The most complicated part was installing the ladder. It wouldn’t fit through the door due to the difficult angle at which the anteroom was separated from the dungeon. The kidnapper tried it again and again, until he suddenly disappeared and came back with a battery-powered screwdriver, which he used to dismantle the wooden wall subdividing the anteroom. Then he dragged the ladder into the dungeon – and that very same day put the wall back up again.
As he was putting together my new bookcases, I witnessed for the first time a side of the kidnapper that terrified me deeply. Up until that point he had yelled at me sometimes, he had denigrated me, cursed at me, and threatened me with all sorts of terrible punishments in order to force my cooperation. But never had he lost control over himself.
He stood in front of me holding the drill and was in the process of affixing a board with screws. Working together in the dungeon had made me somewhat more trusting and I simply burst out with a question: ‘Why are you screwing that board on right there?’ For a second I had forgotten that I was only allowed to speak when he gave me permission. In a fraction of a second, the kidnapper flew into a rage, bellowed at me – and then he threw the heavy drill at me. I managed to duck at the very last moment before it slammed into the wall behind me. I was so stunned that it took my breath away, and I stared at him wide-eyed.
The sudden outburst of anger had not touched me physically. The drill hadn’t even come into contact with me. But the incident burrowed itself deep into my psyche. Because it showed a new dimension in my relationship with the kidnapper: I now knew that he would hurt me if I did not obey him. It made me even more frightened and submissive.
The first night after the kidnapper’s outburst, I lay upon the thin mattress in my new bunk bed. The rattling of the fan felt as if it was directly next to my ears and boring its way into my brain, until I would have loved to scream out in desperation. The cold air from the attic blew directly on my feet. While I had always slept on my back at home, stretched out, I now had to roll myself up on my side like a foetus and wrap the blanket tightly around my feet to avoid the unpleasant draught. But the bed was much softer than the sunlounger. I could turn over and I had more room. And most of all I had my new wood-chip wallpaper.
I stretched out my hand, touched it and closed my eyes. I let the furniture in my room at home glide by in my thoughts, the dolls and stuffed animals as well. The position of the window, the door, the curtains, the smell. If I could just imagine it all intensely enough, I could fall asleep with my hand on the wall of the dungeon – and wake up the next day, still with my hand against the wall, in my room back home. Then my mother would bring me tea in bed, I would remove my hand from the wallpaper and everything would be okay.
Now I fell asleep every evening with my hand resting on the wallpaper, and was certain that one day I would in fact wake up again in my own room. During that initial phase, I believed in it as in a magic formula that would come true at some point. Later, touching the wallpaper was a promise to myself that I renewed every day. And I kept it: eight years later, when I visited my mother for the first time after my imprisonment I lay down on the bed in my room, where nothing had changed, and closed my eyes. When I touched the wall with my hand, all of those moments were there again – especially the first: the small, ten-year-old Natascha who was trying desperately not to lose confidence in herself, placing her hand on the wall in the dungeon for the first time. ‘I’m here again,’ I whispered. ‘You see, it worked.’
*
The more the year wore on, the deeper my sadness became. When I crossed off the first few days in December, I was so gloomy that the chocolate ‘Krampus’* the kidnapper brought me for St Nicholas Day† couldn’t cheer me up. Christmas was coming closer and closer. And the thought of spending the holidays alone in my dungeon was absolutely unbearable.
Just as for any other child, Christmas was one of the highlights of the year for me. The smell of cookies, the decorated tree, the anticipation of gifts, the entire family coming together to celebrate the holiday. I was picturing these images as I apathetically pulled the foil wrapper off the chocolate. It was an image of childhood days, an image that had little in common with the last few Christmases that I had spent with my family. My nephews had come to visit us like always, but they had already received their presents at home. I was the only child opening gifts. As for tree decorations, my mother had a weakness for the latest trends, so our tree glittered with tinsel and purple balls. Underneath lay a pile of presents for me. While I opened one present after the other, the grown-ups sat on the couch, listening to the radio and looking at a tattoo magazine together. These were Christmases that disappointed me deeply. I had not even been able to persuade anyone to sing a Christmas carol with me, although I was so proud of the fact that I knew the songs that we had practised at school by heart.
