Copyright: 2010

Book Jacket:

On 2 March 1998 ten-year-old Natascha Kampusch was snatched off a street in Vienna by a stranger and bundled into a white van. Hours later she was lying on a cold cellar floor, rolled up in a blanket. When she emerged from captivity in 2006, having endured one of the longest abductions in recent history, her childhood had gone.

In 3,096 Days Natascha tells her amazing story forth the first time: her difficult childhood, what exactly happened on that fateful morning when she was on her way to school, her long imprisonment in a five-square-metre dungeon, and the physical and mental abuse she suffered from her abductor, Wolfgang Priklopil - who committed suicide by throwing himself under a train on the day she managed to make her escape.

3,096 Days is ultimately a story about the triumph of the human spirit. It describes how, in a situation of almost unbearable hopelessness, she learned how to manipulate her captor. And how, against inconceivable odds, she managed to escape with her spirit intact.

PENGUIN BOOKS

3,og6 Days

Natascha Kampusch was born on 2 February 1988 in Vienna and became victim, at the age of ten, to what proved to be one of the longest abductions in recent history. She finally gained her freedom in zooC. On the day she escaped, her abductor, Wolfgang Priklopil, committed suicide by throwing himself under a train. j,ogGDay.r is her own account of her ordeal.

Natascha, now aged twenty-two, lives in Vienna, where she is continuing her studies.

'Psychological trauma is an affliction of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters. When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities. Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection and meaning.' Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery

All my best Natascha Kampusch

My Escape to Freedom

Epilogue

My Crumbling World

My Childhood on the Outskirts of Vienna

My mother lit a cigarette and took a deep puff. 'It's already dark outside. Think of all the things that could've happened to you!' She shook her head.

My father and I had spent the last weekend of February 1998 in Hungary, where he had purchased a holiday house in a small village not far from the border. It was a complete dump, with damp walls where the plaster was crumbling off. Over the years he had renovated the house, furnishing it with beautiful old furniture, making it nearly inhabitable through his efforts. Still, I was not particularly fond of going there. My father had a number of friends in Hungary with whom he spent a great deal of time, always drinking a little bit too much thanks to the favourable currency exchange rate. In the bars and restaurants we visited in the evenings, I was the only child in the group. I would sit there saying nothing, bored.

I had reluctantly gone with him to Hungary on this occasion as well. Time seemed to move incredibly slowly, and I was angry that I was still too young and had no say in how I spent my time. Even when we visited the thermal spa in the area that Sunday, I was less than overjoyed. In a rotten mood, I was strolling through the spa premises when a woman I knew asked me, 'Would you like to have a soda with me?' I nodded and followed her into the cafe. She was an actress and lived in Vienna. I admired her because she always exuded great serenity and seemed so self-assured.

Besides, I had always secretly dreamed of being an actress. After a while, I took a deep breath and said, 'You know, I would like to become an actress too. Do you think I could do that?'

She beamed a smile at me. 'Of course you could, Natascha! You'd be a great actress if that's what you really want!'

My heart leapt at that. I had truly expected not to be taken seriously or even to be laughed at - as had happened many times before.

'When you're ready, I'll help you,' she promised me, putting her arm around my shoulders.

On the way back to the swimming area, I bounded about in high spirits, humming to myself, 'I can do anything if I want it enough and believe in myself enough.' I felt more light-hearted and untroubled than I had in a long time.

However, my euphoria was cut short. The afternoon was already getting on, but my father wasn't making any move to leave the spa. When we finally returned to his holiday house, he again didn't seem to be in any great hurry. Just the opposite. He even wanted to lie down for a short while. I glanced nervously at the clock. We had promised my mother that we would be home by seven o'clock, because the next day was a school day. I knew that there would be a heated discussion if we didn't get back to Vienna on time. While he lay snoring on the couch, the clock kept ticking away inexorably. It was already dark when my father finally woke up and we began the trip home. I sat in the back seat pouting and saying nothing. We wouldn't make it on time, my mother would be angry, and everything that had been so pleasant this afternoon would be ruined in one fell swoop. As always, I would be caught in the middle. Adults always ruined everything. When my father stopped at a petrol station and bought me a chocolate bar, I crammed the whole thing into my mouth at once.

