3,096 Days (19 page)

The kidnapper’s burst of aggression was over as quickly as it had come. He came over to me, shook me, tried to lift my arms and tickled me. ‘Please stop. I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t really so bad.’ I remained standing there with my eyes closed. He pinched my side and pushed the corners of my mouth up with his fingers. A tormented smile, in the truest meaning of the word. ‘Be normal again. I’m sorry. What can I do to make you normal again?’

I don’t know how long I stood there, motionless, silent, eyes closed. At some point my childish pragmatism won out. ‘I want an ice cream and gummi bears!’

Half of me exploited the situation to get sweets. The other half wanted to render the attack less significant with my request. He reiterated that he was sorry and that it would never happen again – just as every violent husband promises his battered wife and children.

Yet that outburst seemed to open the floodgates. He began to beat me on a regular basis. I don’t know what switch was thrown or if he simply believed that in his omnipotence he could do anything he wanted. I had been held captive now for over two years. He had not been discovered and had such control over me that I wouldn’t run away. Who was there to punish his behaviour? In his eyes he had the right to make demands of me and punish me physically if I failed to meet those demands immediately.

From then on he reacted to even the smallest inattentions with violent outbursts of temper. A couple of days after the incident with the sack of cement, he ordered me to hand him a plasterboard panel. He thought I was too slow – he grabbed my hand and twisted it round, rubbing it so hard against one of the plasterboard panels that I had a burn on the back of my hand that took years to heal. Again and again the kidnapper would rub open the wound – on the wall, on plasterboard panels; even on the smooth surface of the sink he succeeded in rubbing my hand with such brute force that blood seeped through my skin. Today, still, that spot on my right hand remains raw.

Another time when I yet again reacted too slowly to one of his orders, he aimed a Stanley knife at me. The sharp blade, which can cut through carpeting like butter, punctured my knee and remained stuck there. The pain seared so viciously through my leg that I felt nauseated. I felt the blood running down my shin. When he saw that, he bellowed as if he had taken all leave of his senses. ‘Leave it! You’re making a stain!’ Then he grabbed me and dragged me to the bathroom to staunch the bleeding and bind my wound. I was in shock and could hardly breathe. Indignantly
he splashed water on my face and barked at me, ‘Stop crying.’ Afterwards I was given another ice cream.

Soon he began to abuse me verbally while I did the housework as well. He would sit in his leather chair in the living room and watch me kneel and wipe the floor, making deprecating remarks about every one of my gestures.

‘You are even too dumb to clean.’

‘You can’t even wipe away a spot of dirt.’

I would stare silently at the floor, boiling inside. On the outside, I cleaned with twice the energy. But that still wasn’t enough. Without warning I would suddenly be kicked in the side or in the shin. Until everything shone.

Once, when I was thirteen years old and hadn’t cleaned the kitchen counter quickly enough, he kicked me so hard in the tailbone that I slammed against the edge of the cooker and split the skin covering my hip bone. Although I was bleeding heavily, he sent me back to my dungeon with no plaster, no bandages, indignant at the annoyance my gaping wound had caused. It took weeks to heal, because he kept pushing me against the edge of the cooker in the kitchen time and again. Unexpectedly, casually, purposefully. Again and again the thin scab that had formed over the wound on my hip bone would be ripped off.

What he would not stand for at all was when the pain made me cry. Then he would grab my arm and wipe the tears from my face with the back of his hand with such brute force that fear made me stop crying. If that didn’t work, he would grab me by the throat, drag me to the sink and push me under. He would squeeze my windpipe and rub my face with cold water until I almost lost consciousness. He hated being confronted with the consequences of his mistreatment. Tears, bruises, bloody injuries, he would see none of it. What you can’t see didn’t happen.

It wasn’t systematic beatings that he subjected me to, which I could have come in a way to expect, but rather sudden outbursts
that became more and more violent. Perhaps because with every line he crossed he realized that he could do so with impunity. Perhaps because he was unable to do anything to stop the spiral of violence from escalating further.

