The world I was living in had shrunk to five square metres. If I wasn’t to go crazy in it, I would have to try to conquer it for myself. And not wait, trembling, for the cruel call ‘Off with her head!’ like the playing card people from Alice in Wonderland; and not submit like all the other fantasy creatures from that twisted reality. But rather try to create a refuge in this dark place, which the kidnapper could infiltrate but within which I could weave as much as possible of myself and my old world around me – like a protective cocoon.
I began to make myself at home in the dungeon and turn the kidnapper’s prison into my space, into my room. The first things I asked for were a calendar and an alarm clock. I was trapped in a time warp where the kidnapper alone was the master of time. The hours and minutes blurred into a thick mass that weighed dully on everything. Like a deity, Priklopil had the power over light and darkness in my world. ‘God spoke: Let there be light. And there was light. And God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night.’ A bare bulb dictated to me when I was to sleep and when I was to be awake.
I had asked the kidnapper every day what day of the week it was, what the date was. I don’t know whether he lied to me, but that didn’t matter. The most important thing for me was to feel a connection to my former life ‘up there’. Whether it was a school day or a weekend off. Whether bank holidays or birthdays I wanted to spend with my family were drawing near. Measuring time, I learned back then, is probably the most important anchor you can have in a world in which you run the risk of otherwise simply dissolving. The calendar helped me to regain a modicum of orientation – and images that the kidnapper had no access to. I now knew whether other children would be getting up early or were allowed to sleep in. In my imagination I followed my mother’s daily routine. Today she would go to the shop. Tomorrow she might visit a friend. And at the weekend she might go on an outing with her boyfriend. In this way the sober numbers and names of the days of the week took on a life of their own, giving me support and structure.
Almost more important was the alarm clock.
I asked for one of those old-fashioned ones that mark the passing of the seconds with a loud monotone ticking sound.
My beloved grandmother had such an alarm clock. When I was younger, I had despised the loud ticking that bothered me when I was trying to fall asleep and even crept into my dreams. Now I held tight to that ticking like somebody under water clings on to her last straw in order to get just a little bit of air from above into her lungs. With every tick-tock that alarm clock proved to me that time had not come to a standstill and the earth had continued to turn. In stasis, without any sense of time or space, the alarm clock was my ticking connection to the real world outside.
When I really tried, I could concentrate so intensely on that noise that at least for a couple of minutes I was able to block out the tedious whirring of the fan that filled my room to the threshold of pain. In the evening, as I lay on my lounger unable to fall asleep, the ticking of the alarm clock was like a long lifeline which I could use to climb out of my dungeon and slip into my childhood bed in my grandmother’s home. There I was able to fall asleep peacefully in the knowledge that she was in the next room watching over me. On evenings such as these I would often rub some Franzbranntwein on my hand. When I held it up to my face and the characteristic smell rose into my nose, a feeling of closeness would course through me. Just like back when I would bury my face in my grandmother’s apron as a child. In this way I was able to fall sleep.
Throughout the day I busied myself by making the tiny room as habitable as possible. I asked the kidnapper to bring me cleaning supplies so as to ward off the damp smell of cellar and death that hung over everything. A fine, black mould had formed on the floor of the dungeon from the additional moisture caused by my presence. That mould made the air even more stale and breathing even more difficult. In one spot the laminate was moist because dampness had risen up from the ground. The spot was a constant, painful reminder that I was apparently far beneath the earth’s surface. The kidnapper brought me a red broom and dustpan set, a bottle of ‘Pril’ washing-up liquid, an air freshener and exactly those cleaning wipes scented with thyme that I had seen before in television commercials.
Now I carefully swept every corner of my dungeon and wiped the floor clean. I began my scrubbing at the door. The wall there was only slightly wider than the narrow door. From there the wall led at an oblique angle to the part of the room where the toilet and the double sink were. I would spend hours using decalcifying cleaning materials to wipe away the small traces of water drops on the metal of the sink until it took on a brilliant shine, and wipe the toilet so clean that it rose out of the floor like a valuable porcelain flower. Then I worked my way carefully from the door through the rest of the room: first along the longer wall, and then along the shorter one until I reached the narrow wall opposite the door. Finally, I would push my lounger aside and clean the centre of the room. I was very careful not to use too many cleaning wipes so as not to make the damp worse.
When I was finished, a chemical version of freshness, nature and life hung in the air that I soaked up greedily. If I then sprayed a bit of air freshener, I could let myself go for a moment. The lavender scent did not smell particularly good, but it gave me the illusion of meadows in bloom. And when I closed my eyes, the picture printed on the spray can became a set that dropped down in front of the walls of my prison. In my thoughts I ran along the endless, blue-violet rows of lavender, felt the earth beneath my feet and smelled the tangy scent of the flowers. The warm air was filled with the buzzing of bees and the sun burned down on the back of my neck. Above me, the cerulean sky, endlessly high, endlessly wide. The fields extended to the horizon, with no walls, with no limitations. I ran so fast that I had the feeling that I could fly. And nothing in this blue-violet endlessness stopped me.