It wasn't until 8.30, one and a half hours late, that we arrived

at the Rennbahnsiedlung council estate. 'I'll let you out here, run home quickly,' said my father and gave me a kiss.

'I love you,' I muttered as always when saying goodbye. Then I ran through the dark courtyard to our stairway and unlocked the door. In the foyer there was a note from my mother next to the telephone: 'I've gone to the cinema. Be back later.' I put my bag down and hesitated a moment. Then I scribbled a short note to my mother that I would wait for her at our neighbour's flat, one floor below ours. When she came to pick me up there a while later, she was beside herself.

'Where is your father?' she barked at me.

'He didn't come with me. He dropped me off out the front,' I said quietly. It wasn't my fault we were late and it wasn't my fault that he hadn't walked me to our front door. But still I felt guilty.

Jesus Christ! You are hours late. Here I've been, worrying. How could he let you cross the courtyard by yourself? In the middle of the night? Something could have happened to you. I'll tell you one thing: You are not to see your father any more. I'm so sick and tired of this and I won't put up with it any longer!'

When I was born on 17 February 1988, my mother was thirty-eight years old and already had two grown-up daughters. She had had my first half-sister when she was just eighteen years old and the second came about a year later. That was at the end of the r96os. The two small children were more than my mother, who was on her own, could handle. She and the girls' father had divorced soon after the birth of my second half-sister. It was not easy for her to make a living for her small family. She had to struggle, took a pragmatic approach to things, was somewhat tough on herself and did everything in order to get her children through. There was no place in her life for sentimentality or a lack of assertiveness, for leisure or lightness. At thirty-eight, now that both girls were grown up, she was free from the obligations and worries of raising children for the first time in a long while. It was exactly at that time that I came along. My mother had not counted on getting pregnant again.

The family that I was born into was actually in the process of dissolving itself once again. I turned everything on its head. All of the baby stuff had to be brought out of storage, and daily life had to adjust one more time to the needs of an infant. Even though I was welcomed with joy and spoilt like a little princess by everybody, as a child I sometimes felt like the third wheel. I had to fight to establish myself in a world where all the roles had already been assigned.

When I was born, my parents had been together for several years. A customer of my mother's had introduced them. As a trained seamstress, my mother had earned a living for herself and her two daughters by selling and altering clothing for the women in the neighbourhood. One of her customers was a woman from the town of Sussenbrunn bei Wien, who ran a bakery and a small grocery store with her husband and her son. Ludwig Koch Junior accompanied his mother sometimes when she came to try on the clothes and always stayed a bit longer than necessary to chat with my mother. She soon fell in love with the young, handsome baker who made her laugh with his stories. After a while, he moved in with her and her two girls, into her flat in the large block of council flats situated on the northern outskirts of Vienna.

Here, the edge of the city bleeds into the flat countryside of the Marchfeld plain, unable to decide what exactly it wants to be. It is an incongruous area with no centre and no identity, where everything seems possible and chance reigns supreme. Commercial areas and factories stand surrounded by fallow fields where dogs from the neighbouring council estates roam the unmowed grassy areas in packs. In the midst of this, the nuclei of former villages struggle to maintain their identities, which are peeling away just as the paint slowly flakes off from the fgades of the small Biedermeier-era houses. They are relics of bygone days, slowly replaced by innumerable council flat buildings, utopias of social housing construction, set down in the middle of a green field with a grand gesture and left to fend for themselves. I grew up in one of the largest of these council estates.

The council flats located on Rennbahnweg were designed on a drawing board in the 1970s and built as the stony embodiment of urban planners' vision, urban planners looking to create a new environment for new people: happy, industrious families of the future, lodged in modern satellite cities characterized by clean lines, shopping centres and excellent public transport into Vienna.

At first glance, the experiment seems to have been successful. The council estate consists of 2,400 flats housing over 7,00o people. The courtyards between the tower blocks are generously proportioned and shaded by large trees. Playgrounds alternate with areas of concrete and large grassy sections. You can picture very clearly how urban planners placed miniatures of mothers with prams and children playing in their mock-ups and were convinced that they had created a space for an entirely new kind of shared environment. The flats, stacked one on top of the other in towers of up to fifteen storeys, were - compared to the stuffy and substandard tenement buildings closer to the centre - airy and well-proportioned, equipped with balconies and appointed with modern bathrooms.

