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.
7
Caught Between Visions of Madness and a Perfect World
The Two Faces of the Kidnapper
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 happin
ess 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.
It wasn’t just that he loved order; it was necessary for his survival. A lack of order, supposed chaos and dirt threw him completely. He spent a great deal of his time keeping his cars (in addition to the delivery van, he also had a red BMW), his garden and his house meticulously clean and well maintained. It wasn’t enough for him if you cleaned up after cooking. The counter had to be wiped, every cutting board, every knife that had been used to prepare the meal, had to be washed, even while the food was on the cooker.
Rules were just as important as order. Priklopil could get wrapped up for hours in instructions on how to do something and followed them fastidiously. If the instructions for heating a ready-to-eatmeal said ‘Heat for four minutes’, then he took it out of the oven after exactly four minutes, no matter whether it was hot enough or not. It must have made a significant impression on him that despite adhering to all the rules he couldn’t quite get his life under control. It must have bothered him so much that one day he decided to break a major rule and kidnap me. But although that had made him a criminal, he maintained his belief in rules, instructions and structures nearly religiously. At times he looked at me pensively and said, ‘How ridiculous that you didn’t come with instructions for use.’ It must have thrown him completely that his newest acquisition, a child, didn’t always function like it was supposed to, and on some days he didn’t know how to get it working again.
At the beginning of my imprisonment I had suspected that the kidnapper was an orphan and that the lack of warmth in his childhood had turned him into a criminal. Now that I had got to know him better, I realized that I had created a false image of him. He had had a very sheltered childhood in a classic family setting. Father, mother, child. His father Karl had worked for a large alcoholic beverage company as a travelling salesman and was on the road a great deal, where he apparently cheated on his wife repeatedly, as I found out later. But outward appearances were maintained. His parents stayed together. Priklopil told me about their weekend outings to Lake Neusiedl, family ski holidays and walks. His mother took loving care of her son. Maybe a bit too loving.
The more time I spent upstairs in the house, the stranger the presence of his mother, hovering over everything in the kidnapper’s life, seemed to me. It took me some time to figure out who the ominous person was who occupied the house at the weekends, forcing me to spend two or three days alone in my dungeon. I read the name ‘Waltraud Priklopil’ on the letters lying near the front door. I ate the food that she had cooked over the weekend. One meal for every day she left her son alone. And when I was allowed up into the house on Mondays, I noticed the traces she left behind: everything had been spotlessly cleaned. Not one speck of dust indicated that anyone lived there. Every weekend she scrubbed the floors and dusted for her son. Who in turn made me clean the house the rest of the week. Thursdays he drove me through all the rooms again and again with the cleaning cloth. Everything had to sparkle before his mother came. It was like an absurd cleaning competition between mother and son that I was forced to bear the brunt of. Still, after my lonely weekends I was always happy when I discovered signs that his mother had been there: freshly ironed laundry, a cake in the kitchen. I never saw Waltraud Priklopil once in all those years, but through all those small signs she became a part of my world. I liked to imagine her as an older friend and pictured being able to sit with her at the kitchen table one day drinking a cup of tea. But we never got around to doing that.
Priklopil’s father died when he was twenty-four years old. The death of his father must have torn a gaping hole in his life. He seldom spoke of him, but you could tell that he had never got over the loss. He seemed to keep one room on the ground floor of the house unaltered to commemorate him. It was decorated in rustic style with an upholstered corner couch and wrought-iron lamps – what you would call a Stüberl in Austria, where people probably used to play cards and drink when his father was still alive. The product samples from the schnapps manufacturer he had worked for were still standing on the shelves. Even when the kidnapper later renovated the house, he left that room untouched.
Waltraud Priklopil seemed to have been hit hard by the death of her husband as well. I don’t wish to judge her life or interpret things that are perhaps not true. After all, I have never met her. But from my perspective, it seemed that after the death of her husband she clung even more tightly to her son, making him her substitute partner. Priklopil, who in the meantime had moved out to his own flat, moved back to the house in Strasshof, where he could never escape his mother’s influence. He constantly expected her to go through his wardrobe and dirty laundry, and paid meticulous attention to making sure that there were no traces of me to be found anywhere in the house. And he set the rhythm of his week and how he dealt with me exactly after his mother. Her exaggerated mollycoddling and his acceptance of it were somewhat unnatural. She didn’t treat him like an adult and he didn’t act like one. He lived in his mother’s house – she had moved into Priklopil’s flat in Vienna – and let her take care of him in every way.
I don’t know whether he lived off her money as well. He had lost his job as a communications technician at Siemens, where he had done his apprenticeship, even before my abduction. After that, he was probably registered as unemployed for years. Sometime
s he told me that he would go to a job interview from time to time, but then intentionally act stupid so that they wouldn’t give him the job. This allowed him to keep the Employment Service happy and hold onto his unemployment benefit at the same time. Later, as mentioned above, he helped his friend and business partner, Ernst Holzapfel, renovate flats. Ernst Holzapfel, whom I sought out after my escape, describes Priklopil as correct, proper and reliable. Perhaps socially backward, as he never had any other friends, let alone girlfriends. But, above all, unremarkable.
This well-turned-out young man, incapable of setting boundaries vis-à-vis his mother, courteous to the neighbours, and proper in a way bordering on pedantic, also kept up outward appearances. He put his repressed feelings in the cellar, allowing them later to come up into the darkened kitchen from time to time. Where I was.
I was a witness to Wolfgang Priklopil’s two sides, which were probably unknown to anyone else. One was a strong tendency to power and domination. The other was an utterly insatiable need for love and approval. He had abducted and ‘shaped’ me in order to be able to express both these contradictory sides.
Sometime in the year 2000, I saw, at least on paper, who was hiding behind those outward appearances. ‘You can call me Wolfgang,’ he casually said one day while we were working.
‘What is your full name?’ I asked back.
‘Wolfgang Priklopil,’ he answered.
That was the name I had seen upstairs in the house on the address labels of the advertisement brochures he had neatly stacked on the kitchen table. Now I had confirmation. At the same time I realized at that moment that I would not leave his house alive. Otherwise he would never have entrusted me with his full name.
From then on I sometimes called him ‘Wolfgang’ or even ‘Wolfi’, a nickname that gives the appearance of a certain kind of closeness, while at the same time his treatment of me reached a new level of violence. Looking back, it seems to me that I was trying to reach the person behind the mask, while the person before me systematically tormented and beat me.
3,096 Days Page 15
