Weighing myself daily had become second nature to me and I watched as the needle moved backwards day by day. The kidnapper had lost all sense of proportion and still accused me of being too fat. And I believed him. Today I know that my body mass index back then came to 14.8. The World Health Organization has said a body mass index of fifteen is an indicator of starvation. Mine was lower than that.
Hunger is an extreme physical experience. At first, you still feel good. When nourishment is cut off, the body stimulates itself. Adrenaline pours into the system, you suddenly feel better, full of energy. It is probably a mechanism the body uses to signal: I still have reserves, you can use them to search for food. However, locked underground there’s no way to find food. Rushes of adrenaline go nowhere. Next comes a growling stomach and fantasizing about eating. Thoughts focus only on one’s next bite of food. Later, you lose all touch with reality, sliding into delirium. You no longer dream, but simply drift between worlds. You see buffets, large plates of spaghetti, cakes and sweets, all there for the taking. A mirage. Cramps shake your whole body, that feel as if your stomach is devouring itself. The pain that hunger can cause is unbearable. You can’t understand that if you have known hunger as only a slight growling of the stomach. I wish I had never come to know cramps like that. Finally, the weakness comes. You can hardly lift your arm any more, your blood pressure plummets, and when you stand up, your vision goes black and you fall over.
My body showed clear signs of lack of food and light. I was only skin and bones. Blue-black marks appeared on the white skin on my calves. I don’t know whether they were from hunger or from my extended periods with no light. But they looked worrying, like marks on a corpse.
Whenever he starved me for a longer period, the kidnapper would then slowly feed me again until I had enough strength to work. It would take some time, because after a longer starvation phase I could only eat a few spoonfuls of food. Although I had fantasized about nothing else for days, the smell of food turned my stomach. When I once again became ‘too strong’ for him, he once again began to deny me food. Priklopil used starvation in a very targeted way: ‘You are too rebellious, you have too much energy,’ he would say sometimes, before he took away the last morsel of my tiny meals. At the same time, his own eating disorder, which he transferred to me, also intensified. His compulsive attempts to eat healthily took on absurd forms.
‘We are going to drink a glass of wine every day to prevent heart attack,’ he announced one day. From then on, I had to drink a glass of red wine a day. I only had to take a few sips, but the taste disgusted me. I choked the wine down like bitter medicine. He didn’t like wine either, but forced himself to drink a small glass with his meal. For him it was never about the pleasure, but rather the introduction of a new rule that he – and therefore I – had to follow strictly.
Then he declared carbohydrates his enemy: ‘We are now going to follow a ketogenic diet.’ Sugar, bread and even fruit were forbidden. I was given only food rich in fats and proteins, still only in small portions, and my gaunt body coped with this treatment worse and worse. Mostly when I had been locked up for days in the dungeon with no food, I was given fatty meats and an egg upstairs. Whenever I ate with the kidnapper, I devoured my ration as quickly as possible. If I was finished before him, I could maybe hope that he would give me another bite, because he found it unpleasant when I watched him eat.
The worst thing was having to cook when I was completely starving. One day he put one of his mother’s recipes and a package containing pieces of codfish on the counter. I peeled the potatoes, floured the cod, separated eggs and put the pieces of fish in the yolk. Then I heated a bit of oil in a pan, rolled the fish in breadcrumbs and fried it. As always, he sat in the kitchen, commenting on what I did:
‘My mother can do that ten times faster.’
‘You can see that the oil is getting much too hot, you stupid cow.’
‘Don’t peel too much off the potato. That’s wasting it.’
The scent of fried fish permeated the kitchen, driving me half crazy. I lifted the pieces out of the pan and put them on a paper towel to drip. My mouth watered. There was enough fish for a real feast. Maybe I could eat two pieces? And maybe some potatoes as well?
I don’t remember exactly what I did wrong at that moment. I only know that Priklopil suddenly jumped up, tearing the serving dish I had wanted to put on the kitchen table out of my hand and barking at me, ‘You aren’t getting anything today!’