But from the beginning the council estate was a catch-all for people originating from outside Vienna who had wanted to move to the city but had never quite made it that far: blue-collar workers from other Austrian provinces, such as Lower Austria, Burgenland and Styria. Slowly but surely, immigrants moved in as well with whom the other residents squabbled daily about minor issues, such as cooking smells, playing children and varying opinions regarding noise levels. The atmosphere in the area became more and more aggressive, and the nationalistic and xenophobic graffiti slogans increased. Shops with cheap merchandise opened up in the shopping centres, and milling about in the large squares in front of these were teenagers and people without jobs who drowned their frustrations in alcohol.

Today the council estate has been renovated, the tower blocks gleam in bright new colours and the Vienna underground station nearby has finally been completed. But when I lived there as a child, the Rennbahnsiedlung estate was viewed as a typical hotspot for social problems. It was considered dangerous to walk through the area at night, and during the day it was awkward having to pass the groups of teenagers who spent their time hanging around the courtyards and shouting dirty comments at women. My mother always hurried through the courtyards and stairwells holding tight to my hand. Despite being a resolute, quick-witted woman, she hated the coarse remarks she was subjected to at Rennbahnweg. She tried as best she could to protect me; she explained why she did not like it when she saw me playing in the courtyard and why she found the neighbours vulgar. Of course, as a child I was unable to really understand what she meant, but most of the time I did what she told me.

I vividly remember as a small girl how I resolved time and again to go down into the courtyard anyway and to play there. I spent hours getting ready, imagining what I would say to the other kids, and changed my clothes over and over. I chose toys for the sandbox and tossed them aside. I thought long and hard about what doll it would be best for me to take in order to make friends. But when I actually made it down to the courtyard, I never stayed longer than just a few minutes: I could never shake off the feeling that I didn't belong. Despite my lack of understanding, I had internalized my parents' negative attitude to such an extent that my own council estate remained unfamiliar territory. I preferred instead to escape in daydreams, lying on my bed in my room. That room - with its pink painted walls, light-coloured wall-to-wall carpet and patterned curtain sewn by my mother that was never opened even during the day - enshrouded me protectively. Here I forged great plans and spent hours thinking about where my path in life would likely lead. At any rate, I knew that I did not want to put down any roots here on the council estate.

For the first few months of my life I was the centre of our family. My sisters took care of the new baby as if they were practising for later in life. While one fed and changed my nappies, the other took me with her in the baby sling into the city centre to stroll up and down along the streets of Vienna's shopping districts where passers-by stopped to admire my wide smile and my pretty clothes. My mother was overjoyed when they told her about what had happened. She worked hard to make sure I looked good and outfitted me from infancy with the prettiest clothes, which she spent long evenings sewing for me herself. She chose special fabrics, leafed through fashion magazines to find the latest sewing patterns or bought little accessories for me in boutiques. Everything was colour-coordinated, even my socks. In the midst of a neighbourhood where many women went about wearing curlers in their hair and most men shuffled to the supermarket in shell-suit bottoms, I was turned out like a mini fashion model. This overemphasis on outward appearances was not only an act of distancing ourselves from our environment, it was also my mother's way of demonstrating how much she loved me.

Her brisk, resolute nature made it difficult for her to allow herself to show her emotions. She was not the type of person who was always hugging and cuddling a child. Tears and gushing pronouncements of love alike always made her uncomfortable. My mother, whose early pregnancies had forced her to grow up so quickly, had developed a thick skin over the years. She allowed herself no 'weaknesses' and refused to tolerate them in others. As a child I often watched her gain the upper hand on colds through sheer willpower and observed with fascination as she removed steaming hot dishes from the dishwasher without wincing. An Indian knows no pain' was her credo - a certain amount of toughness doesn't hurt, but actually helps you assert yourself in the world.

