Had he truly recreated me? Whenever I ask myself that question today, I can’t answer it unequivocally. On the one hand, he had picked the wrong person when he chose me. I continued to resist his attempts to erase my identity and make me into his creature. He never broke me.
On the other hand, his attempts to make me into a new person fell on fertile ground, especially because of who I was. Just before my abduction I had been sick of my life and was so dissatisfied with myself that I had decided to change something. And just minutes before he threw me into his delivery van, I had vividly imagined throwing myself in front of a moving car – that’s how much I hated the life that I saw myself forced to live.
Of course, the fact that I was not allowed to have my own history made me infinitely sad. I felt it was a gross injustice that I was not allowed to be myself any more or talk about the deep pain the loss of my parents had caused. But what actually remained of my own history? It now consisted only of memories that had very little to do with the real world that had continued to turn without me. My primary school class no longer existed; my little nephews had grown and would perhaps not even recognize me, even if I were suddenly to stand in front of them. And perhaps my parents really were relieved because they were now spared the long and tiresome arguments over me. By cutting me off from everything for so long, the kidnapper had created the perfect foundation to enable him to take my past away from me. Because even while on the conscious level and to his face I held tight to my opinion that my abduction had been a serious crime, his constantly repeated command to view him as my saviour seeped ever more deeply into my subconscious. Basically it was much easier for me to look upon the kidnapper as my saviour, not as an evil person. In a desperate attempt to force myself to see the positive aspects of my imprisonment, so as not to let it destroy me, I said to myself, ‘At least it can’t get any worse.’ Unlike what had happened in many of the cases that I’d heard about on television, up to that point the kidnapper had neither raped nor murdered me.
The theft of my identity did, however, offer me a great deal of freedom. Today when I think back to that feeling, it seems incomprehensible and paradoxical in light of the fact that I had been so completely robbed of my liberty. But back then I felt unencumbered by preconceived opinions for the first time in my life. I was no longer just a small cog in a family where the roles had already long been doled out – and where they had assigned me that of clumsy roly-poly. A family in which I had become a pawn for the adults whose decisions I often didn’t understand.
Although I was now caught up in a system of complete oppression, had lost my freedom of movement and one single person governed every detail of my life, this form of oppression and manipulation was direct and clear. The kidnapper was not the kind of person to act subtly – he wanted to exercise his power in an open and unvarnished way. In the shadow of his power, which dictated how I should do everything, I was paradoxically able to be myself for the first time in my life.
One sign of this was the fact that since my abduction I never again wet the bed. Although I was subjected to an inhuman burden, a certain kind of stress seems to have lifted from me at that time. If I had to sum it up in one sentence, I would say that by giving up my history and submitting to the kidnapper’s wishes, I felt wanted – for the first time in a long time.
In late autumn 1999, the stripping of my identity was complete. The kidnapper had ordered me to pick out a new name: ‘You are no longer Natascha. Now you belong to me.’
I had refused for a long time, partly because I found that using names was unimportant anyway. There was only me and him, and ‘you’ was enough to know who was being addressed. But saying the name ‘Natascha’ triggered so much anger and displeasure in him that I acquiesced. And besides, hadn’t I always disliked that name? When my mother called it reproachfully, it had the ugly sound of unmet demands and expectations I could never live up to. I had always wished for one of those names that other girls had: Stefanie, Jasmin, Sabine. Anything but Natascha. ‘Natascha’ contained everything that I had not liked about my former life. Everything I wanted to get rid of, everything I was forced to get rid of.
The kidnapper suggested ‘Maria’ as my new name, because both his grandmothers were called Maria. Although I did not like his suggestion, I agreed, because Maria was my middle name anyway. However, that didn’t sit well with the kidnapper because the point was I was to have a completely new name. He pressed me to suggest something different. That very minute.
I leafed through my calendar, which gave the saints’ days, and on 2 December found one possibility right next to Natascha: ‘Bibiane’. For the next seven years, ‘Bibiane’ became my new identity, even though the kidnapper never succeeded in entirely wiping out my old one.
The kidnapper had taken my family away, my life and my freedom, my old identity. The physical prison of the dungeon underground, behind the many heavy doors, was supplemented piece by piece by a psychological one, whose walls grew ever higher. And I began to thank the prison warden who had built it. Because at the end of the year, he granted me one of the wishes most dear to my heart: a moment outside under the sky.
It was a cold, clear December night. He had already communicated to me his rules for this ‘outing’ days before: ‘If you scream, I will kill you; if you run, I will kill you; I will kill anyone who hears or sees you, if you are so dumb as to draw attention to yourself.’ It wasn’t enough for him any more to threaten to kill just me. He also burdened me with the responsibility for anyone I might call to for help. I believed his murderous plans immediately and without reflection. Even today I’m convinced that he would’ve been capable of killing an unsuspecting neighbour who had accidentally taken notice of me. Anyone who goes to so much effort to keep a prisoner in the cellar would not hesitate to commit murder.