At that moment, I completely lost control. I was so hungry that I could’ve committed murder for a piece of fish. I grabbed for the plate with one hand, took a piece of fish and tried hastily to stuff it into my mouth. But he was faster and slapped the fish out of my hand. I tried to nab a second piece, but he grabbed my wrist and squeezed it so hard that I had to let go. I dropped to the floor to pick up the remains that had fallen during our struggle. I managed to put a tiny bit in my mouth. But, immediately, he had his hand on my throat, lifting me up, dragging me to the sink and pushing my head down. With his other hand, he forced my teeth apart and choked me until the forbidden fish came back up again. ‘That will teach you.’ Then he slowly removed the serving dish from the table and took it to the hallway. I stood in front of the kitchen cabinets, humiliated and helpless.
The kidnapper kept me weak using such methods – and trapped me in a mixture of dependence and gratitude. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you. For me there was only one hand that could save me from starvation. It was the hand of the very same man who was systematically starving me. In this way, the small rations of food seemed to me like generous gifts sometimes. I remember so vividly the sausage salad that his mother prepared from time to time at the weekend that even today it seems to me to be a particular delicacy. When I was allowed to come back upstairs after two or three long days in the dungeon, sometimes he gave me a small bowl of it. Mostly, only the onions and a few pieces of tomato were still swimming in the dressing. He had previously fished out the sausage and the hard-boiled eggs. But the leftovers seemed like a feast to me. And when he gave me an additional bit from his plate, or sometimes even a piece of cake, I was overjoyed. It is so easy to bind to you someone from whom you are withholding food.
On 1 March 2004 the trial of the serial killer Marc Dutroux began in Belgium. I can still vividly remember his case from my childhood. I was eight years old when the police stormed his house in August 1996, freeing two girls – the twelve-year-old Sabine Dardenne and the fourteen-year-old Laetitia Delhez. The dead bodies of four other girls were also found.
For months, I followed news about his trial on the radio and on television. I heard about Sabine Dardenne’s martyrdom and suffered with her when she confronted the perpetrator in the courtroom. She too had been thrown into a delivery van and kidnapped on her way to school. The cellar dungeon where she had been locked up was even smaller than mine and her story of imprisonment was different. She had lived the nightmare that the kidnapper had threatened me with. Yet even though there were significant differences, the crime that had been discovered two years before my own abduction could definitely have served as a blueprint for Wolfgang Priklopil’s sick plan. However, there is no proof of that.
The trial stirred me up even though I couldn’t see myself reflected in Sabine Dardenne. She had been freed after eighty days in captivity. She was still angry and knew that she was right. She called her abductor ‘monster’ and ‘bastard’ and demanded an apology, which she did not receive in court back then. Sabine Dardenne’s imprisonment had been too short for her to lose herself. At the time, I had already been held captive for 2,200 long days and nights. My perception had begun to alter long ago. Intellectually, I certainly knew that I was the victim of a crime. But, emotionally, the long period of contact I had had only with the kidnapper, who was necessary to my survival, had caused me to internalize his psychopathic fantasies. They had become my reality.
I learned two things from that trial. First of all, that victims of violent crime are not always
believed. All of Belgium seemed to be persuaded that Marc Dutroux was merely a front man for a large-scale network, a network that reached up to the highest levels. On the radio I heard of the revilement Sabine Dardenne was being subjected to because she refused to support these theories, always insisting that she had never seen anyone else other than Dutroux. And, secondly, that people do not empathize with victims and give them limitless sympathy, but can very quickly switch to aggression and rejection.
At about the same time, I heard my own name on the radio for the first time. I had turned on the Austrian cultural station Ö1 to listen to a broadcast on non-fiction works when I suddenly jumped: ‘Natascha Kampusch’. For six years, I had heard nobody speak that name. The only person who could have said it had forbidden me my name. An announcer on the radio mentioned it in connection with a new book written by Kurt Totzer and Günther Kallinger entitled Spurlos – die spektakulärsten Vermisstenfälle der Interpol, or Without a Trace – Interpol’s Most Spectacular Missing Persons Cases. The authors talked about the research they had done – and about me. A mysterious case where there was no hot trail and no body, they said. I sat in front of the radio and wanted only to scream: Here I am! I’m alive! But nobody would hear me.
