3,096 Days

by Natascha Kampusch

  Priklopil was mentally very ill. His paranoia went even beyond the level that you would expect from someone who puts an abducted child in a cellar. His fantasies of omnipotence blended with his paranoia. In many, he played the role of absolute ruler.

  Consequently, he told me one day that he was one of those Egyptian gods from the science-fiction series Stargate that I liked to watch. The ‘evil ones’ among the aliens were modelled after Egyptian gods who sought out young men as host bodies. They penetrated the body through the mouth or the back of the neck and lived as parasites in the body, completely taking over the host in the end. These gods had a particular piece of jewellery that they used to force people to their knees and humiliate them. ‘I am an Egyptian god,’ Priklopil said to me one day in the dungeon. ‘You must do everything I say.’

  At first I was unable to tell whether this was meant as a strange joke or whether he was trying to use my favourite TV series to force even more humiliations upon me. I suspected that he really did think himself a god, in whose absurd fantasy world the only role left for me was that of the oppressed, which would simultaneously lift him up.

  His references to Egyptian gods frightened me. After all, I really was trapped under the earth as if in a sarcophagus; buried alive in a room that could have become my burial chamber. I lived in the pathologically paranoid world of a psychopath. If I didn’t want to lose myself completely, I had to have a part in shaping it as much as possible. Back when he had told me to call him ‘Maestro’, I had seen from his reaction that I was not just a pawn of his will, but that I had modest means at my disposal to define boundaries. Similar to the way the kidnapper had opened up a wound in me, into which he had for years poured the poison that my parents had left me in the lurch, I felt that I had a few grains of salt in my hand that could prove painful to him as well.

  ‘Call me “My Lord”,’ he demanded. It was absurd that Priklopil, whose position of power was so obvious on the surface, was so dependent on this verbal show of humility.

  When I refused to call him ‘My Lord’, he screamed and raged, and one time he beat me for it. But with my refusal, I not only maintained a bit of personal dignity, but had also found a lever I could use. Even if I had to pay for it with immeasurable pain.

  I experienced the same situation when he commanded me for the first time to kneel in front of him. He was sitting on the couch, waiting for me to serve him something to eat, when out of the blue he ordered, ‘Kneel down!’ I answered him calmly, ‘I won’t do that.’ He jumped up in anger and pressed me down to the floor. I made a quick turn so that I would land on my rear end at least instead of my knees. He wasn’t to have the satisfaction, not even for a second, of me kneeling in front of him. He grabbed me, turned me on my side and bent my legs as if I were a rubber doll. He pressed my calves against the back of my thighs, lifted me like a corded package off the floor and tried to push me down into a kneeling position again. I made myself heavy and stiff and twisted desperately in his grip. He punched and kicked me. But, in the end, I had the upper hand. In all the years he vehemently demanded that I call him ‘Lord’, I never did so. And I never kneeled before him.

  Often it would’ve been easier to kneel and I would have saved myself a number of blows and kicks. But in that situation of total oppression and complete dependence on the kidnapper, I had to preserve a modicum of room to manoeuvre. The roles we were to play were very clear, and as prisoner I was without question the victim. However, this battle over the word ‘Lord’ and the kneeling became a secondary theatre where we fought for power as if in a proxy war. I was in an inferior position when he humiliated and mistreated me as he liked. I was in an inferior position when he locked me up, turned off my electricity and used me as forced labour. But on that point, I stood up to him. I called him ‘Criminal’ when he wanted me to call him ‘Lord’. Sometimes I said ‘Honey’ or ‘Darling’ instead of ‘My Lord’ in order to illustrate the grotesqueness of the situation that he had placed us both in. And he punished me every time for it.

  It took immeasurable strength to remain consistent in my behaviour towards him throughout the entire period of my imprisonment. Always resisting. Always saying no. Always defending myself against attacks and always explaining calmly to him that he had gone too far and had no right to treat me that way. Even on days when I had given up on myself and felt completely worthless, I couldn’t afford to show any weakness. On days like that, I told myself in my childish view of things that I was doing it for him. So that he wouldn’t become an even more evil person. As if it were my responsibility to prevent him from completely falling into a moral abyss.

  Whenever he had his outbursts of rage, beating me with his fists and feet, there was nothing I could do. Similarly, I was powerless to do anything about the forced labour, being locked up or the hunger and the humiliations suffered while cleaning the house. This kind of oppression formed the framework in which I lived; they were an integral component of my world. The only way for me to deal with it was to forgive the kidnapper his transgressions. I forgave him for kidnapping me and I forgave him every single time he beat me and tormented me. This act of forgiveness gave me back the power over my experience and made it possible to live with it. If I had not adopted this attitude instinctively from the very beginning, I would probably have destroyed myself in anger and hatred – or I would have been broken by the humiliations that I was subjected to daily. In this way, I would have been eliminated; this way would have entailed even more dire consequences than giving up my old identity, my past, my name. By forgiving him, I pushed his deeds away from me. They could no longer make me small or destroy me; after all, I had forgiven them. They were evil deeds that he had committed and would rebound only on him, no longer on me.