When I opened my eyes again, the bare walls brought me back from my fantasy journey with a thud.
Images. I needed more images, images from my world that I could shape. That did not fit the kidnapper’s sick fantasy that jumped out at me from every corner of the room. Slowly but surely I began to turn the tongue-and-groove wood panels covering the walls into colourful pictures using the crayons from my school bag. I wanted to leave something of me behind, the way prisoners write on the walls of their cells. Drawing images and making notches for every single day, and writing sayings. Prisoners don’t do that out of boredom, I now understood. Drawing is a way to counter the feeling of powerlessness and of being at the mercy of others. They do it to prove to themselves and all those who ever enter that cell that they exist – or at least had once existed.
Drawing my murals served another purpose: I created a film set in which I could imagine that I was home. First I tried to draw the entryway to our apartment. I drew a long door handle on the door to the dungeon, the small dresser that still stands in the hallway in my mother’s flat today on the wall next to it. Meticulously I outlined it and drew the handles of the drawers. I didn’t have enough crayons to draw more, but it was enough to create the illusion. Now when I lay on my lounger looking at the door, I could imagine that it would open at any moment and my mother would walk in to greet me, placing her key on the dresser.
The next thing I drew on the wall was a family tree. My name was all the way at the bottom, then came the names of my sisters, their husbands and children, then my mother’s and her boyfriend’s, my father’s and his girlfriend’s, and then the names of my grandparents. I spent a lot of time designing my family tree. It gave me a place in the world and assured me that I was part of a family, part of a whole unit, and not a free-floating atom meandering in space outside the real world – the way I often felt I was.
I drew a large car on the wall opposite. It was supposed to be a Mercedes SL in silver, my favourite car. I even had a model at home and planned to buy one someday when I was an adult. It had large, full breasts instead of wheels. I had seen that once in some graffiti painted on a concrete w
all near our council estate. I don’t know exactly why I chose that motif. Apparently I wanted something that was strong and presumably grown-up. Over the last few months in primary school I had provoked my teachers at times. Before school started, we were allowed to write on the blackboard with chalk if we erased it in time for class to start. While other children drew flowers and comic characters, I scribbled ‘Protest!’, ‘Revolution!’ or ‘Teachers out!’ It was not behaviour that seemed appropriate in that small classroom of twenty children where we learned our school subjects, sheltered as if in an eternal kindergarten environment. I don’t know whether I was further along the path towards puberty than my classmates, or whether I just wanted to show off to those who otherwise only teased me. At any rate, in the dungeon the small rebellion that lay in that drawing gave me strength. Just like the swear word that I wrote on the wall in small letters in a hidden spot: ‘a—’. I wanted to show my power to resist; I wanted to do something forbidden. I don’t appear to have impressed the kidnapper with it. At least, he refrained from commenting on the picture.
The most important change came as a result of the arrival in my dungeon of a television set and a video recorder. I had asked Priklopil repeatedly for them, and one day he did bring them for me, placing them next to the computer on the dresser. After weeks in which ‘life’ appeared to me in only one form, namely in the person of the kidnapper, I was now able to bring a colourful imitation of human company into my dungeon with the help of the television screen.
In the beginning, the kidnapper had simply recorded at random the television programmes on a given day. But it was probably too much effort to edit out the news programmes which still reported on the search for me. He never would have allowed me to receive any hint that people in the world outside had not forgotten me. The image that my life was of no value to anyone, particularly to my parents, was, after all, one of the most important psychological instruments he had to keep me pliable and dependent on him.
For that reason he later only recorded individual shows or brought me old video cassettes with films that he had recorded in the early 1990s. The furry alien in ALF, I Dream of Jeannie, Al Bundy in Married with Children and the Taylors from Home Improvement became replacements for family and friends. Every day I looked forward to meeting them again, and observed them probably more closely than any other television viewer. Every facet of their interactions, every scrap of dialogue, no matter how minuscule, fascinated and interested me. I analysed every detail of the set backdrops which demarcated the horizon at my disposal. They were my only ‘windows’ into other homes, and yet were crafted in such a thin and paltry way that the illusion that I had access to ‘real life’ quickly caved in. Perhaps that was also one of the reasons why I later found science fiction so gripping: Star Trek, Stargate, Back to the Future, etc … anything that had to do with space or time travel fascinated me. The heroes in those films strike out to discover new territory, unknown galaxies. And, unlike me, they had the technical means to simply beam themselves away from difficult locations and life-threatening situations.
One spring day that I knew only from the calendar, the kidnapper brought a radio to the dungeon. Inside, I leapt with joy. A radio – that would truly mean a link to the real world! News, the familiar morning shows that I had always listened to in the kitchen while eating breakfast, music – and perhaps an off-hand clue that my parents had not forgotten me after all.
‘Of course, you cannot listen to any Austrian stations,’ said the kidnapper, destroying my illusions with one casual remark as he plugged the radio into the socket and turned it on. Still, I was able to hear music. But when the announcer said something, I couldn’t understand a word. The kidnapper had manipulated the radio so that I could only receive Czech stations.