When he grabbed me firmly by the upper arm and opened the door to the garden, a deep sense of happiness came over me. The cool air gently caressed my face and arms, the odour of rot and isolation that had taken over my nose slowly receded, and my head became lighter. For the first time in nearly two years, I felt the soft ground beneath my feet. Every blade of grass that gave way under the soles of my shoes seemed to me a precious, singular living creature. I lifted my head and looked at the sky. The infinite space that opened up before me took my breath away. The moon was low on the horizon and a couple of stars twinkled far above. I was outside. For the first time since I had been pulled into a delivery van on 2 March 1998. I tilted my head all the way back and tried with difficulty to suppress a sob.
The kidnapper led me through the garden up to the privet hedgerow. Once there, I stretched out my hand, cautiously touching the dark leaves. They smelled tangy and shone in the moonlight. It seemed like a miracle to me to touch something living with my hand. I plucked a few leaves and put them in my pocket. A souvenir of what was living in the world outside.
After a short moment, he turned me round without a word and led me back into the house. The first time I saw it in the moonlight from the outside: a yellow house with a sloped roof and two chimneys. The windows were outlined in white. The lawn we were walking across seemed unnaturally short and well maintained.
Suddenly I was beset by doubts: I saw grass, trees, leaves, a piece of the sky, a house, a garden. But was this the world as I remembered it? Everything looked too flat, too artificial. The grass was green and the sky big, but you could see that these were stage backdrops! He had placed the shrubbery and the house there in order to deceive me. I had landed in a kind of theatre production, where the outdoor scenes of a television series were filmed. There were no neighbours, no city with my family only twenty-five minutes away by car. Instead, all of them were the kidnapper’s accomplices who were trying to make me believe that I was outside, while they watched me on huge monitors and laughed at my naivety. I closed my hand firmly around the leaves in my pocket, as if they could prove something to me: that this was real, that I was really real. But I felt nothing. Only a large emptin
ess that reached mercilessly for me like a cold hand.
6
Torment and Hunger
The Daily Struggle to Survive
My childhood was over when I was abducted at the age of ten. I ceased being a child in the dungeon in the year 2000. One morning I woke up with a cramping pain in my abdomen and found spots of blood on my pyjamas. I knew immediately what was happening. I had been waiting for my period to start for years. I knew the particular brand of sanitary pads I wanted from a commercial that the kidnapper had recorded after some of the television series. When he came into the dungeon, I asked him as matter-of-factly as possible to buy me several packets. Confronted with this new development, the kidnapper was deeply unsettled, and his paranoia reached a new level. Until then, he had painstakingly picked up every piece of lint, frantically wiped away every single fingerprint, in order to eliminate all traces of me, and now he was nearly hysterical in making sure that I wouldn’t sit down anywhere upstairs in the house. If I was allowed to sit somewhere, he put down a pile of newspapers first in an absurd attempt to prevent even the tiniest spot of blood from staining his house. He continued to worry daily that the police would show up and search his house for traces of DNA.
I felt personally harassed by his behaviour, like an untouchable. It was a confusing time when I urgently needed to be able to talk to my mother or one of my older sisters about the changes taking place inside my body that had so suddenly confronted me. But the only person I had to talk to was a man who was completely out of his depth on the issue. Who treated me as if I were dirty and disgusting. And who obviously had never lived with a woman.
His behaviour towards me underwent a clear change once I entered puberty. As long as I had still been a child, I was ‘allowed’ to remain in my dungeon and go about my business within the narrow framework of his rules. Now, having become a woman, I had to be at his service, performing tasks in and on the house under his strict supervision.
Upstairs in the house I felt as if I were in an aquarium, like a fish in a too-small container who looks longingly at the outside world, but doesn’t jump out of the water as long as it can still live in its prison. Because crossing that line means certain death.
The line demarcating where the outside began was so absolute that it appeared insurmountable to me. As if the house was in a different dimension to the world outside its yellow walls. As if the house, the garden and the garage with its dungeon were located on a different matrix. Sometimes a hint of spring would waft in through a tilted window. From time to time I could hear a distant car driving down the peaceful street. Otherwise nothing more from the world outside could be discerned. The blinds were always down and the entire house was bathed in dim light. The alarm systems on the windows were activated – at least, I was convinced that they were. There were still moments when I thought of escape. But I no longer made any specific plans. The fish does not jump over the edge of the glass bowl where only death awaits.
But my longing for freedom remained.
I was now being constantly watched. I was not allowed to take a single step without him having already ordered me to. I had to stand, sit or walk however the kidnapper wanted. I had to ask if I wanted to stand up or sit down, before I turned my head or how to hold out my hand. He told me where I was to direct my gaze and even accompanied me to the toilet. I don’t know what was worse, the time I spent alone in the dungeon or the time I was no longer alone, not even for a second.
This permanent surveillance reinforced my feeling of having landed in an absurd experiment. The atmosphere in the house intensified that impression. Behind its bourgeois façade, it seemed to have fallen out of time and space. Lifeless, uninhabited, like a backdrop for a gloomy film. On the outside, it fitted perfectly into its environment: conventional, extraordinarily well maintained, with thick shrubbery around the large garden to carefully screen it from the neighbours. Curious eyes were unwanted.