It wasn’t until the next day, when we celebrated with my grandmother, that I began to feel the Christmas spirit. All of us gathered in an adjacent room and solemnly sang ‘Silent Night’. Then I listened for the anticipated small bell to ring. The Christkind* had been there. When we opened the door to the room, the Christmas tree shimmered in the light of real beeswax candles and gave off a wonderful smell. My grandmother always had a traditional, rustic Christmas tree, decorated with straw stars and glass baubles as delicate as soap bubbles.
That’s how I imagined Christmas to be – and that’s how it would have been this year as well. But I was going to spend the most significant family holiday of the year without my family. The idea frightened me. On the other hand, I had to admit that Christmas with my family had always been a disappointment anyway. And that I, in my isolation, was surely romanticizing the past. But I could try to make Christmas in my dungeon as similar as possible to how I remembered the Christmas holidays spent at my grandmother’s.
The kidnapper played along. Back then I was infinitely grateful to him for making some semblance of a real Christmas possible. Today I think that he probably didn’t do it for me, but rather because of his own inner compulsion. For him, too, celebrating holidays was enormously important – they provided structure, they followed certain rules, and he was unable to live without rules and structures which he obeyed with ridiculous stringency. Nevertheless, he still didn’t have to grant my Christmas requests. The fact that he did may have had to do with the fact that he had been raised to meet expectations and conform to the image that others wanted to have of him. Today I know that he had failed time and again, primarily in his relationship with his father, on precisely those counts. The approval that he urgently wanted to receive from his father obviously was denied to him for long periods. Towards me, this attitude surfaced only in phases, but when it did he was particularly absurd. After all, he was the one who had kidnapped me and locked me in the cellar. It’s not a scenario in which you take the expectations of the other person, namely your victim, into account. It was as if he were choking someone and asking them at the same time whether they were lying comfortably and if the pressure was okay. However, at the time I blocked all of that out. I was full of grateful, childish wonder that the kidnapper was making such a fuss for me.
I knew that I wouldn’t be able to have a real Christmas tree, so I asked for one made of plastic. We opened the box together and put the tree on one of the small cupboards. I was given a couple of angels and some sweets, and spent a great deal of time decorating the small tree.
On Christmas Eve I was alone watching television until the light was turned off, desperately trying not to think of my family at home. The kidnapper was at his mother’s house, or she was visiting his, just as would happen on all the Christmases to come. But I didn’t know that at the time. It wasn’t until the next day that he celebrated with me. I was amazed that he gave me everything I asked for. I had asked for a small educational computer like the one I had received from my parents the year before. It was nowhere near as good as the first one I had got, but I was overjoyed that I could study without going to school. Afte
r all, I didn’t want to be completely left behind should I manage to escape. I also got a pad of drawing paper and a box of watercolours. It was the same as the one that my father had given to me once, with twenty-four colours, including gold and silver, as if the kidnapper had given me a piece of my life back. The third package contained a paint-by-numbers set with oil paints. I had had that at home too, and I looked forward to the many hours of activity that the painstaking painting promised. The only thing that the kidnapper did not give me was turpentine. He was probably afraid that it would cause harmful fumes in the dungeon.
The days after Christmas I was busy with painting and my educational computer. I tried to see the positive side of my situation and suppress all longing for my family as much as possible by recalling the negative aspects of our last Christmases together. I tried to persuade myself that it was interesting to experience the holiday the way other grown-ups celebrated it. And I was exceedingly grateful that I had even had a Christmas celebration at all.