I spent hours fiddling with the small radio that could have been my gateway to the world outside. Always in the hope of finding a German word, a familiar jingle. Nothing. Only a voice I did not understand. This, on the one hand, gave me the impression that I was not alone, but on the other hand reinforced my feelings of alienation, of being excluded.
Desperate, I turned the knob back and forth, millimetre by millimetre, readjusting the antenna again and again. But outside that one frequency, the only thing I could hear was static.
Later on the kidnapper gave me a Walkman. Because I suspected that he had music from older bands at home, I asked for tapes of The Beatles and Abba. When the light was turned off in the evening, I now no longer had to lie in the darkness with my fear, but could listen to music, as long as the batteries held out. The same songs over and over.
The most important means I had at my disposal for combating boredom and for keeping me from going crazy was books. The first book the kidnapper brought me was The Flying Classroom by Erich Kästner, followed by a series of classics, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Robinson Crusoe, Tom Sawyer, Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book, Treasure Island and Kon-Tiki. I devoured the paperback comic books with stories of Donald Duck, his three nephews, his miserly Uncle Scrooge and the inventive Professor Ludwig von Drake. Later I asked for Agatha Christie, whose books I was familiar with from my mother, and read whole piles of crime novels, like Jerry Cotton, and science-fiction stories. The novels catapulted me into another world and absorbed my attention to such an extent that I forgot where I was for hours. And that is precisely what made reading so significant to my survival. While television and radio allowed me to bring the illusion of the company of others into my dungeon, reading enabled me to leave it for hours in my thoughts.
The books by Karl May held a particular importance for me during my initial time in captivity when I was still a ten-year-old girl. I devoured the adventures of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, and read the stories about the North American Wild West. A song sung by German settlers for the dying Winnetou touched me so deeply that I copied it word for word and pasted the paper to the wall using Nivea lotion, as I had neither Sellotape nor any other adhesive or glue in the dungeon. It is a prayer to Mary the mother of God:
The light of day seeks to depart;
Now the quiet night is falling.
Oh, if only the heart’s suffering
Could pass just like the day!
I lay my plea at your feet;
Oh carry it upwards to God’s throne
And, Madonna, be saluted
In the devout tone of prayer:
Ave Maria!
The light of faith seeks to depart;
Now, the night of doubt is falling.
Youth’s trust in God
Is to be taken from me.
In old age, Madonna, please preserve
In me my youth’s happy confidence.
Shelter my harp and my psalter,
You are my salvation, you are my light!
Ave Maria!
The light of life seeks to depart;
Now, death’s night is falling.
The soul seeks to spread its wings
And die I must.
Madonna, into your hands
I place my last, fervent plea:
Please solicit for me a trusting end
And a blissful resurrection from the dead!
Ave Maria!
I read, whispered and prayed this poem so often that I can still recite it from memory today. It seemed as if it had been written especially for me. The ‘light of life’ had also been taken away from me, and in dark hours I saw no way out of my dungeon other than death.
*
The kidnapper knew how dependent I was on a continuous supply of films, music and reading matter, which gave him a new instrument of power over me. By withholding these things, he was able to exert pressure.
Whenever I had behaved ‘improperly’ in his eyes, I had to count on him slamming shut the door on the world of words and sounds that promised at least somewhat of a diversion. This was particularly awful at the weekend. By now, the kidnapper usually came to my dungeon every day in the morning, and mostly once again in the afternoon or e
vening. But at the weekend, I was all alone. I wouldn’t see him from noon on Friday, sometimes even from Thursday evening, until Sunday. He would bring me two days of ready-to-eat meals, some fresh food and mineral water that he brought from Vienna. And videos and books. During the week I received a video cassette full of television serials, two hours, and when I really begged, four. It wasn’t a lot. Every day, I had to get through twenty-four hours all by myself, interrupted only by the kidnapper’s visits. At the weekend, I was given four to eight hours of entertainment on cassette, and the next book in the series that I was currently reading. But only if I met his demands. Only when I was ‘good’ did he give me that vitally important sustenance for my mind. He was the only one who knew what he understood by ‘being good’. Sometimes only a minor infraction was enough for him to punish my behaviour.
‘You’ve used too much air freshener. I’m going to take it away from you.’
‘You were singing.’
You did this, you did that.
With the videos and books, he knew exactly which button to push. Having torn me away from my real family, it felt as if he had then taken hostage my replacement family, made up of novels and television series, in order to make me do what he said.
The man who had in the beginning made such an effort to make my life in the dungeon ‘pleasant’ and who had driven to the other side of Vienna just to get a particular audio story starring the character Bibi Blocksberg, had undergone a gradual transformation since he had announced that he would never let me go.
At this time, the kidnapper began to dominate me more and more. Of course, he had had me completely under his control from the very beginning. Locked in his cellar, cooped up in only five square metres of space, I really couldn’t do much to oppose him anyway. However, the longer I remained in captivity, the less this obvious manifestation of his power satisfied him. Now he wanted to bring every gesture, every word and every function of my body under his control.
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