3,096 Days

by Natascha Kampusch

  After what seemed like an eternity, we were finally sitting in the air. I floated through the wintry mountain landscape – a moment of peace and stillness, which I tried to savour. But my body rebelled against the unfamiliar strain. My legs trembled and I froze miserably. When the chair lift entered the upper station, I panicked. I didn’t know how to jump off and got tangled in my poles in my agitation. Priklopil swore at me, grabbed me by the arm and pulled me off the lift at the last moment.

  After a couple of runs, a modicum of self-assuredness slowly returned. I could keep myself upright long enough to enjoy the short runs before I fell into the snow again. I felt my life force returning, and for the first time in ages I experienced something like bliss. I stopped as often as I could to view the panorama. Wolfgang Priklopil, proud of his knowledge of local geography, explained which mountains we saw all around. From the Hochkar summit you could see over to the massive Ötscher; behind it, mountain chains upon mountain chains vanished into the fog.

  ‘That over there is even Styria,’ he lectured. ‘And there, on the other side, you can almost see all the way to the Czech Republic.’

  The snow glittered in the sun and the sky was an intense blue. I took deep breaths and wanted most of all to stop time. But the kidnapper pushed me to hurry up: ‘This day has cost me a fortune. We have to take full advantage of it now!’

  ‘I have to go to the toilet!’ Priklopil looked at me, annoyed. ‘I really have to go!’ There was nothing left for him to do other than ski with me to the next lodge. He decided in favour of the lower station, because the toilets there were located in a separate building, making it possible to avoid having to go through the restaurant area. We unstrapped our skis. The kidnapper took me to the toilets and hissed at me to hurry up. He would wait for me and keep a close eye on the time. Initially, it puzzled me that he didn’t come with me. After all, he could have said that he had got the wrong door. But he stayed outside.

  The toilets were empty when I walked in. But as I was in the stall, I heard a door opening. I was terrified – I was certain that I had taken too long and the kidnapper had come into the ladies to get me. But when I hurried back out into the small anteroom, a blonde woman stood in front of the mirror. For the first time since my imprisonment began I was alone with another person.

  I don’t remember exactly what I said. I only know that I gathered all my courage together and spoke to her. But all that came out of my mouth was a soft squeak.

  The blonde woman smiled at me in a friendly way, turned round – and left. She hadn’t understood what I’d said. That was the first time that I had spoken to someone. And it was just like in my worst nightmares. People couldn’t hear me. I was invisible. I mustn’t hope for help from others.

  It wasn’t until after I escaped that I found out that the woman was a tourist from the Netherlands and simply hadn’t understood what I was saying to her. At the time, her reaction came as a blow to me.

  I have only a hazy memory of the rest of the ski trip. I had once again failed to seize an opportunity. When I was locked in my dungeon again that evening, I was more desperate than I had been in ages.

  Soon after that, the decisive date was drawing near: my eighteenth birthday. It was the date that I had feverishly anticipated for ten years, and I was determined to celebrate my day properly – even if it had to be in captivity.

  In the years before, the kidnapper had allowed me to bake a cake. This time I wanted something special. I knew that his business partner organized parties in a remotely located warehouse. The kidnapper had shown me videos depicting Turkish and Serb weddings. He wanted to use them to make a video compilation to promote the event venue. I had greedily absorbed the images of the celebrating people, who jumped around in a circle holding hands, doing the strangest dances. At one celebration, an entire shark lay on the buffet, and at another, bowl upon bowl full of unfamiliar foods were lined up. But the cakes fascinated me most of all. Works of art built of several layers, featuring flowers made of marzipan or sponge cake and cream in the shape of a car. I wanted a cake like that – in the shape of an ‘18’, the symbol of my adulthood.

  When I came up into the house on the morning of 17 February 2006, there it stood on the kitchen table: a ‘1’ and an ‘8’ made of fluffy sponge cake, covered in a sugary pink foam and decorated with candles. I don’t remember what other gifts I received that day. There were certainly several more, because Priklopil loved celebrating such special days. However, for me that ‘18’ was the focal point of my little celebration. It was a symbol of freedom. It was the symbol, the sign that it was high time for me to keep my promise.

