3,096 Days (13 page)

Desperate, I turned the knob back and forth, millimetre by millimetre, readjusting the antenna again and again. But outside that one frequency, the only thing I could hear was static.

Later on the kidnapper gave me a Walkman. Because I suspected that he had music from older bands at home, I asked for tapes of The Beatles and Abba. When the light was turned off in the evening, I now no longer had to lie in the darkness with my
fear, but could listen to music, as long as the batteries held out. The same songs over and over.

The most important means I had at my disposal for combating boredom and for keeping me from going crazy was books. The first book the kidnapper brought me was
The Flying Classroom
by Erich Kästner, followed by a series of classics, such as
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
,
Robinson Crusoe
,
Tom Sawyer
,
Alice in Wonderland
,
The Jungle Book
,
Treasure Island
and
Kon-Tiki
. I devoured the paperback comic books with stories of Donald Duck, his three nephews, his miserly Uncle Scrooge and the inventive Professor Ludwig von Drake. Later I asked for Agatha Christie, whose books I was familiar with from my mother, and read whole piles of crime novels, like
Jerry Cotton
, and science-fiction stories. The novels catapulted me into another world and absorbed my attention to such an extent that I forgot where I was for hours. And that is precisely what made reading so significant to my survival. While television and radio allowed me to bring the illusion of the company of others into my dungeon, reading enabled me to leave it for hours in my thoughts.

The books by Karl May held a particular importance for me during my initial time in captivity when I was still a ten-year-old girl. I devoured the adventures of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, and read the stories about the North American Wild West. A song sung by German settlers for the dying Winnetou touched me so deeply that I copied it word for word and pasted the paper to the wall using Nivea lotion, as I had neither Sellotape nor any other adhesive or glue in the dungeon. It is a prayer to Mary the mother of God:

The light of day seeks to depart;
Now the quiet night is falling.
Oh, if only the heart’s suffering
Could pass just like the day!
I lay my plea at your feet;
Oh carry it upwards to God’s throne
And, Madonna, be saluted
In the devout tone of prayer:
    Ave Maria!

The light of faith seeks to depart;
Now, the night of doubt is falling.
Youth’s trust in God
Is to be taken from me.
In old age, Madonna, please preserve
In me my youth’s happy confidence.
Shelter my harp and my psalter,
You are my salvation, you are my light!
    Ave Maria!

The light of life seeks to depart;
Now, death’s night is falling.
The soul seeks to spread its wings
And die I must.
Madonna, into your hands
I place my last, fervent plea:
Please solicit for me a trusting end
And a blissful resurrection from the dead!
    Ave Maria!

I read, whispered and prayed this poem so often that I can still recite it from memory today. It seemed as if it had been written especially for me. The ‘light of life’ had also been taken away from me, and in dark hours I saw no way out of my dungeon other than death.

*

The kidnapper knew how dependent I was on a continuous supply of films, music and reading matter, which gave him a new instrument of power over me. By withholding these things, he was able to exert pressure.

Whenever I had behaved ‘improperly’ in his eyes, I had to count on him slamming shut the door on the world of words and sounds that promised at least somewhat of a diversion. This was particularly awful at the weekend. By now, the kidnapper usually came to my dungeon every day in the morning, and mostly once again in the afternoon or evening. But at the weekend, I was all alone. I wouldn’t see him from noon on Friday, sometimes even from Thursday evening, until Sunday. He would bring me two days of ready-to-eat meals, some fresh food and mineral water that he brought from Vienna. And videos and books. During the week I received a video cassette full of television serials, two hours, and when I really begged, four. It wasn’t a lot. Every day, I had to get through twenty-four hours all by myself, interrupted only by the kidnapper’s visits. At the weekend, I was given four to eight hours of entertainment on cassette, and the next book in the series that I was currently reading. But only if I met his demands. Only when I was ‘good’ did he give me that vitally important sustenance for my mind. He was the only one who knew what he understood by ‘being good’. Sometimes only a minor infraction was enough for him to punish my behaviour.

