3,096 Days

by Natascha Kampusch

  Today, I sometimes observe the reactions of small children as they look forward to being with their parents, whom they haven’t seen all day, and then their parents greet them only with unpleasant words and sometimes even strike them. Each of these children could be said to be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. They love the people with whom they live and on whom they are dependent, even if those people do not treat them very well.

  I too was a child when my imprisonment began. The kidnapper had torn me from my world and placed me in his own. The person who had stolen me, who took my family and identity from me, became my family. I had no choice other than to accept him as such and I learned to derive happiness from his affection and repress all that was negative. Just like any child growing up in a dysfunctional family.

  After my escape I was amazed – not that I as the victim was capable of making that differentiation, but that the society in which I landed after my imprisonment does not allow for the slightest nuance. I am not permitted to reflect at all on the person who was the only one in my life for eight and a half years. I cannot even hint that I need that outlet to work through what has happened without evoking incomprehension.

  In the meantime I have learned that I idealized this society to a certain extent. We live in a world in which women are battered and are unable to flee from the men who beat them, although their door is theoretically standing wide open. One out of every four women becomes a victim of severe violence. One out of every two will be confronted by sexual harassment over her lifetime. These crimes are everywhere and can take place behind any front door in the country, every day, and barely elicit much more than a shrug of the shoulders and superficial dismay.

  Our society needs criminals like Wolfgang Priklopil in order to give a face to the evil that lives within and to split it off from society itself. It needs the images of cellar dungeons so as not to have to see the many homes in which violence rears its conformist, bourgeois head. Society uses the victims of sensational cases such as mine in order to divest itself of the responsibility for the many nameless victims of daily crimes, victims nobody helps – even when they ask for help.

  Crimes such as the one committed against me form the austere, black-and-white structure for the categories of Good and Evil on which society is based. The perpetrator must be a beast, so that we can see ourselves as being on the side of good. His crime must be embellished with S&M fantasies and wild orgies, until it is so extreme that it no longer has anything to do with our own lives.

  And the victim must have been broken and must remain so, so that the externalization of evil is possible. The victim who refuses to assume this role contradicts society’s simplistic view. Nobody wants to see it. People would have to take a look at themselves.

  For this reason, I have sparked unconscious aggression in some people. Perhaps it is what has happened to me that triggers aggression, but because I’m the only one within reach after the kidnapper’s suicide, they strike out at me. Particularly violently, whenever I try to get society to see that the kidnapper who abducted me was a person too. One who lived among them. Those who are able to react anonymously in Internet postings unload their hate directly on to me. It is society’s self-hate that rebounds on society itself, begging the question of why it allows something like that to happen. Why people among us are able to disappear so easily without anyone noticing. For over eight years.

  Those who stand across from me in interviews and at events are more subtle. They turn me – the only person who experienced my imprisonment – into a victim for the second time with those two small words. They say only ‘Stockholm Syndrome’.

  8

  Rock Bottom

  When Physical Pain Eases the Psychological Torment

  The staircase was narrow, steep and slippery. I was balancing a glass fruit bowl in front of me that I had washed upstairs and was now carrying down into my dungeon. I couldn’t see my feet and groped my way forward. Then it happened: I slipped and fell. My head hit the stairs and I heard the bowl shatter into pieces with a loud crash. Then I was out for a moment. When I came to again and lifted my head, I felt sick. Blood dripped from my bald head on to the stairs. Wolfgang Priklopil was right behind me, as always. He bounded down the stairs, picked me up and carried me into the bathroom to wash off the blood. He swore at me constantly under his breath: How could I be so clumsy! All the problems I was making for him! I was even too stupid to walk! Then he ineptly put a bandage on me to staunch the bleeding and locked me in the dungeon. ‘Now I have to repaint the stairs,’ he barked before he bolted the door. He came back the next morning with a bucket of paint and painted the grey concrete stairs where the ugly dark stains could be seen.

  My head pounded. Whenever I lifted it, a harsh, stabbing pain would shoot through my body and everything would go black. I spent several days in bed and could hardly move. I think I had concussion. But in those long nights when the pain kept me awake, I was afraid that I might have broken my skull. Nevertheless, I didn’t dare ask to see a doctor. The kidnapper had never wanted to hear about my pain before and punished me this time as well for having injured myself. Over the next few weeks, he aimed directly at that spot on my head whenever he beat me.

  After my fall I realized that the kidnapper would rather let me die than go for help in an emergency. Until that point I had always simply been lucky: I had no contact with the outside world and was in no danger of catching any illnesses. Priklopil was so hysterically intent on avoiding germs that I was safe from illnesses despite my contact with him. I never experienced anything more than slight colds with minimal fever in all the years of my imprisonment. But an accident could have happened at any time during all the heavy work in the house, and at times it seemed a miracle that I came away with only large bruises, contusions and abrasions from his beatings and that he never broke any of my bones. But now I was sure that any serious illness, any accident that required medical treatment, would spell certain death for me.