  10

  For One, Only Death Remains

  My Escape to Freedom

  That day began like any other – at the behest of the timer switch. I lay in my bunk bed when the light in my dungeon turned on, waking me from a confused dream. I remained in bed for some time and tried to decipher its significance from the slivers of my dream. However, the harder I tried to reach for them, the more they slid away from me. Only a vague feeling remained that I reflected on wonderingly. Deep resolve. I hadn’t felt that way in a long time.

  After a while, hunger motivated me to get out of bed. There had been no dinner and my stomach was rumbling. Driven by the thought of eating something, I climbed down the ladder. But before I reached the bottom, I remembered that I didn’t have anything more to eat. The previous evening, the kidnapper had given me a tiny piece of cake to take with me to my dungeon for breakfast, which I had already devoured. Frustrated, I brushed my teeth in order to rid my mouth of the slightly sour taste of empty stomach. Then I looked around, uncertain as to what to do. That morning my dungeon was a big mess. Articles of clothing lay strewn all over the place and paper was stacked on my desk. Other days I would have begun tidying up immediately, making my tiny room as comfortable and organized as possible. But that morning, I had no desire to. I felt a strange, distanced feeling towards those four walls that had become my home.

  In a short orange-coloured dress I was very proud of, I waited for the kidnapper to open the door. Other than that I had only leggings and paint-stained T-shirts, a turtleneck jumper formerly belonging to the kidnapper for cold days and a couple of clean, simple things for the few outings he had taken me on over the past few months. In that dress I was able to feel like a normal girl. The kidnapper had bought it for me as a reward for my work in the garden. In the spring after my eighteenth birthday, he had allowed me to work outside now and again under his supervision. He had grown less cautious; there was a constant danger that the neighbours could see me. Twice already I had been greeted from across the fence while I was weeding in the garden. ‘Temporary help,’ the kidnapper once said by way of brief explanation, when the neighbour waved at me. He seemed satisfied with the information and I had been incapable of saying anything anyway.

  When the door to my dungeon finally opened, I saw Priklopil from below standing on the forty-centimetre step. A sight that could still frighten me after all that time. Priklopil seemed so big, an overpowering shadow, distorted by the light bulb in the anteroom – just like a jailer in a horror film. But that day he didn’t seem threatening to me. I felt strong and self-assured.

  ‘May I put on a pair of knickers?’ I asked him, even before I greeted him. The kidnapper looked at me, amazed.

  ‘Out of the question,’ he answered.

  In the house I always had to work half-naked, and in the garden I was principally not allowed to wear any knickers. It was one of his ways to keep me down.

  ‘Please, it’s much more comfortable,’ I added.

  He shook his head energetically.

  ‘Absolutely not. What made you think of that? Come on now!’

  I followed him into the anteroom and waited for him to crawl through the passageway. The rounded, heavy concrete door, which had become a permanent fixture in my life’s scenery, stood open. Whenever I saw in front of me that colossus of a door made of reinforced concrete, a lump
always came to my throat. Over the last few years I had had damn good luck. Any accident the kidnapper might have had would have been a death sentence for me. The door couldn’t be opened from the inside and couldn’t be found from the outside. I pictured the scene vividly. How I would realize after a couple of days that the kidnapper had disappeared. How I would run amok in my room and how mortal fear would grip me. How I would manage with my last ounce of strength to kick down the two wooden doors. But that concrete door would be the decisive factor of life or death. Lying in front of it, I would die of hunger and thirst. It was a relief every time I slipped through the narrow passageway behind the kidnapper. Once again a morning had broken when he opened that door, when he hadn’t left me in the lurch. Again I had escaped my underground grave. When I climbed the stairs into the garage, I sucked the air deep into my lungs. I was upstairs.