‘You’ve used too much air freshener. I’m going to take it away from you.’

‘You were singing.’

You did this, you did that.

With the videos and books, he knew exactly which button to push. Having torn me away from my real family, it felt as if he had then taken hostage my replacement family, made up of novels and television series, in order to make me do what he said.

The man who had in the beginning made such an effort to
make my life in the dungeon ‘pleasant’ and who had driven to the other side of Vienna just to get a particular audio story starring the character Bibi Blocksberg, had undergone a gradual transformation since he had announced that he would never let me go.

At this time, the kidnapper began to dominate me more and more. Of course, he had had me completely under his control from the very beginning. Locked in his cellar, cooped up in only five square metres of space, I really couldn’t do much to oppose him anyway. However, the longer I remained in captivity, the less this obvious manifestation of his power satisfied him. Now he wanted to bring every gesture, every word and every function of my body under his control.

It started with the timer switch. The kidnapper had had the power over light and darkness from the very beginning. When he came down to my dungeon in the morning, he turned on the electricity, and when he left in the evening, he turned it off again. Now he installed a timer switch which controlled the electric power in the room. While in the beginning I had been allowed now and then to have the light on for longer, now I had to submit to a merciless rhythm I had no control over. At seven in the morning, the electricity was turned on. For thirteen hours, I was able to lead a cheap imitation of life in a tiny, airless room: seeing, hearing, feeling warmth and cooking. Everything was synthetic. A light bulb can never replace the sun, ready-to-eat meals are only distantly reminiscent of family dinners around a shared table, and the flat people flickering across the television screen are only an empty substitute for real humans. But as long as the power was on, I could at least maintain the illusion that there was life outside myself.

The electricity was turned off at eight o’clock in the evening. From one second to the next I found myself in total darkness. The television would cease working in the middle of a series, and I had
to put my book down in the middle of a sentence. And if I was not already lying in bed, I had to feel my way on all fours to my lounger. Light bulb, television set, the recorder, radio, computer, hotplate, cooker and heat – everything that brought life into my dungeon was turned off. Only the sounds of the ticking alarm clock and the excruciating whirring of the fan filled the room. For the next few hours, I was dependent on my imagination to prevent me from going crazy and keep my fear at bay.

It was a daily rhythm similar to life in a penitentiary, strictly prescribed from the outside, with no second of deviation, no consideration for my needs. It was a demonstration of power. The kidnapper loved schedules, and with the timer switch he imposed them on me.

In the beginning I still had my battery-operated Walkman, which allowed me to keep the leaden darkness at bay somewhat, when the timer switch had decreed that I had exhausted my ration of light and music. But the kidnapper did not like the fact that I could use my Walkman to circumvent his divine command of light and darkness. He began to monitor my battery status. If he thought that I used my Walkman too long or too often, he would take it away from me until I promised to behave better. One time he had apparently not yet closed the outer door to my dungeon, before I was already sitting on my lounger, wearing the headphones from my Walkman and loudly singing along to a Beatles song. He must’ve heard my voice and came back to the dungeon in a wild rage. Priklopil punished me for singing so loudly by taking away my light and my food. In the next few days I was forced to fall asleep without music.

His second instrument of control was the intercom system. When he came to my dungeon to install the cable, he told me, ‘From now on you can ring upstairs and call me.’ In the beginning I was very happy about that and I felt as though a great weight of fear had lifted off my chest. The thought that I would suddenly
be faced with an emergency had plagued me since the beginning of my imprisonment. Over the weekend at least I was often alone and couldn’t even get the attention of the only person who knew where I was, the kidnapper. I had played out innumerable situations in my head. A cable fire, a burst pipe, a sudden allergy attack … I could even have died a miserable death in the dungeon by choking on some sausage skin, while the kidnapper was at home upstairs. After all, he only came when he wanted to. For that reason the intercom seemed to be a lifeline. It wasn’t until later that the real significance of the device dawned on me. An intercom works in both directions. The kidnapper used it to control me. To demonstrate his omnipotence and to assure me that he could hear every sound I made and could comment on everything.