My father was just the opposite. He opened his arms wide when I wanted to cuddle him and had great fun playing with me - that is, when he was awake. During the time when he still lived with us, he was asleep more often than not when I saw him. My father loved going out at night, drinking copious amounts of alcohol with his friends. Consequently, he was ill suited to his trade. He had taken over the bakery from his father without ever really having any great interest in it. But having to get up so early in the morning caused him the greatest suffering. He stayed out in bars until midnight, and when the alarm clock rang at two in the morning it was extremely difficult to wake him. Once all of the rolls had been delivered, he lay on the couch for hours snoring. His enormous round belly raised and lowered formidably before my fascinated child's eyes. I played with the large sleeping man, placed teddy bears against his cheek, decorated him with ribbons and bows, put bonnets on him and painted his fingernails. When he awoke in the afternoon, he tossed me through the air, producing small surprises from his sleeves as if by magic. Then he would go out once again to make his rounds of the bars and cafes in town.

My grandmother became the most important point of reference for me during this time. With her - she ran the bakery together with my father - I felt completely safe and at home. She lived just a few minutes away from us by car and yet it was like another world. Sussenbrunn, situated on the northern outskirts of the city, is one of the oldest villages in Vienna, and the ever-encroaching city has never been able to destroy its rural character. The peaceful side streets are lined with old single-family dwellings with gardens where people still grow vegetables. My grandmother's house, which also included a small grocery and the bakery, still looked as nice as it did during the Austro-Hungarian empire.

My grandmother was originally from the Wachau, a picturesque region in the Danube valley where vineyards stretch across sunny terraced slopes. Her parents had been winegrowers and, as was the custom back then, my grandmother had to help out in the vineyards even at a very young age. She always spoke nostalgically of her childhood in the Wachau, made famous in Austria by the Hans Moser films from the 1950s, which romanticized the region as a dulcet idyll. In reality, her life in this panoramic landscape had mainly centred round work, work and more work. One day, on a ferry shuttling people to the other bank of the Danube, she met a baker from Spitz. She seized her opportunity to flee her predetermined life and married him. Ludwig Koch Senior was twenty-four years older than her, and it is difficult to imagine that love was the only motivation for her decision to marry. But as long as she lived she always spoke of her husband with great affection. I never got to know him, as he died shortly after I was born.

Even after all her years living in the city, my grandmother remained a rather eccentric country woman. She wore wool skirts and, over them, flowered aprons. She twisted her hair into curls and she smelled of a mixture of kitchen and Franzbranntwein,{A kind of rubbing alcohol made of camphor, menthol and various fragrances, such as spruce or pine needle oil.} which enveloped me whenever I pressed my face into her skirts. I even liked the slight odour of alcohol that surrounded her. As the daughter of winegrowers, she always drank a large glass of wine at every meal as if it were water, without ever showing any signs of drunkenness. She remained true to her traditions, cooking meals on an old wood-fired stove and scouring her pots with an old-fashioned wire brush. She tended her flowers with particular devotion. Innumerable pots, pails and a long, old dough trough stood on exposed aggregate concrete slabs in the large courtyard behind her house, turning into islands of purple, yellow, white and pink blossoms every spring and summer. Apricots, cherries, plums and currants grew in the adjoining fruit orchard. The contrast between her house and our council estate at Rennbahnweg couldn't have been greater.

During the first years of my life, my grandmother was the epitome of 'home' for me. I often spent the night at her house, allowed her to spoil me with chocolate and cuddled up with her on her old couch. In the afternoons, I would visit a friend of mine in the village whose parents had a small swimming pool in their garden. I rode my bike through the village with the other children living on the streets and explored with curiosity an environment where I was free to wander as I pleased. My parents had opened a shop nearby and I sometimes rode my bike the short distance to my grandmother's house to surprise her with a visit. I still remember that she would often be sitting under the hairdryer, which drowned out the doorbell and my knocking. Then I would climb over the fence, sneak up to her from behind and have great fun startling her. She would laugh and shoo me through the kitchen with curlers still in her hair -Just you wait till I get my hands on you!' - and sentence me to work in the garden as 'punishment'. I loved picking dark red cherries with her off the tree or snapping the over-full branches of currants carefully from the bushes.

My grandmother not only provided me with a small slice of a carefree and loving childhood, but I also learned from her how to create space for feelings in a world that did not allow emotions to come to the surface. On my visits, I accompanied her nearly daily to a small cemetery a little outside the village, surrounded by a wide-open field. My grandfather's grave, with its shiny black tombstone, was located all the way at the back along a newly created gravel pathway near the cemetery wall. During the summer the sun beats down on the graves, and except for the occasional passing car along the main street, the only thing you can hear is the humming of the crickets and the flocks of birds flying above the fields. My grandmother would place fresh flowers on the grave, crying softly to herself. When I was small, I always tried to comfort her, saying, 'Don't cry, Grandma - Grandpa wants to see you smile!' Later, when I was old enough to go to primary school, I understood that the women in my family, unwilling to show any weakness in their daily lives, needed a place where they could let their emotions run free. A protected place that belonged only to them.

