It started with the timer switch. The kidnapper had had the power over light and darkness from the very beginning. When he came down to my dungeon in the morning, he turned on the electricity, and when he left in the evening, he turned it off again. Now he installed a timer switch which controlled the electric power in the room. While in the beginning I had been allowed now and then to have the light on for longer, now I had to submit to a merciless rhythm I had no control over. At seven in the morning, the electricity was turned on. For thirteen hours, I was able to lead a cheap imitation of life in a tiny, airless room: seeing, hearing, feeling warmth and cooking. Everything was synthetic. A light bulb can never replace the sun, ready-to-eat meals are only distantly reminiscent of family dinners around a shared table, and the flat people flickering across the television screen are only an empty substitute for real humans. But as long as the power was on, I could at least maintain the illusion that there was life outside myself.
The electricity was turned off at eight o’clock in the evening. From one second to the next I found myself in total darkness. The television would cease working in the middle of a series, and I had to put my book down in the middle of a sentence. And if I was not already lying in bed, I had to feel my way on all fours to my lounger. Light bulb, television set, the recorder, radio, computer, hotplate, cooker and heat – everything that brought life into my dungeon was turned off. Only the sounds of the ticking alarm clock and the excruciating whirring of the fan filled the room. For the next few hours, I was dependent on my imagination to prevent me from going crazy and keep my fear at bay.
It was a daily rhythm similar to life in a penitentiary, strictly prescribed from the outside, with no second of deviation, no consideration for my needs. It was a demonstration of power. The kidnapper loved schedules, and with the timer switch he imposed them on me.
In the beginning I still had my battery-operated Walkman, which allowed me to keep the leaden darkness at bay somewhat, when the timer switch had decreed that I had exhausted my ration of light and music. But the kidnapper did not like the fact that I could use my Walkman to circumvent his divine command of light and darkness. He began to monitor my battery status. If he thought that I used my Walkman too long or too often, he would take it away from me until I promised to behave better. One time he had apparently not yet closed the outer door to my dungeon, before I was already sitting on my lounger, wearing the headphones from my Walkman and loudly singing along to a Beatles song. He must’ve heard my voice and came back to the dungeon in a wild rage. Priklopil punished me for singing so loudly by taking away my light and my food. In the next few days I was forced to fall asleep without music.
His second instrument of control was the intercom system. When he came to my dungeon to install the cable, he told me, ‘From now on you can ring upstairs and call me.’ In the beginning I was very happy about that and I felt as though a great weight of fear had lifted off my chest. The thought that I would suddenly be faced with an emergency had plagued me since the beginning of my imprisonment. Over the weekend at least I was often alone and couldn’t even get the attention of the only person who knew where I was, the kidnapper. I had played out innumerable situations in my head. A cable fire, a burst pipe, a sudden allergy attack … I could even have died a miserable death in the dungeon by choking on some sausage skin, while the kidnapper was at home upstairs. After all, he only came when he wanted to. For that reason the intercom seemed to be a lifeline. It wasn’t until later that the real significance of the device dawned on me. An intercom works in both directions. The kidnapper used it to control me. To demonstrate his omnipotence and to assure me that he could hear every sound I made and could comment on everything.
The first version the kidnapper installed consisted essentially of a button that I was to press if I needed something. Then a red light would light up upstairs in a hidden place in his house. However, he wasn’t able to see the light every time, nor was he willing to undertake the complicated procedures necessary to open the dungeon without knowing what exactly I wanted. And he couldn’t come down at all at the weekends. It was only much later that I found out this was due to his mother’s weekend visits, when she would stay overnight in the house. It would have been too much trouble and too conspicuous to remove the many obstacles between the garage and my dungeon as long as she was there.
Shortly thereafter, he replaced the temporary device with another system you could talk through. By pressing the button, he could now issue his instructions and questions to my dungeon.
‘Have you rationed your food?’
‘Have you brushed your teeth?’
‘Have you turned the television off?’
‘How many pages have you read?’
‘Have you done your maths exercises?’
I jumped out of my skin every time his voice pierced the stillness. He threatened me with consequences because I had been too slow in answering. Or had eaten too much.
‘Have you already eaten everything ahead of schedule?’
‘Didn’t I tell you that you were only allowed to eat one piece of bread in the evening?’
The intercom was the perfect instrument for terrorizing me – until I discovered that it afforded me a little bit of power as well. Looking back today, it seems surprising to me that the kidnapper, with his manifest need to control everything, never figured out that a ten-year-old girl would inspect the device very carefully. But that’s exactly what I did after a few days.
The intercom had three buttons. When you pressed ‘Speak’, the line was open on both ends. This was a setting that he had shown me. If the intercom was on ‘Listen’, I could hear his voice, but he couldn’t hear me. And then there was a third button: when you pressed it, the line was open on my end, but up above everything was silent.
