3,096 Days (20 page)

And I was to look like one as well.

In the beginning, every time he came to get me from the dungeon, I had to hide my hair under a plastic bag. The kidnapper’s obsession with cleanliness was caught up in his paranoia. Every single hair was a danger to him; the police, when they showed up, could trace me and throw him in prison. As a result, I had to put my hair up with slides and pins, put a plastic bag on my head and secure it with a wide rubber band. Whenever a strand worked itself free and fell into my face while I was working upstairs, he immediately pushed it back under my plastic cap. He burned every hair of mine he found with a soldering iron or a lighter. After I was done showering, he meticulously fished out every single hair and poured half a bottle of caustic drain cleaner down the plughole to eliminate all traces of me in the sewer system as well.

It was sweaty and itchy under the plastic bag. The printed pictures on the bags left yellow and red stripes on my forehead, the pins dug into my scalp, and I had red, itchy patches everywhere. Whenever I complained about this form of torment, he would hiss at me, ‘If you were bald, we wouldn’t have this problem.’

I refused for a long time. Hair is an important component of personality. It seemed to me that I would be sacrificing too large a part of me if I cut it off. But one day I just couldn’t take it any more. I took the household scissors I had been given, grabbed the hair on the side of my head and cut it off, strand by strand. It
probably took me over an hour until it was so short my head was covered only by the fuzzy remains.

The kidnapper completed the job the next day. With a wet razor, he scraped the stubble off my head. I was now bald. The process was repeated on a regular basis over the next few years whenever he showered me off in the bathtub. Not even the minutest hair was allowed to remain. Anywhere.

I must have been a pitiful sight. My ribs stuck out, my arms and legs were covered in bruises, and my cheeks were gaunt.

The man who had done this to me obviously found my appearance pleasing. Because from then on he forced me to work in the house half-naked. For the most part I wore a cap and knickers. Sometimes a T-shirt or leggings as well. But I was never fully clothed. He most likely took pleasure in humiliating me in this way. But certainly it was also one of his perfidious ploys to keep me from escaping. He was convinced that I wouldn’t dare run out on to the street half-naked. And he was right about that.

During this period, my dungeon took on a double function. Of course, I still feared it as a prison, and the many doors behind which I was locked away drove me to a claustrophobic state in which, half mad, I searched the corners for a tiny crack where I could secretly dig a tunnel to the outside. There were none. But at the same time my tiny cell became the only place where I was largely safe from the kidnapper. When he took me down towards the end of the week and supplied me with books, videos and food, I knew that at least for three days I would be spared work and beatings. I tidied up, cleaned and settled down for a pleasant afternoon of television. I often ate up almost all my weekend’s rations on Friday evening. Having a full stomach at least once allowed me to forget that I would have to suffer worse hunger later.

At the beginning of 2000, I was given a radio that allowed me
to receive Austrian stations. He knew that two years after my disappearance the search for me had been abandoned and that interest in the media had waned, so he could afford to allow me to listen to the news as well. The radio became my lifeline to the world outside, the announcers became my friends. I could tell you exactly when someone went on holiday or retired. I tried to form a picture of the world outside by listening to the programmes broadcast on the cultural and educational station ‘Ö1’. With FM4, I learned a little bit of English. When I risked losing my grasp on reality, the mundane shows on the Ö3-Wecker morning broadcasts, where people called in from work and made requests for the morning music programming, saved me. Of course, I sometimes had the feeling that the radio as well was part of the elaborate show the kidnapper had created around me, where everyone was playing along, including DJs, callers and news announcers. But in the end, when something surprising came through the loudspeakers, that brought me back down to earth.

The radio was perhaps my most important companion in those years. It gave me the certainty that, away from my martyrdom in the cellar, there was a world that continued to turn – a world that was worth returning to some day.

My second great passion became science fiction. I read hundreds of Perry Rhodan and Orion pulp booklets where heroes travelled to distant galaxies. The possibility of switching space, time and dimension from one moment to the next fascinated me deeply. When I received a small thermal printer at the age of twelve, I began to write my own science-fiction novel. The figures were similar to the crew on the Starship Enterprise (
Next Generation
), but I spent many hours and put great effort into developing particularly strong, self-confident and independent female characters. Making up stories involving my characters, whom I equipped with the wildest technological advancements, saved me during the dark nights in the dungeon for months at a
time. For hours, my words became a protective cocoon that enveloped me and allowed nothing or no one to hurt me. Today only empty pages remain from my novel. Even during my imprisonment, the letters on the thermal paper faded away, until they disappeared entirely.

It must have been the many series and books full of time travel that gave me the idea of undertaking such a journey through time myself. One weekend, when I had just turned twelve, the feeling of loneliness hit me so hard that I was afraid of losing my grip. I awoke bathed in sweat and carefully climbed down the narrow ladder of my bunk bed in complete darkness. The unoccupied floor space in my dungeon had shrunk to about two or three square metres. I stumbled around in a circle with no sense of direction, continuously bumping against the table and the bookcase. Out of space. Alone. A weakened, hungry and frightened child. I longed for an adult, a person who would come to rescue me. But nobody knew where I was. The only possibility open to me was to be my own adult.