The first version the kidnapper installed consisted essentially of a button that I was to press if I needed something. Then a red light would light up upstairs in a hidden place in his house. However, he wasn’t able to see the light every time, nor was he willing to undertake the complicated procedures necessary to open the dungeon without knowing what exactly I wanted. And he couldn’t come down at all at the weekends. It was only much later that I found out this was due to his mother’s weekend visits, when she would stay overnight in the house. It would have been too much trouble and too conspicuous to remove the many obstacles between the garage and my dungeon as long as she was there.

Shortly thereafter, he replaced the temporary device with another system you could talk through. By pressing the button, he could now issue his instructions and questions to my dungeon.

‘Have you rationed your food?’

‘Have you brushed your teeth?’

‘Have you turned the television off?’

‘How many pages have you read?’

‘Have you done your maths exercises?’

I jumped out of my skin every time his voice pierced the stillness. He threatened me with consequences because I had been too slow in answering. Or had eaten too much.

‘Have you already eaten everything ahead of schedule?’

‘Didn’t I tell you that you were only allowed to eat one piece of bread in the evening?’

The intercom was the perfect instrument for terrorizing me – until I discovered that it afforded me a little bit of power as well. Looking back today, it seems surprising to me that the kidnapper, with his manifest need to control everything, never figured out that a ten-year-old girl would inspect the device very carefully. But that’s exactly what I did after a few days.

The intercom had three buttons. When you pressed ‘Speak’, the line was open on both ends. This was a setting that he had shown me. If the intercom was on ‘Listen’, I could hear his voice, but he couldn’t hear me. And then there was a third button: when you pressed it, the line was open on my end, but up above everything was silent.

In my direct confrontations with him I had learned to let what he said go in one ear and out the other. Now I had a button that did just that. When these questions, control attempts and accusations got too much for me, I pressed the third button. It gave me deep satisfaction when his voice fell silent and it was I who had pressed the button to make that happen. I loved that button because it enabled me to shut the kidnapper out of my life for a short time. When Priklopil found out about my small, index finger-led rebellion, he was stunned at first, then indignant and angry. It took him nearly an hour to open the many doors and locks every time he wanted to speak to me face to face. But it was clear that he would have to think of something else.

In fact, it wasn’t long before he removed the intercom with the wonderful third button. Instead, he came into the dungeon carrying a Siemens radio. He took the insides out of the case and
began to tinker with it. At the time I didn’t know a thing about the kidnapper, and it was only much later that I found out that Wolfgang Priklopil had been a communications engineer at Siemens. However, the fact that he understood how alarms, radios and other electrical systems worked was something that was not news to me.

This rebuilt radio became a terrible instrument of torture for me. It had a microphone that was so powerful it could broadcast up above every noise I made in my room. The kidnapper could simply listen in on my ‘life’ without warning and monitor me every second to check whether I was following his orders. Whether I had turned off the television. Whether the radio was on. Whether I was still scraping my spoon across my plate. Whether I was still breathing.

His questions pursued me even under my blanket:

‘Have you not eaten your banana?’

‘Have you been a greedy pig again?’

‘Have you washed your face?’

‘Did you turn off your television after one episode?’

I couldn’t even lie to him because I didn’t know how long he had been eavesdropping. And if I did it one more time anyway, or failed to answer right away, he yelled into the loudspeaker until everything in my head hammered. Or he came into my dungeon unannounced and punished me by taking away my prized possessions: books, videos, food. I had to provide a penitent account of my misconduct, of every moment of my life in the dungeon, no matter how minute. As if there was anything that I could have concealed from him.