  In addition, our ‘living together’ wasn’t turning out to be exactly what he had imagined. My fall on the stairs and his behaviour afterwards were symptomatic of a phase of bitter struggle that would continue for the next two years of my imprisonment. A phase in which I would fluctuate between depression and thoughts of suicide on one hand and the conviction on the other that I wanted to live and everything would turn out okay in the end. A phase in which he struggled to bring his violent assaults into harmony with his dream of a ‘normal’ life together. He had more and more difficulty doing this, which tormented him.

  When I turned sixteen, the renovation of the house, in which he had invested all of his energy and my labour, was coming to an end. The work which had given his daily routine structure over months and years was about to come to an end with nothing to replace it. The child that he had abducted had now become a young woman – in other words, the embodiment of that which he deeply hated. I didn’t want to be his puppet with no will of my own, as he had perhaps hoped I would be, so that he would not feel humiliated himself. I was rebellious, while at the same time I grew more and more depressed and tried to withdraw whenever I could. Sometimes he now had to force me to come out of my dungeon at all. I cried for hours and no longer had the strength to stand up. He hated resistance and tears, and my passivity enraged him. He had nothing to counter it with. Back then it must have finally become clear to him that he had not only chained my life to his, but also his life to mine. And that any attempt to break those chains would have to end in death for one of us.

  Wolfgang Priklopil became more and more erratic from week to week, and his paranoia increased. He watched me with suspicion, always expecting me to attack him or flee. In the evening, when he would fall into a state of acute anxiety, he brought me to his bed, manacled me to him and tried to calm himself with the warmth of my body. But his moodiness continued to increase and I was the one on whom he took out every one of his mood swings. He now began to talk of a ‘life together’. More frequently than in the previous
years, he informed me of his decisions and talked to me about his problems. The fact that I was his prisoner and that he monitored all my movements was something that didn’t even seem to register with him in his longing for an ideal world. If I would only belong to him completely one day – if he could be certain that I wouldn’t escape after all – then we could both lead a better life, he would always tell me with shining eyes.

  He had only vague ideas about what this better life was supposed to look like. But his role in it was clearly defined: in every version he saw himself as the ruler in the house; he had reserved various roles for me. At times the housewife and forced labourer who did all the work in the house for him, from building to cooking and cleaning. At other times the companion he could lean on, and at still other times his replacement mother, the bin for his psychological garbage, the punching bag he could use to work off his anger over his powerlessness in the real world. What never changed was his idea that I had to be fully and completely at his disposal. Me having my own personality, my own needs or even a modicum of freedom never featured in his screenplay of a ‘life together’.

  My reaction to his dreams was torn. On the one hand they seemed to me to be deeply abnormal. Nobody who was thinking clearly would picture a life together with the person he had kidnapped, beaten for years and locked away. But, at the same time, this distant, attractive world he painted began to take root in my subconscious. I had an all-powerful longing for normality. I wanted to meet other people, leave the house, go shopping, swimming. See the sun whenever I wanted to. Talk with someone, no matter what about. This life together in the mind of the kidnapper, in which he would allow me some freedom, in which I could leave the house under his supervision, seemed to me on many days like the most that I would be entitled to in this life. Freedom, real freedom, was something I could hardly even imagine after all those years. I was afraid of venturing outside the established framework – within that framework I had learned to play the entire keyboard in every key. I had forgotten what freedom sounded like.

  I felt like a soldier who is told that everything will be okay after the war. No matter that he has lost a leg in the meantime – that’s just part of what happens. For me, it had become an irrefutable truth over time that I first had to suffer before our ‘better life’ could begin. My better life in imprisonment. You should be so happy that I found you. You couldn’t even live outside any more. Who would want you, after all. You have to be grateful to me that I have taken you in. My war took place in my head. And it had absorbed those words like a sponge.

  But even this less stringent form of imprisonment the kidnapper had promised lay in the distant future. And he blamed me for it. One evening at the kitchen table he said, ‘If you weren’t so defiant, we could have such a better life. If I could be sure that you wouldn’t run away, I wouldn’t have to lock you up and shackle you.’ The older I got, the more he transferred the entire responsibility for my imprisonment on to me. It was my fault that he had to beat me and lock me up – if I would just cooperate better, be more humble and obedient, then I could live upstairs in the house with him. I would retort, ‘You’re the one who has locked me away! You’re keeping me prisoner!’ But it seemed as if he had long ago lost the ability to see that reality. And, to a certain extent, he pulled me along with him.

  On his good days, this image – his image that was to become my own – became tangible. On bad days, he became more unpredictable than ever. More frequently than before he used me as a doormat for his miserable moods. The worst were the nights when he couldn’t sleep because a chronic sinus inflammation tormented him. If he couldn’t sleep, then I couldn’t either. If I lay in my bed in the dungeon on those nights, his voice droned through the loudspeakers for hours. He told me every detail of how he had spent the day, and asked me about every step, every word I had read, every movement: ‘Have you tidied up? How did you divide up your food? What did you listen to on the radio?’