Earlier I had found comfort in imagining how my mother would encourage me. Now I took on her role and tried to transfer a little of her strength to myself. I imagined Natascha as a grown-up, helping me. My whole life lay stretched out before me like a shining beam of time that extended far into the future. I stood on the number twelve. Far out in front of me I saw my eighteen-year-old self. Big and strong, self-confident and independent like the women in my novel. My twelve-year-old self moved slowly forward along the beam, while my grown-up self came towards me. In the middle, we each reached for the other’s hand. Her touch was warm and soft, and at the same time I felt the strength of my grown-up self being transferred to my younger self. Grown-up Natascha embraced the smaller Natascha, which was no longer even her name, and comforted her, saying, ‘I will get you out of here, I
promise you that. Right now you cannot escape. You are still too small. But when you turn eighteen I will overpower the kidnapper and free you from your prison. I won’t leave you alone.’

That night I made a pact with my own, older self. I kept my word.

There are nightmares where you wake up and know that everything was just a dream. During the first period I spent in the dungeon, I clung to the possibility of waking up that way, and spent many of my lonely hours planning my first few days in the world outside. During this time the world that I had been ripped away from was still real. It was still peopled by real persons whom I knew were worrying about me every second and doing their utmost to find me. I could picture every single detail from that world in my mind’s eye: my mother, my room, my clothes, our flat.

Meanwhile, the world I had landed in had the colours and the smell of the surreal. The room was too small, the air too stale to be real. And the man who had abducted me was deaf to my arguments that originated from the world outside: that they would find me; that he would have to let me go; that what he was doing to me was a serious crime that would be punished. And yet, day by day, I increasingly realized that I was trapped in this underground world and no longer held the key to my life in my own hand. I resisted making myself at home in this unnerving environment, which had sprung from the fantasy of a criminal who had designed it down to the last detail and had placed me in it like a decorative object.

But you can’t live in a nightmare forever. We humans have the
ability to create the appearance of normality even in the most abnormal situations so as to avoid losing ourselves. In order to survive. Children can do this sometimes better than adults. The smallest straw can be enough for them to keep from drowning. For me, those straws were my rituals, such as our meals together, the choreographed Christmas celebration or my escape into the world of books, videos and television series. These were moments that were not wholly gloomy, even if I know today that my feelings basically originated from a psychological defence mechanism. You would go crazy if you saw only horrors for years at a time. Those small moments of purported normality are the ones that you cling to, that ensure your survival. There is an entry in my diary that clearly underlines my longing for normality:

Dear diary,

I haven’t written to you for so long because I was in a difficult phase of depression. So I will report only briefly what has happened so far. In December, we put up the tiling, but we didn’t install the toilet tank until the beginning of January. This is how I spent New Year’s Eve: I slept upstairs from 30 to 31 December, then I spent the whole day alone. But he came shortly before midnight. He showered, and we poured lead
*
. At midnight, we turned the television on and listened to the Pummerin
†
ring out and the sounds of the Blue Danube waltz. In the meantime, we toasted and looked out of the window to admire the fireworks. However, my happiness was spoilt. When a rocket flew into our conifer, a chirping suddenly emerged. And I am certain that it was a small bird that was
frightened to death. I wasn’t pleased when I heard the little dickey twitter. I gave him the chimney sweep that I had made for him and he gave me a chocolate coin, chocolate biscuits and a miniature chocolate chimney sweep. The previous day he had already given me a chimney sweep cake. My chimney sweep contained Smarties, no, mini M&Ms, that I gave Wolfgang.

Nothing is all black or all white. And nobody is all good or all evil. That also goes for the kidnapper. These are words that people don’t like to hear from an abduction victim. Because the clearly defined concept of good and evil is turned on its head, a concept that people are all too willing to accept so as not to lose their way in a world full of shades of grey. When I talk about it, I can see the confusion and rejection in the faces of many who were not there. The empathy they felt for my fate freezes and is turned to denial. People who have no insight into the complexities of imprisonment deny me the ability to judge my own experiences by pronouncing two words: Stockholm Syndrome.

‘Stockholm syndrome is a term used to describe a paradoxical psychological phenomenon wherein hostages express adulation and have positive feelings towards their captors that appear irrational in light of the danger or risk endured by the victims’ – that’s what the textbooks say. A labelling diagnosis that I emphatically reject. Because as sympathetic as the looks may be when the term is simply tossed out there, their effect is terrible. It turns victims into victims a second time, by taking from them the power to interpret their own story – and by turning the most significant experiences from their story into the product of a syndrome. The term places the very behaviour that contributes significantly to the victim’s survival that much closer to being objectionable.

Getting closer to the kidnapper is not an illness. Creating a cocoon of normality within the framework of a crime is not a syndrome. Just the opposite. It is a survival strategy in a situation
with no escape – and much more true to reality than the sweeping categorization of criminals as bloodthirsty beasts and of victims as helpless lambs that society refuses to look beyond.

To the world outside, Wolfgang Priklopil came across as a shy, courteous man who always seemed a bit too young in his well-turned-out clothes. He wore proper trousers and ironed shirts or polo shirts. His hair had always been freshly washed and neatly styled, in a cut that was a bit too old-fashioned for the start of a new millennium. He probably seemed unassuming to the few people he dealt with. It was not easy to catch a glimpse of what was behind this exterior, because he maintained it completely. For Priklopil it was less important to uphold societal conventions; he was rather a slave to keeping up outward appearances.