  And I had my small victories. My refusal to call him ‘My Lord’ or ‘Maestro’. My refusal to kneel. My appeals to his conscience, which sometimes fell on fertile ground. They were vital to my survival. They gave me the illusion that I was an equal partner in the relationship within certain parameters – because they gave me a kind of counter-power over him. And it showed me something very important: namely, that I still existed as a person and had not been degraded to an object with no will of her own.

  Parallel to his fantasies of oppression, Priklopil nurtured a deep longing for a ‘perfect’ world. I, his prisoner, was to be at his disposal for this as a prop and as a person. He tried to make me into the partner he had never had. ‘Real’ women were out of the question. His hatred of women was deep-seated and irreconcilable, and burst out of him again and again in little remarks. I don’t know whether he had had any contact with women earlier, or even a girlfriend during his time in Vienna. During my imprisonment, the only ‘woman in his life’ was his mother – a dependent relationship with an over-idealized figure. Release from this dominance, which he was unable to achieve in reality, was to come about in the world of my dungeon by reversing the relationship – by choosing me to take on the role of submissive woman who acquiesced and looked up to him.

  His image of an ideal family was taken from the 1950s. He wanted a hard-working little woman, who had his dinner ready for him when he came home, who did not talk back and did the housework perfectly. He dreamed of ‘family celebrations’ and outings, enjoyed our meals together and celebrated name days, birthdays and Christmas as if there was no dungeon and no captivity for me. It was as if he was trying to live a life through me that he couldn’t manage to outside the house. As if I were a walking stick that he had collected at the side of the road to support him the moment his life wasn’t going the way he wanted. ‘I am your king,’ he said, ‘and you are my slave. You obey.’ Or he would tell me, ‘Your family is made up of chavs. You have no right to your own life. You are here to serve me.’

  He needed that insane crime to realize his vision of a perfect, small, intact world. But in the end, he really only wanted two things from me: approval and affection. As if his objective behind all the cruelty was to force a person to love him a
bsolutely.

  When I turned fourteen, I spent the night above ground for the first time in years. It was not a liberating feeling.

  I lay stiff with fright on the kidnapper’s bed. He locked the door behind him and placed the key on a cabinet that was so high that only he could reach it by standing on tiptoe. For me it was absolutely unreachable. Then he lay down next to me and tied my wrists to his using plastic cord cuffs.

  One of the first headlines about the kidnapper after I escaped was: ‘The Sex Beast’. I will not write about this part of my imprisonment – it is the last remaining bit of privacy I would like to preserve now that my life in captivity has been picked apart in innumerable reports, interrogations, photographs, etc. But I will say this much: in their eagerness for the sensational, the journalists of the red-top press were far off the mark. In many respects, the kidnapper was a beast and more cruel than can possibly be depicted. But in this sense he was not. Naturally, he subjected me to minor sexual assaults; these were part of my daily harassment, like the thumps and punches, the kicks at my shins when he walked past. But when he manacled me to him on those nights I had to spend upstairs, it wasn’t about sex. The man who beat me, locked me in the cellar and starved me, wanted to cuddle. Controlled and manacled by my plastic cuffs, I was something to hold tight to in the night.

  I could have screamed at how painfully paradoxical my situation seemed. But I couldn’t make a sound. I lay next to him on my side and tried to move as little as possible. My back, as so often, had been beaten black and blue. It hurt so much that I couldn’t lie on it, and the cuffs cut into my skin. I felt his breath on the back of my neck and stiffened.

  I remained manacled to the kidnapper until the next morning. Whenever I had to go to the toilet, I had to wake him, and he came with me with his wrist tied to mine. When he had fallen asleep next to me I reflected on whether I could break the cuffs – but I soon gave up. Whenever I turned my wrist and tightened my muscles, the plastic cut into not only my arm, but also his. He would inevitably have woken up and realized immediately my attempt to escape. Today I know that the police also use cord cuffs when they make arrests. They would never have broken under the muscle strength of a starving fourteen-year-old anyway.

  So there I lay, manacled to my kidnapper, the first of many nights in his bed. The next morning I would have to eat breakfast with him. As much as I had liked that ritual as a child, I became nauseated at the hypocrisy with which he forced me to sit with him at the kitchen table, drink milk and eat two tablespoonfuls of cereal, not a single bite more. An ideal world, as if nothing had happened.

  That summer I tried for the first time to take my life.

  In that phase of my imprisonment I no longer had any thought of escape. At the age of fifteen my psychological prison was complete. The door to the house could have been standing wide open: I couldn’t have taken a single step. Escape, that meant death. For me, for him, for everyone who could have seen me.

  It is not easy to explain what isolation, beatings and humiliations do to a person. How after so much mistreatment the mere sound of a door can cause you to panic so that you cannot even breathe, let alone run. How your heart pounds, the blood in your ears drones and then suddenly a switch in your brain is flipped and you feel nothing but paralysis. You are incapable of action, incapable of reason. The feeling of mortal fear has been indelibly branded on your brain, and all the details of the time when you first felt that fear – smells, sounds, voices – are preserved in your subconscious. If one detail should reappear – a raised hand – the fear returns; without the hand even closing about your throat, you feel yourself suffocating.