  The kidnapper ordered me to get him two pieces of bread with jam from the kitchen. I watched him bite into the bread with pleasure as my stomach growled. His teeth left no marks. Delicious, crispy bread with butter and apricot jam. And I was given nothing – after all, I’d had my cake. I never would have dared tell him that I had already eaten the dry slice the evening before.

  After Priklopil had eaten breakfast, I washed up and went over to the tear-off calendar in the kitchen. As I did every morning, I tore off the page with the bold-face number and folded it into small pieces. I stared at the date for a long time: 23 August 2006. It was the 3,096th day of my imprisonment.

  That day, Wolfgang Priklopil was in a good mood. It was to be the beginning of a new era, the dawn of a less difficult period with no money worries. That morning two decisive steps were to be taken. First of all, he wanted to get rid of the old delivery van he had used eight and a half years ago to abduct me. And, secondly, he had placed an advert on the Internet for a flat we had spent the last few months renovating. He had purchased it six months before in the hope that the rental income would alleviate the constant financial pressure his crime had put him under. The money, so he told me, was from his business activities with Holzapfel.

  It was shortly after my eighteenth birthday that he had excitedly filled me in one morning.

  ‘There’s a new remodelling job. We are going to leave presently for Hollergasse.’

  His delight was catching and I was in urgent need of a change of scenery. The magical date of my adulthood had passed and barely anything had changed. I was just as oppressed and monitored as all the years before. Except that a switch had been activated within me. My uncertainty about whether the kidnapper wasn’t in fact right after all and I was better off in his care than outside was slowly disappearing. I was now an adult. My other self held me tight, and I knew precisely I didn’t want to continue living this way. I had survived the period of my youth as the kidnapper’s slave, punch bag and companion, and made myself at home in this world, as long as I had no other choice. But now that period was over. Whenever I was in my dungeon, I recalled over and over all the plans I had made as a child for this time in my life. I wanted to be independent. Become an actress, write books, make music, experience other people, be free. I no longer wanted to accept the fact that I was to be the prisoner in his fantasy for all eternity. I just had to wait for the right opportunity. Maybe that would be the new remodelling job. After all the years I had spent chained to the house, I was allowed to work at another location for the first time. Under the kidnapper’s strict supervision, but still.

  I remember our first trip to the flat on Hollergasse exactly. The kidnapper didn’t take the fastest route via the motorway – he was too miserly to pay the toll fee. Instead, he queued up in the traffic jam on Vienna’s Gürtel. It was morning and the last commuters of the rush-hour pressed in on both sides of the delivery van. I observed the people behind their steering wheels. Men with tired eyes looked at us from the van next to ours. They sat tightly squeezed in, obviously labourers from Eastern Europe, picked up by Austrian construction companies ‘kerb crawling’ in the morning along the arterial roads, only to dump them out there again in the evening. At once I felt a kinship with those day-labourers: no documents, no work permit, totally exploitable. That was the reality I found so hard to bear that morning. I sank deep into my seat and gave myself over to my daydream: I was on my way to a normal, regular job with my boss – just like all the other commuters in the cars next to us. I was an expert in my field and my boss placed great importance on my opinion. I lived in a grown-up world where I had a voice that was heard.

  We had crossed nearly the entire city when Priklopil turned on to the Mariahilfer Strasse at the West Railway Station, driving outwards from the city centre and rolling alongside a small market where only half the stands were occupied. Then he turned on to a small side street. There he parked the car.

  The flat was on the first floor of a rundown house. The kidnapper waited a long time before he allowed me to get out. He was afraid that someone would see us, and only wanted to let me scurry across the pavement once the street was empty of people. I let my eyes sweep down the street: small car repair shops, Turkish greengrocers, kebab stands and dodgy, tiny bars were scattered among the scenery of grey older buildings constructed during Vienna’s Age of Promotorism in the late 1800s, which had served as tenements for the masses of poor workers from the Austrian Empire’s crown lands. Even now the area was inhabited primarily by immigrants. Many of the flats still had no bathroom; the toilets were out in the corridor and were shared among neighbours. The kidnapper had purchased one of these flats.