When I was older, the afternoons spent with my grandmother's friends, who often joined us in visiting the cemetery, began to bore me. Though I had once loved being fed cakes and asked questions by old ladies about anything and everything, I had now reached the age when I simply had no more desire to sit in oldfashioned living rooms full of dark furniture and lace doilies, where you were not allowed to touch anything, while the ladies bragged about their grandchildren. At the time, my grandmother felt insulted when I'turned away from her'. 'I'll just go and find myself another granddaughter,' she informed me one day. I was deeply hurt when she actually began to give ice cream and sweets to another, smaller, girl who came into her shop regularly.

Although that disagreement was soon cleared up, from then on my visits to Sussenbrunn grew less frequent. My mother had an uneasy relationship with her mother-in-law anyway, so it was not inconvenient for her that I was no longer to spend the night there so often. But even though the relationship became less close when I began primary school, as is the case with most grandmothers and grandchildren, she always remained my touchstone.

For she gave me the sense of safety and security that I lacked at home.

Three years before I was born, my parents opened a small grocery with a Stuberl, an adjoining cafe, in the Marco-PoloSiedlung council estate, about fifteen minutes by car from Rennbahnweg. In 1988, they took over yet another grocery located on Probstlgasse in Sussenbrunn, situated on the main road running through the village and just a few hundred metres from my grandmother's house. In a single-storey, antique pink corner house with an old-fashioned door and a shop counter from the IgGos, they sold baked goods, ready-to-eat foods, newspapers and special magazines for lorry drivers, who made their final stop here on this arterial road on the outskirts of Vienna. The shelves were stocked with the small things required for everyday life that people still bought from the corner grocery even though they now had access to the local supermarket: small cardboard packages with laundry detergent, noodles, instant soups and, most of all, sweets. An old cold storehouse painted pink stood in the small back courtyard.

These two shops later became the central pillars of my childhood, in addition to my grandmother's house. I spent countless afternoons after kindergarten or school at the shop in the MarcoPolo-Siedlung while my mother balanced the accounts or waited on customers. I played hide-and-seek with the other children or rolled down the small sledding hill the municipality had made. The council estate was smaller and quieter than ours; I was free to explore as I pleased and found it easy to make friends. From the shop I was able to observe the customers in the cafe: housewives, men coming home from work, and others who began drinking beer even in the late morning, ordering a grilled cheese sandwich to go with it. Such shops were slowly disappearing from the cities and, with their longer opening hours, the serving of alcohol and their personal atmosphere, my parents' shops filled an important niche for many people.

My father was responsible for the bakery and for delivering the baked goods, while my mother took care of everything else. When I was about five years old, he began to take me with him on his delivery rounds. We drove in the van through the rambling suburbs and villages, stopping in restaurants, bars and cafes, at hotdog stands and in smaller shops as well. For that reason I probably became better acquainted with the area north of the Danube than any other kid my age - and spent more time in bars and cafes than was perhaps appropriate. I enjoyed spending so much time with my father immensely and felt like I was very grown up and being taken seriously. But our delivery rounds had their downside as well.

'What a sweet girl!' I probably heard that a thousand times. I don't have pleasant memories of it, although I was on the receiving end of compliments and the centre of attention. The people who pinched my cheeks and bought me chocolate were unfamiliar. Besides, I hated being pushed into a spotlight that I had not sought out myself. It left in me only a deep-seated feeling of embarrassment.

My father was a jovial man who loved to make a grand entrance. His little daughter in her freshly pressed dresses was the perfect accessory and he enjoyed showing me off to his customers. He had friends everywhere - so many that even as a child I recognized that not all of these people could really be close to him. Most of them let him buy them a drink, or borrowed money from him. In an effort to fulfil his need for approval, he was happy to pay.

