3,096 Days (22 page)

His image of an ideal family was taken from the 1950s. He wanted a hard-working little woman, who had his dinner ready for him when he came home, who did not talk back and did the housework perfectly. He dreamed of ‘family celebrations’ and outings, enjoyed our meals together and celebrated name days, birthdays and Christmas as if there was no dungeon and no captivity for me. It was as if he was trying to live a life through me that he couldn’t manage to outside the house. As if I were a walking stick that he had collected at the side of the road to support him the moment his life wasn’t going the way he wanted. ‘I am your king,’ he said, ‘and you are my slave. You obey.’ Or he would tell me, ‘Your family is made up of chavs. You have no right to your own life. You are here to serve me.’

He needed that insane crime to realize his vision of a perfect, small, intact world. But in the end, he really only wanted two things from me: approval and affection. As if his objective behind all the cruelty was to force a person to love him absolutely.

When I turned fourteen, I spent the night above ground for the first time in years. It was not a liberating feeling.

I lay stiff with fright on the kidnapper’s bed. He locked the door behind him and placed the key on a cabinet that was so high that only he could reach it by standing on tiptoe. For me it was absolutely unreachable. Then he lay down next to me and tied my wrists to his using plastic cord cuffs.

One of the first headlines about the kidnapper after I escaped was: ‘The Sex Beast’. I will not write about this part of my imprisonment – it is the last remaining bit of privacy I would like to
preserve now that my life in captivity has been picked apart in innumerable reports, interrogations, photographs, etc. But I will say this much: in their eagerness for the sensational, the journalists of the red-top press were far off the mark. In many respects, the kidnapper was a beast and more cruel than can possibly be depicted. But in this sense he was not. Naturally, he subjected me to minor sexual assaults; these were part of my daily harassment, like the thumps and punches, the kicks at my shins when he walked past. But when he manacled me to him on those nights I had to spend upstairs, it wasn’t about sex. The man who beat me, locked me in the cellar and starved me, wanted to cuddle. Controlled and manacled by my plastic cuffs, I was something to hold tight to in the night.

I could have screamed at how painfully paradoxical my situation seemed. But I couldn’t make a sound. I lay next to him on my side and tried to move as little as possible. My back, as so often, had been beaten black and blue. It hurt so much that I couldn’t lie on it, and the cuffs cut into my skin. I felt his breath on the back of my neck and stiffened.

I remained manacled to the kidnapper until the next morning. Whenever I had to go to the toilet, I had to wake him, and he came with me with his wrist tied to mine. When he had fallen asleep next to me I reflected on whether I could break the cuffs – but I soon gave up. Whenever I turned my wrist and tightened my muscles, the plastic cut into not only my arm, but also his. He would inevitably have woken up and realized immediately my attempt to escape. Today I know that the police also use cord cuffs when they make arrests. They would never have broken under the muscle strength of a starving fourteen-year-old anyway.

So there I lay, manacled to my kidnapper, the first of many nights in his bed. The next morning I would have to eat breakfast with him. As much as I had liked that ritual as a child, I became nauseated at the hypocrisy with which he forced me to sit with
him at the kitchen table, drink milk and eat two tablespoonfuls of cereal, not a single bite more. An ideal world, as if nothing had happened.

That summer I tried for the first time to take my life.

In that phase of my imprisonment I no longer had any thought of escape. At the age of fifteen my psychological prison was complete. The door to the house could have been standing wide open: I couldn’t have taken a single step. Escape, that meant death. For me, for him, for everyone who could have seen me.

It is not easy to explain what isolation, beatings and humiliations do to a person. How after so much mistreatment the mere sound of a door can cause you to panic so that you cannot even breathe, let alone run. How your heart pounds, the blood in your ears drones and then suddenly a switch in your brain is flipped and you feel nothing but paralysis. You are incapable of action, incapable of reason. The feeling of mortal fear has been indelibly branded on your brain, and all the details of the time when you first felt that fear – smells, sounds, voices – are preserved in your subconscious. If one detail should reappear – a raised hand – the fear returns; without the hand even closing about your throat, you feel yourself suffocating.

Just as survivors of bombing attacks can be panic-stricken at the sound of New Year’s fireworks, the same happened to me with a thousand small details. The sound I heard when the heavy doors to my dungeon were opened. The rattling of the fan. Darkness. Harsh lighting. The smell upstairs in the house. The rush of air before his hand struck me. His fingers around my throat, his breath on the back of my neck. Our bodies are programmed for survival and react by going limp. At some point, the trauma is so immense that even the outside world does not promise any relief, but rather becomes a threatening terrain associated with fear.