Strasshof is a faceless town with no history, with no centre and no character, as you would expect with a population today of about 9,000. After the town limit sign, the houses, stooping in the flat Marchfeld plain, line a thoroughfare and a railway line, interrupted time and again by the commercial areas common to the cheap surroundings of any large city. In particular, the town’s full name, ‘Strasshof an der Nordbahn’, or ‘Strasshof on the Northern Railway Line’, is a major clue that this is an area whose lifeline is its connection to Vienna. You travel away from here, you travel through here, you don’t travel to here without good reason. The town’s attractions include a ‘locomotive monument’ and a railway museum named ‘Heizhaus’, or ‘boiler house’. A century ago, not even fifty people lived here; today its inhabitants work in Vienna, returning to their suburban houses, lined up monotonously next to one another, only to sleep. At the weekend, the lawnmowers hum, the cars are polished and the cosy living room remains hidden behind closed curtains and blinds in partial darkness. Here, the façade is what counts, not what you might discover behind it. The perfect place to lead a double life. The perfect place for a crime.
The house itself was laid out as a typical early 1970s building. On the ground floor, a long hallway in which a staircase led to the upper floor. On the left the bathroom and toilet, on the right the living room, and at the end of the hallway, the kitchen. This was an oblong room, with a kitchenette on the left with rustic cabinet fronts of dark wood veneer. On the floor, tiling with an orange-brown flowered pattern. A table, four chairs with cloth coverings, hooks in the ‘Prilblume’ flower design on the grey-white wall tiling with the dark green decorative flowers next to the sink.
The most striking part of the room was the mural wallpaper which covered the wall on the right: a forest of birch trees, green, with slender trunks stretching upwards, as if trying to flee the oppressive atmosphere of the room. When I looked at it properly for the first time, it seemed grotesque to me that someone who could commune with nature at any time, who could go out into life whenever he liked, would surround himself with artificial, dead nature; while I desperately tried to bring life into my bedroom in the dungeon, be it only in the form of a couple of plucked leaves.
I don’t know how often I scrubbed and polished the floor and the tiling in the kitchen until they gleamed immaculately. Not the tiniest streak, not the smallest crumb was allowed to mar the smooth surfaces. And when I thought I was done, I had to lie on the floor in order to check even the furthest corner from that perspective. The kidnapper always stood behind me, giving me orders. It was never clean enough for him. On countless occasions, he took the cloth from my hand and showed me how to clean ‘properly’. And he flew into a rage if I besmirched a beautiful smooth surface with an oily fingerprint, thereby destroying the façade of the untouched and pure.
For me, the worst thing was cleaning the living room. It was a large room that exuded a gloom that did not only come from the closed blinds. A dark, nearly black coffered ceiling, dark wood panelling, a green leather suite, light-brown wall-to-wall carpeting. A dark brown bookcase containing works such as Kafka’s The Judgement and Peter Kreuder’s Only Dolls Don’t Cry. An unused fireplace with a poker and, on the mantel above, a candle on a wrought-iron candle holder, a clock, a miniature helmet from a medieval knight’s armour. Two medieval portraits on the wall above the fireplace.
Whenever I spent any long period of time in that room, I had the impression that the gloom would penetrate through my clothes into every pore of my body. The living room seemed to me the perfect mirror image of the kidnapper’s ‘other’ side. Conservative, conformist and well adjusted on the surface, barely covering the dark layer underneath.
Today I know that for years Wolfgang Priklopil had barely changed anything in that house built by his parents in the 1970s. He wanted to renovate completely to his specifications only the upper floor, which had three bedrooms, and the attic. An attic dormer window was to allow additional light in; the dusty attic, with its bare wooden beams along the slanted roof, was to be outfitted wit
h drywalling and transformed into a living space. For me, this meant that a new phase of my imprisonment was about to begin.
For the next months and years the upper floor under renovation was where I spent most of my time during the day. Priklopil himself no longer had a regular job, although sometimes he did disappear to do some ‘business’ with his friend Holzapfel. I didn’t find out until much later that they renovated flats in order to rent them out. However, they can’t have had too many orders coming in, because most of the time the kidnapper was busy renovating his own house. I was his only worker. A worker he could fetch from the dungeon as needed to do the back-breaking work that most people would have paid tradesmen to do, and who he then coerced into cooking and cleaning ‘after the working day’ before he locked her in the cellar again.
Back then I was actually much too young to do all the jobs he burdened me with. Whenever I see twelve-year-old kids today complaining and rebelling when asked to do easy chores, it makes me smile every time. I don’t begrudge them that small act of rebellion at all. I couldn’t rebel; I had to obey.
The kidnapper, who didn’t want any strange workmen in the house, took on the entire renovation project himself and forced me to do things that were far beyond my strength and capabilities. Together with him, I dragged marble slabs and heavy doors, hauled sacks of cement across the floor, broke open concrete with a chisel and a sledgehammer. We installed the dormer window, insulated and covered the walls, poured screed, then laid heating pipes and electric cabling, plastered the drywall panels, hammered an opening between the upper floor and the new attic floor and built a staircase with marble tiling.
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