I sat on barstools in these smoky pubs and listened to grown-ups whose interest in me quickly dissipated. A large number of them were unemployed and had failed at life, spending their days drinking beer and wine and playing cards. Many of them had had a profession at one time, had been teachers or civil servants, and had just fallen through the cracks of life. Today we call that 'burnout syndrome'. Back then this was part of the normal fabric of life on the outskirts of the big city.

Only rarely did someone ask me what I was doing in these places. Most of them just took it for granted and were friendly to me in an exaggerated way. 'My big girl,' said my father approvingly, patting my cheek with his hand. When someone bought me sweets or a soft drink, payment in kind was expected in return: 'Give Uncle So-and-So a kiss. Give Aunty here one too.' I resisted such close contact with strangers, who I resented for stealing my father's attention, attention that was supposed to be mine. These delivery rounds were a constant emotional roller-coaster: one moment I was the centre of attention, presented to the group and given a sweet, while the next I was ignored so completely that I could have been run over by a car and it not be noticed. This fluctuation between attention and neglect in a world of superficial interactions chipped away at my self-esteem. I learned to play-act my way to the centre of attention and keep myself there for as long as possible. Only nowadays have I begun to understand that this attraction I have for the stage, the dream of acting that I had nurtured from my earliest days, did not come from within me. It was my way of imitating my extrovert parents - and a way to survive in a world in which you were either admired or ignored.

Just a little while later, this roller-coaster ride of attention and neglect began to extend to my closest environment. The world of my early childhood slowly began to crack. At first, only small cracks appeared, barely noticeable in the familiarity of my surroundings so that I still took little notice of them, blaming myself as the cause of all the discord. But then the cracks grew bigger until our entire family structure imploded. My father realized much too late that he had pushed things a little too far and that my mother had already long made up her mind to leave him. He continued to behave extravagantly, like a king of the urban fringe area, who went from bar to bar and bought himself large expensive cars time and again. The Mercedes or Cadillacs were meant to impress his 'friends'. He borrowed the money to buy them. Whenever he gave me a small allowance, he would borrow it right back again to buy cigarettes or to go out for coffee. He took out so many loans on my grandmother's house that it was seized as payment. By the mid rggos he had accumulated so much debt that it endangered the existence of our family. In the process of his debtrestructuring, my mother took over the grocery in Sussenbrunn and the shop in the Marco-Polo-Siedlung. But the cracks went far beyond finances. At some point my mother had just had enough of a man who liked to parry, but who had no idea of the meaning of dependability.

The gradual separation of my parents changed my entire life. Instead of being pampered and spoilt, I got left by the wayside. My parents spent hours arguing loudly. They took turns locking themselves in the bedroom, while the other would continue to shout in the living room. When I timidly tried to ask what was going on, they put me in my room, closed the door and continued fighting. I felt caged up in there and didn't know what the world was coming to. I buried my head in my pillow to try to shut out the loud rows and transport myself back to my earlier, carefree childhood. Only rarely was I able to do this. I simply could not understand why my once beaming father now seemed helpless and lost, unable to produce little surprises from his sleeve as if by magic to cheer me up. His inexhaustible supply of gummi bears seemed to have suddenly dried up.

After one heated quarrel, my mother even left the flat, not returning for several days. She wanted to show my father how it felt to have no idea where your partner was. For him, one or two

nights away from home was nothing unusual. But I was much too young to understand her ulterior motives, and I was afraid. At that age you have a different sense of time and my mother's absence seemed interminable to me. I had no idea whether she would ever come back at all. The feeling of abandonment, of being rejected, became deep-seated within me. A phase of my childhood began in which I was no longer able to find my place, in which I no longer felt loved. The small, self-assured person I had been was gradually transformed into an insecure girl who ceased to trust the people closest to her.

It was during these difficult times that I started pre-school, or Kindergarten as we call it. This was a moment when other people's control over my life, which I had such difficulty coping with as a child, reached a high point.