I spent my first New Year’s Eve in captivity alone in complete darkness. I lay on my bunk bed and strained to hear whether I could make out the fireworks that would be set off at midnight up in the other world. But only the monotonous ticking of the alarm clock and the rattling of the fan penetrated my ears. Later I found out that the kidnapper always spent New Year’s Eve with his friend Holzapfel. He prepared meticulously, buying the largest, most expensive rockets. Once, I must’ve been fourteen or fifteen, I was allowed to watch from inside the house as he set off a rocket in the early evening. At sixteen I was even allowed outside in the garden to watch a rocket sprinkle a shower of silver balls across the sky. But that was at a time when my captivity had become a fixed component of my ‘self’. That’s why the kidnapper dared take me with him out into the garden in the first place. He knew that by then my inner prison had grown such high walls that I would not seize the opportunity to escape.
The year in which I had been abducted was over, and I was still being held captive. The world outside moved even further into the distance and my memories of my former life became dimmer and unreal. I found it difficult to believe that a year earlier I had been a primary school girl, who played in the afternoon, went on outings with her parents and led a normal life.
I tried to come to terms as best I could with the life that I had been forced to lead. It wasn’t always easy. The kidnapper’s control continued to be absolute. His voice in the intercom exasperated my nerves. In my tiny dungeon, I felt as though I were miles below the earth, yet at the same time living in a fishbowl where my every move could be watched.
My visits upstairs now took place on a more regular basis: about every two weeks I was allowed to take a shower upstairs, and sometimes he let me eat and watch television in the evening. I was glad of every minute I could spend outside my dungeon, but in the house I was still afraid. I now knew that he was there alone, and no strangers would be waiting to ambush me. But my nervousness barely lessened. Because of his own paranoia, he made sure that it was impossible to relax even for a moment. When I was upstairs, I felt as if I were bound to the kidnapper by an invisible leash. I was forced always to stand and walk at the same distance from him – one metre, no more, no less – otherwise he would explode in anger. He demanded that I keep my head down, never lifting my eyes.
After the endless hours and days that I had spent in my dungeon completely isolated, I was very susceptible to his orders and manipulations. The lack of light and human contact had weakened me to such an extent that I was no longer able to defy him beyond a certain basic level of resistance. I never stopped resisting him completely, which helped me draw the boundaries that I saw as indispensable. But I rarely thought of escape any more. It seemed as if the invisible leash that he put me on upstairs was becoming more and more real, as if I were in fact chained to him and not physically able to move either nearer or further away. He had anchored the fear of the world outside – where no one loved me, no one missed me and no one was looking for me – so deep inside me that it almost became greater than my longing for freedom.
When I was in the dungeon, I tried to keep myself as busy as possible. On the long weekends I spent by myself, I continued to clean and tidy up for hours until everything was clean and smelled fresh. I painted a great deal and used even the smallest bit of space on my pad for my pictures: my mother in a long skirt, my father with his fat stomach and his moustache, me laughing in between. I drew the radiantly yellow sun that I hadn’t seen for many, many months, and houses with smoking chimneys, colourful flowers and playing children – fantasy worlds that for hours allowed me to forget what my reality looked like.
One day, the kidnapper gave me a book of handicrafts. It was meant for pre-school children and made me more sad than it cheered me up. Catching paper aeroplanes was simply not possible in just five square metres of space. A better gift was the Barbie doll I was given just a little while later, and a small sewing kit, the kind that you sometimes find in hotels. I was infinitely grateful for this long-legged person made of plastic that now kept me company. It was a Horse-Riding Barbie with riding boots, white trousers, a red waistcoat and a riding crop. I asked the kidnapper for days to bring me some scraps of fabric. Sometimes it could take ages for him to satisfy such requests. And then only if I followed his orders precisely. If I cried, for example, he would take away all my amenities, such as the books and videos I needed to live. In order to get something I wanted I had to show him my gratitude and praise him for everything he did – including the fact that he had locked me up.