In my direct confrontations with him I had learned to let what he said go in one ear and out the other. Now I had a button that did just that. When these questions, control attempts and accusations got too much for me, I pressed the third button. It gave me deep satisfaction when his voice fell silent and it was I who had pressed the button to make that happen. I loved that button because it enabled me to shut the kidnapper out of my life for a short time. When Priklopil found out about my small, index finger-led rebellion, he was stunned at first, then indignant and angry. It took him nearly an hour to open the many doors and locks every time he wanted to speak to me face to face. But it was clear that he would have to think of something else.
In fact, it wasn’t long before he removed the intercom with the wonderful third button. Instead, he came into the dungeon carrying a Siemens radio. He took the insides out of the case and began to tinker with it. At the time I didn’t know a thing about the kidnapper, and it was only much later that I found out that Wolfgang Priklopil had been a communications engineer at Siemens. However, the fact that he understood how alarms, radios and other electrical systems worked was something that was not news to me.
This rebuilt radio became a terrible instrument of torture for me. It had a microphone that was so powerful it could broadcast up above every noise I made in my room. The kidnapper could simply listen in on my ‘life’ without warning and monitor me every second to check whether I was following his orders. Whether I had turned off the television. Whether the radio was on. Whether I was still scraping my spoon across my plate. Whether I was still breathing.
His questions pursued me even under my blanket:
‘Have you not eaten your banana?’
‘Have you been a greedy pig again?’
‘Have you washed your face?’
‘Did you turn off your television after one episode?’
I couldn’t even lie to him because I didn’t know how long he had been eavesdropping. And if I did it one more time anyway, or failed to answer right away, he yelled into the loudspeaker until everything in my head hammered. Or he came into my dungeon unannounced and punished me by taking away my prized possessions: books, videos, food. I had to pr
ovide a penitent account of my misconduct, of every moment of my life in the dungeon, no matter how minute. As if there was anything that I could have concealed from him.
Yet another way for him to make sure I felt that he had total control over me was to leave the headset hanging upstairs. Then, in addition to the whirring of the fan, distorted, unbearably loud static permeated my prison, filling up every last inch of space and forcing me to feel him in every corner of the tiny cellar room. He is here. Always. He is breathing at the other end of the line. He could begin to bellow at any time, and I would recoil, even if I was anticipating it at any second. There was no escape from his voice.
Today I’m not surprised that as a child I believed he could see me in the dungeon. After all, I didn’t know whether or not he had installed cameras. I felt watched every second of the day, even while I was sleeping. Perhaps he had installed a heat-imaging camera so that he could monitor me even as I lay on my lounger in complete darkness. The thought paralysed me and I hardly dared turn over in my sleep at night. During the day, I looked round ten times before I went to the toilet. I had no idea whether or not he was watching me – and whether perhaps others were there as well.
In total panic, I began to search the entire dungeon for peepholes or cameras, always afraid that he would see what I was doing and come downstairs immediately. I filled the tiniest cracks in the wood panelling with toothpaste until I was sure that there were no more gaps. Still, the feeling of constantly being watched remained.
I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers; and in guessing at it myself, and in reasoning from what I have seen written upon their faces, and what to my certain knowledge they feel within, I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in it which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore the more I denounce it.
Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation
The author Charles Dickens wrote these words about solitary confinement in 1842, which had set a precedent in the US and is still in use today. My solitary confinement, the time that I spent exclusively in the dungeon without once being able to leave those five square metres of space, lasted over six months; my total imprisonment 3,096 days.
The feeling that that time spent in complete darkness or constant artificial light created in me was not something I was able to put into words at the time. When I look at the many studies today examining the effects of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation, I can understand precisely what happened to me back then.
One of the studies documents the following effects of solitary confinement:
Significant Decrease in the Ability of the Vegetative Nervous System Function
• Significant disruptions in hormone levels
• Absence of menstruation in women with no other physiological, organic cause due to age or pregnancy (secondary amenorrhoea)
• Increased feeling of having to eat: Zynorexia/cravings, hyperorexia, compulsive overeating
• In contrast, reduction or absence of thirst
• Severe hot flushes and/or sensations of coldness not attributable to any corresponding change in the ambient temperature or to illness (fever, chills, etc.)
Significantly Impaired Perception and Cognitive Ability
• Serious inability to process perceptions
• Serious inability to feel one’s own body
• Serious general difficulties in concentrating
• Serious difficulty, even the complete inability, to read or register what has been read, comprehend it and place it within a meaningful context
• Serious difficulties, even the complete inability, to speak or process thoughts in written form (agraphia, dysgraphia)
• Serious difficulties in articulating and verbalizing thoughts, which is demonstrated in problems with syntax, grammar and word selection and can even extend to aphasia, aphrasia and agnosia.