It may be true that the kidnapper knew what I was going
through. That he understood that I would not run away when he allowed me out in his garden for the first time. Some time before that he had made it possible for me to sunbathe for short periods. On the ground floor there was a room with windows that reached to the floor, which no one could see into from the outside when he closed one of the blinds. There I was permitted to lie on a lounger and absorb the sunshine. The kidnapper probably viewed it as a kind of ‘maintenance’ for me. He knew that a person cannot survive forever without sunlight and therefore made sure that I got some from time to time. For me it was a revelation.

The sensation of the warm rays on my pale skin was indescribable. I closed my eyes. The sun made red circles behind my eyelids. I slowly dozed off and dreamed I was in an outdoor pool, listening to the cheerful voices of children and feeling the cool water, the way it washes over your skin when you jump in all hot. What I wouldn’t have given to go swimming, just once! Just like the kidnapper, who from time to time appeared in my dungeon in his bathing trunks. Neighbours, distant relatives of the Priklopils, had the same swimming pool as he did in their garden – only there was water in theirs and it could be used. When they weren’t home and the kidnapper checked up on the house or watered their plants, he sometimes went for a swim. I envied him deeply.

One day that summer, he surprised me by saying that I could come swimming with him. The neighbours weren’t home and because the gardens of the two houses were connected by a path you could reach the pool without being seen from the street.

The grass tickled my naked feet and the morning dew gleamed like miniature diamonds between the blades of grass. I followed him down the narrow path to the neighbours’ garden, got undressed and slipped into the water.

It was like being reborn. Underwater, my imprisonment, the dungeon, the oppression, all fell away from me for a moment. My stress dissolved in the cool blue water. I came up and floated on
the surface. The small turquoise waves sparkled in the sun. Above me stretched an infinite cerulean sky. My ears were underwater and all around me was nothing but soft splashing.

When the kidnapper nervously ordered me out of the water, it took me a minute to react. It was as if I had to return from a faraway place. I followed Priklopil into the house, through the kitchen into the hallway and from there into the garage and down to the dungeon. Then I was locked up again. For the time being that was the only occasion I was permitted to swim. He didn’t allow me to go in the pool for a long while after that. But that one time had been enough to remind me that in spite of all the despair and powerlessness, I still wanted a life. The memory of that moment showed me that it was worth holding on until I could escape.

I was immeasurably grateful to the kidnapper back then for such small pleasures, like the sunbathing or swimming in the neighbours’ pool. And I still am today. Even if it seems strange, I can recognize that there were small, humane moments during my time in captivity. The kidnapper was unable to completely shut himself off from the influence of the child and young girl with whom he spent so many hours. Back then, I clung to even the tiniest human gesture, because I was dependent on seeing goodness in the world in which I could change nothing; in a kidnapper with whom I had to cope simply because I was unable to escape. Those moments were there and I treasured them. Moments in which he helped me paint, draw or make something, encouraging me to start again from the beginning if I was unsuccessful. By going over the school subjects I was missing with me and giving me extra maths problems to solve, even when it gave him particular pleasure afterwards to correct my mistakes, and when he only paid attention to grammar and spelling in my essays. Rules had to be followed. But he was there. He took time, of which I had more than plenty.

I succeeded in surviving by subconsciously suppressing and splitting off the horrors I experienced. And from these terrible experiences during my imprisonment I learned to be strong. Yes, perhaps even to evolve a strength I would not have been capable of had I grown up in freedom.

Today, years after my escape, I have become cautious in saying such things. That, within the evil, at least brief moments of normality, even mutual understanding, were possible. That’s what I mean when I say that there is neither black nor white, neither in reality nor in extreme situations, but rather many subtle shades in between that make the difference. For me, these nuances were decisive. In time, by detecting mood swings I was perhaps able to avoid a beating. By appealing to the kidnapper’s conscience again and again, he spared me perhaps even worse. By seeing him as a human being, with a very dark and a somewhat lighter side, I was able to remain human myself. Because he was unable to break me.

This may be why I so vehemently oppose being placed in the pigeonhole of Stockholm Syndrome. The term came about after a bank robbery in Stockholm in 1973. The bank robbers had held four employees hostage for five days. Much to the amazement of the media, the hostages, once free, were more afraid of the police than they had been of the hostage-takers – and they had developed an understanding of them. Some of the victims asked for mercy for the robbers and visited them in prison. Public opinion has no understanding for the ‘sympathy’ they showed to the robbers and turned the victims’ behaviour into a pathology. The findings: compassion with the perpetrator denoted illness. This newly created illness has been called Stockholm Syndrome ever since.

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.