G Torment and Hunger The Daily Struggle to Survive My childhood was over when I was abducted at the age of ten. I ceased being a child in the dungeon in the year zooo. One morning I woke up with a cramping pain in my abdomen and found spots of blood on my pyjamas. I knew immediately what was happening. I had been waiting for my period to start for years. I knew the particular brand of sanitary pads I wanted from a commercial that the kidnapper had recorded after some of the television series. When he came into the dungeon, I asked him as matter-of-factly as possible to buy me several packets. Confronted with this new development, the kidnapper was deeply unsettled, and his paranoia reached a new level. Until then, he had painstakingly picked up every piece of lint, frantically wiped away every single fingerprint, in order to eliminate all traces of me, and now he was nearly hysterical in making sure that I wouldn't sit down anywhere upstairs in the house. If I was allowed to sit somewhere, he put down a pile of newspapers first in an absurd attempt to prevent even the tiniest spot of blood from staining his house. He continued to worry daily that the police would show up and search his house for traces of DNA. I felt personally harassed by his behaviour, like an untouchable. It was a confusing time when I urgently needed to be able to talk to my mother or one of my older sisters about the changes taking place inside my body that had so suddenly confronted me. But the only person I had to talk to was a man who was r26 Torment and Hunger completely out of his depth on the issue. Who treated me as if I were dirty and disgusting. And who obviously had never lived with a woman. His behaviour towards me underwent a clear change once I entered puberty. As long as I had still been a child, I was `allowed' to remain in my dungeon and go about my business within the narrow framework of his rules. Now, having become a woman, I had to be at his service, performing tasks in and on the house under his strict supervision. Upstairs in the house I felt as if I were in an aquarium, like a fish in a too-small container who looks longingly at the outside world, but doesn't jump out of the water as long as it can still live in its prison. Because crossing that line means certain death. The line demarcating where the outside began was so absolute that it appeared insurmountable to me. As if the house was in a different dimension to the world outside its yellow walls. As if the house, the garden and the garage with its dungeon were located on a different matrix. Sometimes a hint of spring would waft in through a tilted window. From time to time I could hear a distant car driving down the peaceful street. Otherwise nothing more from the world outside could be discerned. The blinds were always down and the entire house was bathed in dim light. The alarm systems on the windows were activated - at least, I was convinced that they were. There were still moments when I thought of escape. But I no longer made any specific plans. The fish does not jump over the edge of the glass bowl where only death awaits. But my longing for freedom remained. I was now being constantly watched. I was not allowed to take a single step without him having already ordered me to. I had to stand, sit or walk however the kidnapper wanted. I had to ask if I wanted to stand up or sit down, before I turned my head or how to hold out my hand. He told me where I was to direct my gaze 127 3,096 Days and even accompanied me to the toilet. I don't know what was worse, the time I spent alone in the dungeon or the time I was no longer alone, not even for a second. This permanent surveillance reinforced my feeling of having landed in an absurd experiment. The atmosphere in the house intensified that impression. Behind its bourgeois fa~ade, it seemed to have fallen out of time and space. Lifeless, uninhabited, like a backdrop for a gloomy film. On the outside, it fitted perfectly into its environment: conventional, extraordinarily well maintained, with thick shrubbery around the large garden to carefully screen it from the neighbours. Curious eyes were unwanted. Strasshof is a faceless town with no history, with no centre and no character, as you would expect with a population today of about g,ooo. After the town limit sign, the houses, stooping in the flat Marchfeld plain, line a thoroughfare and a railway line, interrupted time and again by the commercial areas common to the cheap surroundings of any large city. In particular, the town's full name, `Strasshof an der Nordbahn', or `Strasshof on the Northern Railway Line', is a major clue that this is an area whose lifeline is its connection to Vienna. You travel away from here, you travel through here, you don't travel to here without good reason. The town's attractions include a'locomotive monument' and a railway museum named `Heizhaus', or `boiler house'. A century ago, not even fifty people lived here; today its inhabitants work in Vienna, returning to their suburban houses, lined up monotonously next to one another, only to sleep. At the weekend, the lawnmowers hum, the cars are polished and the cosy living room remains hidden behind closed curtains and blinds in partial darkness. Here, the fa~ade is what counts, not what you might discover behind it. The perfect place to lead a double life. The perfect place for a crime. The house itself was laid out as a typical early 1970s building. On the ground floor, a long hallway in which a staircase led to the rz8 Torment and Hunger upper floor. On the left the bathroom and toilet, on the right the living room, and at the end of the hallway, the kitchen. This was an oblong room, with a kitchenette on the left with rustic cabinet fronts of dark wood veneer. On the floor, tiling with an orangebrown flowered pattern. A table, four chairs with cloth coverings, hooks in the `Prilblume' flower design on the grey-white wall tiling with the dark green decorative flowers next to the sink. The most striking part of the room was the mural wallpaper which covered the wall on the right: a forest of birch trees, green, with slender trunks stretching upwards, as if trying to flee the oppressive atmosphere of the room. When I looked at it properly for the first time, it seemed grotesque to me that someone who could commune with nature at any time, who could go out into life whenever he liked, would surround himself with artificial, dead nature; while I desperately tried to bring life into my bedroom in the dungeon, be it only in the form of a couple of plucked leaves. I don't know how often I scrubbed and polished the floor and the tiling in the kitchen until they gleamed immaculately. Not the tiniest streak, not the smallest crumb was allowed to mar the smooth surfaces. And when I thought I was done, I had to lie on the floor in order to check even the furthest corner from that perspective. The kidnapper always stood behind me, giving me orders. It was never clean enough for him. On countless occasions, he took the cloth from my hand and showed me how to clean `properly'. And he flew into a rage if I besmirched a beautiful smooth surface with an oily fingerprint, thereby destroying the fapde of the untouched and pure. For me, the worst thing