
From that time on I ceased all attempts to persuade the kidnapper to let me go. I knew that there was no point.
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