I think I got through that period only because I separated those experiences from myself. Not based on a conscious decision that an adult would take, but rather based on the survival instinct of a child. I left my body whenever the kidnapper pummelled it, and from a distance watched a twelve-year-old girl lying on the floor being battered by his feet. And even today I can only describe these attacks from a distance, as if they never happened to me, but rather someone else. I vividly remember the pain I felt from the blows and the pain that accompanied me for days. I remember I had so many bruises that there was no position I could possibly lie in that wasn’t painful. I remember the torment that I went through some days, and how long my pubic bone hurt after a kick. The skin abrasions, the lacerations. And the snapping in my cervical vertebrae when he struck my head with the full force of his fist.

But emotionally, I felt nothing.

The only feeling I was not able to split off from myself was the mortal fear that seized me in those moments. It bit into my mind, my vision went black, my ears droned and adrenaline rushed through my veins, commanding me:
Flee!
But I couldn’t. The prison that in the beginning was only on the outside now held me captive on the inside.

Soon, the first signs that the kidnapper could strike out at any moment were enough to make my heart start pounding. My breathing became shallow and I went stiff with fright. Even when I sat in my comparatively safe dungeon, I was seized by mortal fear as soon as I heard in the distance that the kidnapper was unscrewing the safe blocking the passageway from the wall. The feeling of panic that the body files away in its memory bank once
it has experienced mortal fear and recalls at the slightest hint of a similar threat is uncontrollable. It held me in its iron grip.

After about two years of this, when I was fourteen, I began to fight back. At first it was a kind of passive resistance. When he shouted at me and drew his hand back to strike, I hit myself in the face until he told me to stop. I wanted to force him to look. He had to see how he treated me; he himself was to take the blows that I had had to take up until then. No more ice cream, no gummi bears.

At fifteen I hit back for the first time. He looked at me, surprised and somewhat stunned, when I punched him in the stomach. I felt powerless; my arm moved much too slowly and the blow had been hesitantly executed. But I had fought back. And I struck him again. He grabbed me and put me in a headlock until I stopped.

Of course, I didn’t stand a chance against him physically. He was bigger, stronger; he caught me with ease, held me at a distance, so that my punches and kicks mostly hit empty air. Nonetheless, fighting back became vital to my survival. In so doing I proved to myself that I was strong and hadn’t lost my self-respect. And at the same time I showed him that there were lines I was not prepared to allow him to cross any more. That was a decisive moment in my relationship with the kidnapper, the only person in my life and the only one who brought me sustenance. Who knows what he would have been capable of had I not fought back.

Once I entered puberty, the terror with food began. The kidnapper brought scales down into my dungeon once or twice a week. Back then I weighed forty-five kilograms and was a pudgy child. Over the next few years, I grew – and slowly slimmed down.

After a phase where I was relatively free to ‘order’ what I wanted to eat, he had gradually taken control over the first year, ordering me to ration my food well. In addition to forbidding me to watch television, food deprivation was one of his most effective strategies
to keep me in line. But when I was twelve and my body underwent a growth spurt, he began linking the rationing of food to insults and accusations.

‘Just look at you. You are fat and ugly.’

‘You are such a glutton. You are going to eat me out of house and home.’

‘Those who don’t work, don’t need to eat.’

His words pierced me like arrows. Even before my imprisonment I had been deeply unhappy with my figure, which appeared to me to be the greatest obstacle in my path towards a carefree childhood. The awareness that I was chubby filled me with a gnawing, destructive self-hate. The kidnapper knew precisely which buttons he had to push to land blows to my self-esteem, and he pressed them mercilessly.

At the same time, he was so clever about it that in the first few weeks and months I was really grateful for his control. After all, he was helping me reach one of my greatest goals: losing weight. ‘Just take me for example. I hardly have to eat anything,’ he told me over and over. ‘You have to see it as a kind of trip to a fat farm.’ And, lo and behold, I could almost picture myself shedding the fat before my very eyes, becoming lean and wiry. Until the supposedly well-meaning food rationing turned into a terror campaign which brought me to the brink of starvation at the age of sixteen.