was cleaning the living room. It was a large room that exuded a gloom that did not only come from the closed blinds. A dark, nearly black coffered ceiling, dark wood panelling, a green leather suite, light-brown wall-to-wall carpeting. A dark brown bookcase containing works such as Kafka's The r2g 3,o96 Days Judgement and Peter Kreuder's Only Dolls Don't Cry. An unused fireplace with a poker and, on the mantel above, a candle on a wrought-iron candle holder, a clock, a miniature helmet from a medieval knight's armour. Two medieval portraits on the wall above the fireplace. Whenever I spent any long period of time in that room, I had the impression that the gloom would penetrate through my clothes into every pore of my body. The living room seemed to me the perfect mirror image of the kidnapper's `other' side. Conservative, conformist and well adjusted on the surface, barely covering the dark layer underneath. Today I know that for years Wolfgang Priklopil had barely changed anything in that house built by his parents in the 1970s. He wanted to renovate completely to his specifications only the upper floor, which had three bedrooms, and the attic. An attic dormer window was to allow additional light in; the dusty attic, with its bare wooden beams along the slanted roof, was to be outfitted with drywalling and transformed into a living space. For me, this meant that a new phase of my imprisonment was about to begin. For the next months and years the upper floor under renovation was where I spent most of my time during the day. Priklopil himself no longer had a regular job, although sometimes he did disappear to do some `business' with his friend Holzapfel. I didn't find out until much later that they renovated flats in order to rent them out. However, they can't have had too many orders coming in, because most of the time the kidnapper was busy renovating his own house. I was his only worker. A worker he could fetch from the dungeon as needed to do the back-breaking work that most people would have paid tradesmen to do, and who he then coerced into cooking and cleaning `after the working day' before he locked her in the cellar again. z3o Torment and Hunger Back then I was actually much too young to do all the jobs he burdened me with. Whenever I see twelve-year-old kids today complaining and rebelling when asked to do easy chores, it makes me smile every time. I don't begrudge them that small act of rebellion at all. I couldn't rebel; I had to obey. The kidnapper, who didn't want any strange workmen in the house, took on the entire renovation project himself and forced me to do things that were far beyond my strength and capabilities. Together with him, I dragged marble slabs and heavy doors, hauled sacks of cement across the floor, broke open concrete with a chisel and a sledgehammer. We installed the dormer window, insulated and covered the walls, poured screed, then laid heating pipes and electric cabling, plastered the drywall panels, hammered an opening between the upper floor and the new attic floor and built a staircase with marble tiling. The upper floor was next. The old flooring was ripped out, a new one put in. The doors were removed, the door frames sanded and repainted. The old brown fibre wallpaper had to be torn off the walls and new wallpaper hung and painted. We built a new bathroom with marble tiling in the attic. I was his assistant and serf in one: I had to help him carry things, hand him tools, scrape, chisel, paint. Or hold the bowl with the filler for hours, not moving, while he smoothed out the walls. When he sat down and took a break, I had to fetch him drinks. The work had its upside too. After two years during which I could hardly move around in my tiny room, I enjoyed the exhausting physical activity. The muscles in my arms grew, and I felt strong and useful. Most of all in the beginning I enjoyed being allowed to spend several hours a day during the week outside my dungeon. Of course, the walls around me upstairs were no less insurmountable. The invisible leash too was stronger than ever before. But at least I had a change of pace. At the same time, upstairs in the house, I was helplessly at the 3,096 Days mercy of the kidnapper's evil, dark side. I had evidence from the incident with the drill that he was susceptible to uncontrolled outbursts of rage if I wasn't `good'. In the dungeon there was hardly any opportunity not to be `good'. But now, as I worked, I could make a mistake any second. And the kidnapper didn't like mistakes. `Hand me the putty knife,' he said on one of our first days in the attic. I gave him the wrong tool. `You can't f- do anything, can you?' he burst out. From one second to the next his eyes went dark, as if a cloud had cast a shadow over his irises. His face became distorted. He grabbed a sack of cement lying next to him, lifted it and threw it at me with a shout. It took me unawares and the heavy sack hit me with such force that I staggered for a moment. I froze inside. It wasn't so much the pain that shocked me. The sack was heavy, and the impact hurt, but I could have handled it. It was the sheer aggression bursting forth from the kidnapper that took my breath away. After all, he was the only person in my life; I was completely dependent on him. That outburst threatened me in an extreme way. I felt like a battered dog, who is not allowed to bite the hand that beats him because it is the same hand that feeds him. The only way out I had was to escape into myself. I closed my eyes, blocked everything out and didn't move a centimetre. 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!' r3a Torment and Hunger 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 I33 3,096 Days 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 I34 Torment and Hunger 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 I35 3,096 Days 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 z36 Torment and Hunger 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 wellmeaning 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. I37 3,096 Days 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, onequarter 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, Zoo grams of frozen vegetables to boil or half a readyto-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 * A kind of dry marble cake commonly eaten in Austria. r38 Torment and Hunger the taste pervaded my entire mouth. Then I would switch to Grammelknodel; 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 Jorg 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 m September, he took 139 3,096 Days 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. 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 140 Torment and Hunger 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 aooo, I was given a radio that allowed me 3,096 Days 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 `Or'. With FM4, I learned a little bit of English. When I risked losing my grasp on reality, the mundane shows on the 03-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 i4z Torment and Hunger 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 I43 3,096 Days 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.

 

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