After that radio broadcast my own situation seemed more hopeless than ever. I sat on my bed and suddenly I saw everything very clearly. I knew I couldn’t spend my whole life this way. I also knew that I would no longer be rescued and that escaping seemed completely impossible. There was only one way out.
That day wasn’t the first time I had attempted suicide. Simply disappearing into the distant nothingness where there was no pain and no more feelings – back then I thought it an act of empowerment. Otherwise I had very little power to make any decisions about my life, my body, my actions. Taking my own life seemed my last trump card.
At the age of fourteen I had tried several times without success to strangle myself using articles of clothing. At the age of fifteen I wanted to slit my wrists. I had sliced open my skin with a large sewing needle and had continued to bore into my skin until I couldn’t stand it any more. My arm burned unbearably, but at the same time it released the inner pain that I felt. It is sometimes a relief when physical pain drowns out the psychological torment for a few moments.
This time I wanted to choose another method. It was one of those evenings when the kidnapper had locked me in the dungeon and I knew that he wouldn’t come back until the next day. I tidied up my room, folded my few T-shirts properly and took one last look at the flannel dress he had kidnapped me in, which now hung on a hanger under the bed. In my thoughts I said farewell to my mother. ‘Forgive me for leaving now. And for leaving once again without saying a word,’ I whispered. What could happen anyway?
Then I walked slowly to the hotplate and turned it on. When it began to get hot, I put paper and toilet rolls on it. It took some time for the paper to begin smoking – but it worked. I climbed the ladder to my bed and lay down. The dungeon would fill with smoke and I would gently drift away, as I determined, out of a life that was no longer my own.
I don’t know how long I lay on the bed waiting for death to come. It seemed like the eternity I had prepared myself for. But it all probably happened relatively quickly. When the acrid smoke reached my lungs, I initially inhaled deeply. But then the will to survive that I believed to have lost, resurfaced in full force. Every fibre of my being was prepared to flee. I began to cough. I held my pillow in front of my mouth and stormed down the ladder. I turned on the tap, held cleaning cloths under the stream of water and threw them on top of the blistering cardboard rolls on the hotplate. The water hissed, the acrid smoke became thicker. Coughing and with tears in my eyes, I swung my towel around in the room to disperse the smoke. I feverishly racked my brains as to how to hide from the kidnapper my attempt to suffocate myself. Suicide, the ultimate act of disobedience, the worst imaginable offence.
But the next morning the dungeon still smelled like a smokehouse. Priklopil came in, inhaled, the air irritated him. He yanked me out of bed, shook me and shouted at me. How dare I try to escape him! How dare I abuse his trust in such a way! His face reflected a mixture of limitless anger and fear. Fear that I could ruin everything.
9
Afraid of Life
My Psychological Prison is Complete
Punches and kicks, choking, scratching, contusion on wrist, squeezing of the same, shoved against the door frame. Hit with hammer (heavy hammer) and fists in stomach area. I have bruises on: right hip bone, right upper (5 x 1 cm) and lower (c. 3.5 cm in diameter) arm, on my left and right outer thigh (left c. 9–10 cm long and deep black to purple, c. 4 cm wide) as well as on both shoulders. Abrasions and scratches on both thighs, my left calf.
Diary entry, January 2006
I was seventeen when the kidnapper brought a video of the film Pleasantville into the dungeon. The story is about a brother and a sister who grow up in the US in the 1990s. At school the teachers talk about gloomy job prospects, AIDS and the threat of the destruction of the planet due to climate change. At home, the divorced parents fight on the phone over who is to take the kids for the weekend. And there’s nothing but problems with their friends. The brother escapes into the world of a television series from the 1950s: ‘Welcome to Pleasantville! Morals and decency. Warm welcomes: “Hi honey, I’m home!” The right food. “Do you want some biscuits?” Welcome to the perfect world of Pleasantville. Only on TV Time!’ In Pleasantville the mother serves dinner exactly when the father comes home from work. The children are nicely dressed and always hit the basket when playing basketball. The world consists only of two streets and the fire brigade has only one job: rescuing cats from trees. Because there are no fires in Pleasantville.