Today I believe that the kidnapper, who was extremely thin, was probably battling anorexia himself, which he now transferred to me as well. He was filled with a deep mistrust of food of all kinds. He believed that the food industry was capable of committing collective murder with poisoned food at any time. He never used seasonings because he had read that some of them came from India and had been subjected to radiation there. And then there was his miserliness, which became ever more pathological over the course of my imprisonment. Even milk became too expensive for him at one point.

My food rations were dramatically reduced. In the morning I was given a cup of tea and two tablespoons of cereal with a glass of milk or a slice of
Guglhupf
*
, which was often so thin that you could have read the newspaper through it. I was given sweets only after severe beatings. At lunch and in the evening, I received a quarter of an ‘adult plate’. When the kidnapper came into my dungeon with the food his mother had made or a pizza, the following rule of thumb applied: three-quarters for him, one-quarter for me. Whenever I was to cook for myself in the dungeon, he made a list beforehand of what I was allowed to eat – for example, 200 grams of frozen vegetables to boil or half a ready-to-eat meal. Add to that, one kiwi fruit and one banana a day. If I violated his rules and ate more than I was allowed, I could count on one of his violent outbursts.

He exhorted me to weigh myself and meticulously monitored my notes recording my weight. ‘Take me as an example.’
Yes, take him as an example. I am such a glutton. I am much too fat.
The constant, gnawing feeling of hunger remained.

He did not yet lock me in the dungeon for long periods of time without any food whatsoever – that wasn’t until later. But the consequences of malnourishment were certainly noticeable. Hunger affects the brain. When you don’t get enough to eat, you can’t think of anything else but: When am I going to get my next bite to eat? How can I sneak a piece of bread? How can I manipulate him to give me at least one more bite from his three-fourths portion? I thought only of food and at the same time blamed myself for being ‘such a glutton’.

I asked him to bring supermarket flyers into the dungeon, which I avidly leafed through whenever I was alone. After a while I made up a game that I called ‘Tastes’. For example, I would imagine a piece of butter on my tongue. Cool and hard, slowly melting, until
the taste pervaded my entire mouth. Then I would switch to
Grammelknödel
; in my thoughts, I would bite into one, feeling the soft potato dumpling between my teeth, the filling made of crispy bacon. Or strawberries; their sweet juice on my lips, the feeling of the small seeds on my palate, their slight acidity along the sides of my tongue.

I could play that game for hours and became so good at it that it nearly felt like real food. But the imaginary calories did nothing to fuel my body. More and more frequently I became dizzy when I suddenly stood up while working, or I had to sit down because I was so weak that my legs could hardly carry me. My stomach growled constantly and was sometimes so empty that I lay in bed all night with stomach cramps, trying to appease it with water.

It took me a long time to understand that the kidnapper was not focusing on my figure, but rather using hunger to keep me weak and submissive. He knew exactly what he was doing. He hid his true motives as well as he could. Only sometimes did he say revealing things, like: ‘You are being so rebellious again. I’m probably giving you too much to eat.’ If you don’t get enough to eat, it’s difficult to think straight, let alone to think of rebellion or escape.

One of the books on the shelves in the living room that the kidnapper placed considerable value on was Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
. He spoke often and admiringly of Hitler and said, ‘He was right to gas the Jews.’ His contemporary political idol was Jörg Haider, the right-wing leader of Austria’s Freedom Party. Priklopil liked to denigrate foreigners, who he called
Tschibesen
in the slang common to Donaustadt, Vienna’s twenty-second district, where we had grown up. This was a word that I was familiar with from the racist tirades of the customers in my mother’s shops. When the planes flew into the World Trade Center on 11 September, he took
malicious pleasure in the sight; he saw them hitting the ‘American east coast’ and the ‘conspiracy of global Jewish dominance’.

Even though I never fully believed that he had National-Socialist attitudes – they seemed artificial, like parroted phrases – there was something there that he had deeply internalized. To him I was someone he could order around as he pleased. He felt like a member of the master race. I was a second-class human being.