• Serious difficulties or the complete inability to follow conversations (shown to be the result of slowed function in the primary acoustic cortex of the temporal lobes due to lack of stimulation)
Additional Limitations
• Carrying out conversations with oneself to compensate for the social and acoustic lack of stimulation
• Clear loss of intensity of feeling (e.g. vis-à-vis family members and friends)
• Situatively euphoric feelings which later transform into a depressed mood
Long-term Health Consequences
• Difficulties in social contacts, including the inability to engage in emotionally close and long-term romantic relationships
• Depression
• Negative impact on self-esteem
• Returning to imprisonment situation in dreams
• Blood pressure disorders requiring treatment
• Skin disorders requiring treatment
• Inability to recover in particular cognitive skills (e.g. in mathematics) the prisoner had mastered before solitary confinement
The prisoners felt that the effects of living in sensory deprivation were particularly horrible. Sensory deprivation has an effect on the brain, disrupts the vegetative nervous system and turns self-confident people into dependants who are wide open to being influenced by anyone they encounter during this phase of darkness and isolation. This also applies to adults who voluntarily choose such a situation. In January 2008 the BBC broadcast a programme called Total Isolation which affected me deeply: six volunteers allowed themselves to be locked up in a cell in a nuclear bunker for forty-eight hours. Alone and deprived of light, they found themselves in my situation, confronted by the same darkness and loneliness, albeit not the same fear or length of time. Despite the comparatively short time span, all six reported later that they had lost all sense of time and had experienced intense hallucinations and visions. When the forty-eight hours were over, all of them had lost the ability to perform simple tasks. Not one of them could think of the right answer when asked to come up with a word beginning with the letter ‘F’. One of them had lost 36 per cent of his memory. Four of them were much more easily manipulated than before their isolation. They believed everything the first person they met after their voluntary imprisonment said to them. I only ever encountered the kidnapper.
When I read about such studies and experiments today, I am amazed that I managed to survive that period. In many ways the situation was comparable to the one that the adults had imposed upon themselves for the purposes of the study. Aside from the fact that my time in isolation lasted much, much longer, my case included yet another aggravating factor: I had absolutely no idea why I of all people had come to find myself in this situation. While political prisoners can hold tight to their mission, and even those who have been wrongly condemned know that a justice system, with its laws, institutions and procedures, is behind their seclusion, I was unable to discern even any kind of logical hostility in my imprisonment. There was none.
It may have helped me that I was still just a child and could adapt to the most adverse circumstances more easily than adults would ever have been able to. But it also required of me a self-discipline that, looking back, seems nearly inhuman. During the night, I used fantasy voyages to navigate the darkness. During the day, I stubbornly held tight to my plan to take my life into my own hands on my eighteenth birthday. I was firmly resolved to obtain the necessary knowledge to do so, and asked for reading matter and schoolbooks. In spite of the circumstances, I clung stubbornly to my own identity and the existence of my family.
; As the first Mother’s Day drew near, I made my mother a gift. I had neither glue nor scissors. The kidnapper gave me nothing I could use to hurt either myself or him. So I took my crayons from my school bag and drew several large red hearts on paper, carefully tore them out and stuck them on top of each other using Nivea lotion. I vividly imagined myself giving the hearts to my mother when I was free again. She would then know that I hadn’t forgotten Mother’s Day even though I couldn’t be with her.
In the meantime, the kidnapper reacted more and more negatively when he saw that I spent time on such things, when I talked about my parents, my home and even my school. ‘Your parents don’t want you. They don’t love you,’ he repeated again and again. I refused to believe him, saying, ‘That’s not true, my parents love me. They told me so.’ And I knew down in the deepest recesses of my heart that I was right. But my parents were so inaccessible that I felt as if I were on another planet. And yet only eighteen kilometres separated my dungeon from my mother’s flat. Twenty-five minutes by car, a distance in the real world that was, in my mad world, subjected to a dimensional shift. I was so much further away than eighteen kilometres, in the midst of a world ruled by the despotic King of Hearts, in which the playing card people recoiled every time his voice boomed out.
When he was with me, he controlled my every gesture and facial expression: I was forced to stand the way he ordered me to, and I was never allowed to look him directly in the face. In his presence, he barked at me, I was to keep my gaze lowered. I was not permitted to speak if not asked to. He forced me to be submissive in his presence and demanded gratitude for every little thing he did for me: ‘I saved you,’ he said over and over, and seemed to mean it. He was my lifeline to the outside – light, food, books, all of these I could only get from him, and all of these he could deny me at any time. And he did so later with the consequence that I was forced to the brink of starvation.
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