  I had to answer, giving him all the elaborate details, in the middle of the night, and if I had nothing to tell him I had to make something up to calm him. Other nights he simply harassed me: ‘Obey! Obey! Obey!’ he would call into the intercom in a monotone. His voice boomed throughout the small room, filling it up to the very last corner: ‘Obey! Obey! Obey!’ I couldn’t block it out, even if I hid my head under the pillows. It was always there, and it enraged me. I could not escape that voice. It signalled to me day and night that he had me in his power. It signalled to me day and night that I mustn’t give up on myself. In moments of clarity, my urge to survive and to escape one day was unbelievably strong. In my daily routine, I hardly had the strength to think those thoughts all the way to the end.

  His mother’s recipe lay on the kitchen table. I had read it through numerous times so as not to make any mistakes: separate the eggs; sift the flour together with the baking powder; beat the egg whites until stiff. He stood behind me, watching me nervously.

  ‘My mother doesn’t beat the eggs that way!’

  ‘My mother does that much better!’

  ‘You’re much too clumsy. Be careful!’

  Some flour had spilled on to the counter. He shouted and barked at me that everything was taking much too long. His mother, the cake … I did the best I could, but no matter what I did, it wasn’t enough for him.

  ‘If your mother can do it so much better, why don’t you ask her to bake you a cake?’ It had just slipped out. And it was too much.

  He struck out like a defiant child, swept the bowl with the batter on to the floor and shoved me against the kitchen table. Then he dragged me into the cellar and locked me up. It was broad daylight outside, but he wouldn’t allow me any light. He knew how to torture me.

  I lay down on my bed and rocked quietly back and forth. I couldn’t cry or imagine myself away. With every movement, the pain from my contusions and bruises cried out in me. But I remained mute, simply lying there in the absolute darkness, as if I had fallen out of space and time.

  The kidnapper didn’t come. My alarm clock ticked quietly. I must have dozed off in the meantime, but I couldn’t remember having done so. Everything blended together; dreams turned into delirium, where I saw myself walking along by the sea with young people my own age. The light in my dream was glisteningly bright, the water deep blue. I flew a kite out over the water, the wind played in my hair, the sun burned down on my arms. It was a feeling of an absolute dissolution of boundaries, an intoxication from the sense of being alive. In my fantasy I was standing on a stage and my parents were in the audience; I sang a song loud and strong. My mother applauded, jumped up and hugged me. I wore a beautiful dress made of shimmering fabric, light and delicate. I felt beautiful, strong, whole.

  When I awoke, it was still dark. My alarm clock ticked monotonously. It was the only sign that time hadn’t stood still. The darkness remained – the whole day.

  The kidnapper did not come that evening and he didn’t come the next morning. I was hungry, my stomach was growling, and slowly I felt cramps beginning. I had a little bit of water in my dungeon, but that was all. But drinking didn’t help any more. I couldn’t think of anything other than food. I would’ve done anything for a piece of bread.

  In the course of the day, I increasingly lost control over my body, over my thoughts. I felt the pain in my stomach, the weakness, the certainty that I had overstepped my boundaries and that he would now leave me to die a miserable death. I felt as if I were on board the sinking Titanic. The light had already gone out, the ship was tilting slowly but inexorably to the side. There was no escape. I felt the cold, dark water climbing higher. I felt it on my legs, my back. It sloshed over my arms, encasing my ribcage. Higher, ever higher … There! A glaring ray of light blinded my face momentarily. I heard something fall to the floor with a muffled sound. Then a voice: ‘Here, there’s something for you.’ Then a door clicked shut.

  Dazed, I lifted my head. I was bathed in sweat and had no idea where I was. The water that had wanted to pull me into t
he depths was gone. But everything swayed. I swayed. And below me was nothing, black nothingness, nothing stopping my hand from reaching out into emptiness again and again. I don’t know how long I remained trapped in that vision, until I realized that I was lying in my bunk bed in the dungeon. It seemed to me an eternity before I could muster the strength to grope for the ladder, climb down it backwards, rung by rung. When I reached the floor, I crawled forward on all fours. My hand brushed against a small plastic bag. I ripped it open greedily and with shaking fingers, so clumsily that the contents fell out and rolled across the floor. I fumbled around in a panic, until I felt something long and cool under my fingers. A carrot? I wiped it with my hand and bit into it. He had thrown a bag of carrots into my dungeon. On my knees, I slid across the ice-cold floor until I had found all of them. Then I carried each one individually up to my bunk bed. Each time on the way up the ladder seemed to me to be like climbing a massive mountain, but it pumped up my blood pressure. Finally, I devoured them, one after the other. My stomach grumbled loudly, contracting and cramping. The carrots rolled around like rocks in my stomach and the pain was terrible.

  It wasn’t until two days had passed that the kidnapper allowed me to come upstairs again. Even on the stairs in the garage I had to close my eyes. That’s how much the dim brightness blinded me. I breathed in deeply in the certain knowledge of having survived once again.

  ‘Are you going to be good now?’ he asked me, once we had reached the house. ‘You have to be better, otherwise I will have to lock you up again.’ I was much too weak to contradict him. The next day I saw that the skin on the inside of my thighs and on my stomach had turned yellow. The beta-carotene in the carrots had been deposited in the last few remnants of fat under my transparently white skin. I weighed only thirty-eight kilograms, was sixteen years old and was one metre seventy-five tall.