  Just as survivors of bombing attacks can be panic-stricken at the sound of New Year’s fireworks, the same happened to me with a thousand small details. The sound I heard when the heavy doors to my dungeon were opened. The rattling of the fan. Darkness. Harsh lighting. The smell upstairs in the house. The rush of air before his hand struck me. His fingers around my throat, his breath on the back of my neck. Our bodies are programmed for survival and react by going limp. At some point, the trauma is so immense that even the outside world does not promise any relief, but rather becomes a threatening terrain associated with fear.

  It may be true that the kidnapper knew what I was going through. That he understood that I would not run away when he allowed me out in his garden for the first time. Some time before that he had made it possible for me to sunbathe for short periods. On the ground floor there was a room with windows that reached to the floor, which no one could see into from the outside when he closed one of the blinds. There I was permitted to lie on a lounger and absorb the sunshine. The kidnapper probably viewed it as a kind of ‘maintenance’ for me. He knew that a person cannot survive forever without sunlight and therefore made sure that I got some from time to time. For me it was a revelation.

  The sensation of the warm rays on my pale skin was indescribable. I closed my eyes. The sun made red circles behind my eyelids. I slowly dozed off and dreamed I was in an outdoor pool, listening to the cheerful voices of children and feeling the cool water, the way it washes over your skin when you jump in all hot. What I wouldn’t have given to go swimming, just once! Just like the kidnapper, who from time to time appeared in my dungeon in his bathing trunks. Neighbours, distant relatives of the Priklopils, had the same swimming pool as he did in their garden – only there was water in theirs and it could be used. When they weren’t home and the kidnapper checked up on the house or watered their plants, he sometimes went for a swim. I envied him deeply.

  One day that summer, he surprised me by saying that I could come swimming with him. The neighbours weren’t home and because the gardens of the two houses were connected by a path you could reach the pool without being seen from the street.

  The grass tickled my naked feet and the morning dew gleamed like miniature diamonds between the blades of grass. I followed him down the narrow path to the neighbours’ garden, got undressed and slipped into the water.

  It was like being reborn. Underwater, my imprisonment, the dungeon, the oppression, all fell away from me for a moment. My stress dissolved in the cool blue water. I came up and floated on the surface. The small turquoise waves sparkled in the sun. Above me stretched an infinite cerulean sky. My ears were underwater and all around me was nothing but soft splashing.

  When the kidnapper nervously ordered me out of the water, it took me a minute to react. It was as if I had to return from a faraway place. I followed Priklopil into the house, through the kitchen into the hallway and from there into the garage and down to the dungeon. Then I was locked up again. For the time being that was the only occasion I was permitted to swim. He didn’t allow me to go in the pool for a long while after that. But that one time had been enough to remind me that in spite of all the despair and powerlessness, I still wanted a life. The memory of that moment showed me that it was worth holding on until I could escape.

  I was immeasurably grateful to the kidnapper back then for such small pleasures, like the sunbathing or swimming in the neighbours’ pool. And I still am today. Even if it seems strange, I can recognize that there were small, humane moments during my time in captivity. The kidnapper was unable to completely shut himself off from the influence of the child and young girl with whom he spent so many hours. Back then, I clung to even the tiniest human gesture, because I was dependent on seeing goodness in the world in which I could change nothing; in a kidnapper with whom I had to cope simply because I was unable to escape. Those moments were there and I treasured them. Moments in which he helped me paint, draw or make something, encouraging me to start again from the beginning if I was unsuccessful. By going over the school subjects I was missing with me and giving me extra maths problems to solve, even when it gave him particular pleasure afterwards to correct my mistakes, and when he only paid attention to grammar and spelling in my essays. Rules had to be followed. But he was there. He took time, of which I had more than plenty.

  I succeeded i
n surviving by subconsciously suppressing and splitting off the horrors I experienced. And from these terrible experiences during my imprisonment I learned to be strong. Yes, perhaps even to evolve a strength I would not have been capable of had I grown up in freedom.

  Today, years after my escape, I have become cautious in saying such things. That, within the evil, at least brief moments of normality, even mutual understanding, were possible. That’s what I mean when I say that there is neither black nor white, neither in reality nor in extreme situations, but rather many subtle shades in between that make the difference. For me, these nuances were decisive. In time, by detecting mood swings I was perhaps able to avoid a beating. By appealing to the kidnapper’s conscience again and again, he spared me perhaps even worse. By seeing him as a human being, with a very dark and a somewhat lighter side, I was able to remain human myself. Because he was unable to break me.

  This may be why I so vehemently oppose being placed in the pigeonhole of Stockholm Syndrome. The term came about after a bank robbery in Stockholm in 1973. The bank robbers had held four employees hostage for five days. Much to the amazement of the media, the hostages, once free, were more afraid of the police than they had been of the hostage-takers – and they had developed an understanding of them. Some of the victims asked for mercy for the robbers and visited them in prison. Public opinion has no understanding for the ‘sympathy’ they showed to the robbers and turned the victims’ behaviour into a pathology. The findings: compassion with the perpetrator denoted illness. This newly created illness has been called Stockholm Syndrome ever since.