Finally I had worked on him so much that he brought me an old top, a white polo shirt made of soft, smooth jersey with a fine blue pattern. It was the one he had worn the day of my abduction. I don’t know whether he had forgotten or simply wanted to get rid of it out of paranoia. I used the material to make a cocktail dress with thin spaghetti straps made of thread and an elegant asymmetrical top for my Barbie. Using a string that I had found among my school things, I turned a sleeve into a case for my glasses. Later I was able to persuade the kidnapper to allow me to have an old cloth serviette, which had become blue in the wash and he now used as a cleaning rag. From that I made a ball gown for my Barbie, with a thin rubber band at the waist.
Later, I made trivets from wires and folded miniature artworks out of paper. The kidnapper brought me craft needles so that I could practise crocheting and knitting. Outside, as a primary school girl, I had never learned to do them properly. When I had made mistakes, people quickly lost patience with me. Now I had an infinite amount of time, nobody corrected me, and I could always start over again, until my small handcrafted projects were finished. These craft projects became a psychological lifesaver for me. They kept me from madness in the lonely inactivity I was forced to endure. And at the same time I could think of my parents while I made small gifts for them – for some day when I would be free again.
Of course, I couldn’t breathe a word to the kidnapper that I was making something for my parents. I hid the pictures from him and spoke less frequently of them, because he reacted more and more indignantly whenever I talked about my life outside, before my imprisonment. ‘Your parents don’t love you. They don’t care about you, otherwise they would have paid your ransom,’ he had said in the beginning, still annoyed whenever I spoke about how much I missed them. Then, sometime in the spring of 1999, came the prohibition: I was no longer allowed to mention my parents or to speak of anything I had experienced before my imprisonment. My mother, my father, my sisters and nephews, school, my last ski trip, my tenth birthday, my father’s holiday house, my cats. Our apartment, my habits, my mother’s shop. My teacher, my friends from school, my room. Everything that had existed before was now taboo.
The prohibition on my past became a standard component of his visits to my dungeon. Whenever I mentioned my parents, he flew into a rage. When I cried, he turned the light off and left me in complete darkness until I was ‘good’ again. Being ‘good’ meant I was to be grateful that h
e had ‘rescued’ me from my previous life.
‘I rescued you. You belong to me now,’ he said over and over. Or: ‘You no longer have a family. I am your family. I am your father, your mother, your grandma and your sisters. I am now your everything. You no longer have a past.’ He hammered it into me. ‘You’re so much better off with me. You’re lucky that I took you in and that I take such good care of you. You belong to me now. I have created you.’
Pygmalion loathing their lascivious life,
Abhorr’d all womankind, but most a wife:
So single chose to live, and shunn’d to wed,
Well pleas’d to want a consort of his bed.
Yet fearing idleness, the nurse of ill,
In sculpture exercis’d his happy skill;
And carv’d in iv’ry such a maid, so fair,
As Nature could not with his art compare …
Ovid, Metamorphoses
Today I believe that Wolfgang Priklopil, in committing a terrible crime, wanted to create nothing more than his own little perfect world with a person that could be there just for him. He probably would never have been able to do so the normal way and had therefore decided to force and mould someone to do it. Basically, he didn’t want anything more than anyone else: love, approval, warmth. He wanted somebody for whom he himself was the most important person in the world. He didn’t seem to have seen any other way to achieve that than to abduct a shy, ten-year-old girl and cut her off from the outside world until she was psychologically so alienated that he could ‘create’ her anew.
The year I turned eleven, he took from me my history and my identity. I was not to be anything more than a piece of blank paper on which he could pen his sick fantasies. He even denied me my reflection in the mirror. If I couldn’t see myself reflected in my social interactions with anyone else other than the kidnapper, I wanted to at least be able to see my own face to keep from losing myself completely. But he refused my request for a small mirror again and again. It wasn’t until years later that I received a mirrored bathroom cabinet. When I gazed into it I no longer saw the childlike features I once had, but rather an unfamiliar face.
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