  He waited until the street was clear, then he shooed me into the stairwell. The paint was peeling off the walls and most of the letter boxes were bent open. When he opened the wooden door to the flat and shoved me inside, I could hardly believe how tiny it was. Nineteen square metres – just four times larger than my dungeon. A room with a window looking out on to the back courtyard. The air smelled stale, like body odour, mildew and old cooking oil. The wall-to-wall carpet, which had probably been dark green at some point, had taken on an indefinable grey-brown colour. A large damp stain teeming with maggots could be seen on one wall. I breathed in deeply. Hard work awaited me here.

  From that day on, he took me with him to the Hollergasse flat several times a week. Only when he had longer errands to run did he lock me in my dungeon the whole day. The first thing we did was to drag the old, worn-out furniture out of the flat and on to the street. When we stepped out of the building an hour later, it was gone: taken by neighbours who had so little that even that furniture was good enough for them. Then we began the renovation work. It took me two whole days just to tear up the old carpet. A second carpet came to light under it and a thick layer of dirt. The adhesive had become so stuck to the floor underneath over the years that I had to scrape it up centimetre by centimetre. Then we poured a layer of concrete screed, on which we laid laminate flooring – the same as in my dungeon. We stripped the old wallpaper from the walls, filled the cracks and holes and put up fresh paper, which we painted white. We added the cabinets for a miniature fitted kitchen and a tiny bathroom, hardly larger than the shower tray and the new mat in front of it.

  I toiled like a heavy labourer. Chiselling, carrying, sanding, smoothing, hauling tiling. Wallpapering the ceiling, standing on a narrow board balanced between two ladders. Lifting furniture. The work, the hunger and the constant struggle against my dropping blood pressure took so much out of me that any thought of escape was a very distant notion. In the beginning I had hoped for a moment in which the kidnapper would leave me by myself. But there were none. I was under constant surveillance. It was amazing the efforts he made to prevent me from fleeing. Whenever he went out into the corridor to go to the toilet, he pushed heavy boards and beams in front of the window so that I couldn’t open it quickly and scream. When he knew he would have to be outside for more than five minutes, he screwed the boards on. Even here he constructed a prison for me. When the key turned in the lock, I was transported back to my dungeon in my mind. The fea
r that something would happen to him and that I would have to die in that flat seized me here as well. I breathed a sigh of relief every time he came back.

  Today that fear seems strange to me. After all, I was in a building with flats and could have screamed or beat against the walls. Unlike in the cellar, I would have been found quickly here. There were no rational reasons for my fear. It crept up from my insides, straight out of the dungeon within me.

  One day, a strange man suddenly appeared in the flat.

  We had just hauled the laminate for the floor up to the first floor. The door was only slightly ajar, when an older man with salt-and-pepper hair entered and greeted us loudly. His German was so bad that I could hardly understand him. He welcomed us to the house and obviously wanted to launch into a neighbourly chat about the weather and our renovation work. Priklopil pushed me behind him and shook him off with terse replies. I felt the panic welling up within him and let it infect me as well. Although that man could have meant my rescue, I felt almost harassed by his presence. That’s how much I had internalized the kidnapper’s perspective.

  That evening I lay on my bunk bed in my dungeon and replayed the scene in my head over and over. Had I acted wrongly? Should I have screamed? Had I missed yet another decisive opportunity? I had to try to train myself to act with resolve the next time. In my thoughts I imagined the path from my position behind the kidnapper towards the strange neighbour like a leap across a yawning chasm. I could picture myself exactly taking a run at it, speeding towards the edge of the abyss and jumping. But I never saw myself landing on the other side. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get the image to form. Even in my fantasy, the kidnapper snatched at my T-shirt again and again, yanking me back. The few times I eluded his grasp, I hovered in the air above the chasm for a few seconds before plunging into the abyss. It was an image that tormented me the whole night through. A symbol that I was on the verge of doing it, but would again fail at the deciding moment.