My mother had registered me at a private pre-school close to where we lived. From the very beginning I felt misunderstood and so unaccepted that I began to hate pre-school. The very first day I experienced something that laid the cornerstone for these feelings. I was outside with the other children in the garden and I discovered a tulip that held great fascination for me. I bent over the flower, pulling it carefully towards me with my hand in order to take a sniff. The teacher must have thought that I was about to pick the flower. With one sharp movement, she slapped the back of my hand. I called out indignantly, 'I'm going to tell my mother!' However, that evening I was forced to realize that now she had delegated authority over me to someone else, my mother was no longer on my side. When I told her about the incident, convinced that she would defend me in solidarity and admonish the teacher the very next day, she merely said that that was the way things were in school, that you had to follow the rules. And, moreover, 'I'm just not going to get involved, because I wasn't even there to see it.' This statement became her standard answer when I came to her with problems I had with the pre-school teachers. And whenever I told her about bullying by the other kids, she merely said, 'Then you just have to hit back.' I had to learn to overcome difficulties by myself. The time I spent in pre-school was a tough period in my life. I hated the strict rules. I rebelled at having to lie down after lunch with the other kids in the nap room although I wasn't at all tired. The teachers went about their daily routines without expressing any particular interest in us. While they kept one eye on us, they read novels and magazines with the other, gossiping and painting their fingernails.

I was only able to make friends with the other children very slowly, and though surrounded by kids the same age I felt lonelier than before.

Risk factors, primarily with secondary enuresis, are links to a sense of loss in the broadest sense, such as parents' splitting up, divorce, death, the birth of a sibling, extreme poverty, delinquency on the part of parents, deprivation, neglect, a lack of support for developmental milestones.

This is the dictionary definition for the causes of the problem I was forced to deal with during that time. I went from being a precocious child, who had quickly been able to do without nappies, to a bed-wetter. Bed-wetting became a stigma that blighted my life. The wet patches in my bed every night were the source of never-ending scolding and ridicule.

When I had wet my bed for the nth time, my mother reacted in a manner that was common at the time. She thought it was wilful behaviour on my part that could be trained out of a child by force and punishment. She spanked my behind and asked angrily, 'Why are you doing this to me?' She railed, despaired and was powerless to do anything. And I continued to wet my bed night after night. My mother bought rubber sheets and put them on my bed. It was a humiliating experience. From discussions with friends of my grandmother I knew that rubber pads and special sheets were used for the old and infirm. I just wanted to be treated like a big girl. But I couldn't stop. My mother woke me up during the night to put me on the toilet. But I wet the bed anyway, and she changed my sheets and my pyjamas, swearing all the while. Sometimes I would wake up dry in the mornings and proud of it, but she quickly put a damper on my happiness, bluffing, 'You just can't remember that I had to change you once again in the middle of the night. Just look at the pyjamas you're wearing.' These were accusations I was unable to counter. She punished me with disdain and ridicule. When I asked for undergarments for my Barbie doll, she laughed at me, saying that I would just wet them anyway. I was so embarrassed I wished the ground would swallow me up.

Finally she began to monitor how much I was drinking. I had always been a thirsty child, drinking copiously and frequently. But now my drinking was precisely regulated. I was only given a little to drink during the day and nothing more at night. The more prohibited water or juices became, the greater my thirst, until I could think of nothing else. Every swallow, every trip to the toilet, was observed and commented on, but only when we were alone - otherwise what would people think.

In pre-school, the bed-wetting took on a new dimension. I began to wet myself during the day as well. The other children laughed at me, and the teachers simply egged them on, embarrassing me time and again in front of the group. They probably thought that the ridicule would make me control my bladder better. But every humiliation only made it worse. A trip to the toilet or a drink of water became torture. They were forced upon me when I did not want them and denied me when I desperately needed them. We had to ask for permission to go to the toilet and in my case, every time I asked, I was told, 'But you just went. Why do you have to go again?' Vice versa, they forced me to go to the toilet before any outings, before eating, before my afternoon nap, and monitored me while I did it. Once, when the teachers suspected me of having wet myself again, they even forced me to show all the other children my knickers.

Each time I left the house with my mother, she always brought along a bag with a change of clothes. The bundle of clothing reinforced my feelings of shame and insecurity. It was as if the adults seemed to expect me to wet myself. And the more they expected it, and the more they scolded and ridiculed me, the more they were proven right. It was a vicious circle that I could not find a way out of throughout primary school. I remained a ridiculed, humiliated and perpetually thirsty bed-wetter.

After two years of quarrelling and a number of attempts at reconciliation, my father finally moved out for good. I was now five years old and I had gone from being a cheerful toddler to an insecure, taciturn person who no longer liked life and sought out various ways to protest. Sometimes I withdrew, sometimes I screamed, vomited and had outbursts of crying from the pain and the feeling of being misunderstood. I once suffered with gastritis for weeks.