After a fight over the remote control, the brother and sister suddenly land in Pleasantville. They are trapped in this strange place where there are no colours and the inhabitants live according to rules that the two find incomprehensible. When they adapt and integrate themselves into this society, it can be very nice in Pleasantville. But when they break the rules, the friendly inhabitants turn into an angry mob.
The film was a parable of the life I was living. For the kidnapper, the outside world was synonymous with Sodom and Gomorrah: dangers, dirt and vice lurked everywhere. A world which for him had become the epitome of what he had failed at and what he wanted to keep his, and my, distance from. Our world behind the yellow walls was supposed to be like Pleasantville: ‘Do you want some more biscuits?’ – ‘Thank you, dear.’ It was an illusion that he conjured up again and again in his chitchat: we could have such a nice life. In that house with the gleaming surfaces that shone too much and with the furniture that nearly choked on its own conventionality. But he continued to work on the façade, investing in his – our – new life, which he then battered with his fists the next minute.
In Pleasantville there is a scene where someone says, ‘My reality is only what I know.’ When I leaf through my diary today, I am shocked sometimes to see how well I adapted to Priklopil’s screenplay with all its contradictions:
Dear diary,
It is time to pour my heart out completely and without reservation about the pain that I have come to know. Let us begin in October. I no longer know how it all was, but the things that happened were not very nice. He planted the Brabant Thuja shrubs. They look very nice. At times he wasn’t doing very well, and when he isn’t doing very well, he makes my life hell. Whenever he has a headache and takes a tablet, he gets an allergic reaction, and that means that his nose begins to run badly. But the doctor gave him drops to swallow. In any case, it was very difficult. There were unpleasant scenes again and again. At the end of October the new bedroom furniture arrived with the sonorous name Esmerelda. The blankets, pillows and mattresses came somewhat earlier. Everything of course hypoallergenic and washable at high temperatures. When the bed had come, I had to help him take apart the old wardrobe. That took about three days. We had to take apart the pieces, carry the hea
vy mirrored doors over to the study, the sides and shelves we carried downstairs. Then we went into the garage and opened all of the furniture and part of the bed. The furniture consisted of two bedside tables with two drawers each and gold-coloured brass handles, two dressers, a high, narrow one with … [incomplete]
Gold-coloured brass handles, polished by the perfect housewife, who put the dinner on the table, cooked according to the recipes of his even more perfect mother. When I did everything right and kept to my designated choreography between the backdrops, the illusion held up for a moment. But any deviation from the screenplay, which no one had given me ahead of time, was punished with draconian severity. His unpredictability became my greatest enemy. Even when I was convinced that I had done everything well, even when I thought I knew what prop was needed at any given moment, I was not safe from him. A look that rested on him for too long, a wrong plate on the table that had been the right one yesterday, and he flew into a rage.
Sometime later I wrote in my notes:
Brutal punches to the head, my right shoulder, my stomach, my back and my face, as well as to my ear and eye. Uncontrolled, unpredictable, excessively sudden outbursts of rage. Screaming, insults, pushing me while climbing the stairs. Choking, sitting on me and holding my mouth and nose closed, suffocating me. Sitting on my arm joints, kneeling on my knuckles, wringing my arms with his fists. On my forearms I have finger-shaped bruises and a scratch and abrasion on my left forearm. He sat on my head or, kneeling on my torso, beat my head against the floor with full force. This several times and with all his strength, giving me a headache and making me feel nauseated. Then an uncontrolled shower of punches, throwing objects at me, pushing me viciously against the bedside table.
The bedside table with the brass handles.
Then again he allowed me things that gave me the illusion that he cared. For example, he let me grow my hair again. But that was only part of his choreography. Because I then had to dye it peroxide blonde in order to conform to his image of the ideal woman: obedient, hard-working, blonde.
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