My mother, who was also reeling from the break-up, transferred her way of dealing with it to me. Just as she swallowed the pain and uncertainty and carried on bravely, she demanded that I keep a stiff upper lip as well. She had a very difficult time understanding that, as a small child, I was completely incapable of doing so. When I became too emotional for her, she reacted aggressively to my outbursts. She accused me of feeling sorry for myself and either tried to tempt me with treats or threatened punishment if I didn't stop.

My anger at a situation that was incomprehensible to me gradually turned against the one person who had remained after my father had moved out: my mother. More than once I was so angry at her that I resolved to move out. I packed a few of my things in my gym bag and said farewell to her. But she knew that I wouldn't get any further than the door and remarked on my behaviour with a wink, saying, 'OK, take care.' Another time I removed all of the dolls that she had given me from my room and placed them in a row in the hallway. I meant for her to see that I had resolved to lock her out of the realm that was my room. But, of course, these attempts to outmanoeuvre my mother were not a solution to my actual problem. When my parents split up, I had lost the anchors of stability in my life and was unable to continue relying on the people who had previously always been there for me.

The disregard I suffered slowly destroyed my self-esteem. When you think of violence perpetrated on children, you picture systematic, heavy blows that result in bodily injuries. I experienced none of that in my childhood. It was rather a mixture of verbal oppression and occasional 'old school' slaps across the face that showed me that as a child I was the weaker one.

It was not anger or cold calculation that drove my mother to do it, but rather an aggression that flared up, shot out of her like a flash and was doused just as quickly. She slapped me when she felt overburdened or when I had done something wrong. She hated it when I whined, asked her questions or queried any of her explanations - that too earned me another slap.

At that time and in that area it was not unusual to treat children that way. Quite the contrary - I had a much 'easier' life than many of the other kids in my neighbourhood. In the courtyard I was able to observe time and again mothers screaming at their children, pushing them to the ground and pummelling them. My mother would never have done such a thing, and her way of casually slapping me across the face would certainly not have shocked anyone. When she slapped me in public, nobody intervened - though, for the most part, she was too much of a lady to even risk being observed. Open violence, that was something the other women in our council estate engaged in. I was required to wipe away my tears or cool my cheek before I left the house or climbed out of the car.

At the same time, my mother also tried to assuage her guilty conscience with gifts. She and my father competed to buy me the prettiest clothes or to take me on outings at the weekend. But I didn't want any gifts. At that phase of my life the only thing I needed was someone to give me unconditional love and support, something my parents were not able to do.

A memory from my primary school years demonstrates the extent to which I had internalized the fact that I could expect no help from adults. I was about eight years old and had travelled with my class to spend a week on a school retreat to the country in the province of Styria. I was not an athletic child and did not dare play any of the wild games that other children liked to play. But I wanted to brave at least one attempt on the playground.

The pain shot sharply through my arm as I fell from the monkey bars and hit the ground. I tried to sit up, but my arm gave out, causing me to fall back. The cheerful laughter from the children all around me on the playground rang hollowly in my ears. I wanted to scream. Tears ran down my cheeks, but I couldn't make a sound. It wasn't until a schoolmate of mine came over that I was able to ask her to get the teacher. The girl ran to her, but the teacher sent her back to tell me that I had to come over myself if I wanted something.

I struggled once again to get up, but I hardly had to move for the pain in my arm to return. I remained helplessly lying on the ground. It wasn't until sometime later that the teacher from another class helped me up. I clenched my teeth and didn't complain. I didn't want to be any trouble to anyone. Later my teacher noticed that something was wrong with me. She suspected

that I was bruised from the fall and permitted me to spend the afternoon in the television room.

That night I lay in my bed in the dormitory, and the pain was so bad I could hardly breathe. Still, I didn't ask for help. It wasn't until late the next day when we were visiting the Herberstein zoological park that my teacher realized I had seriously injured myself and took me to the doctor. He immediately sent me to the hospital in Graz. My arm was broken.

My mother came with her boyfriend to pick me up from the hospital. The new man in her life was well known to me - my godfather. I didn't like him. The ride to Vienna was a hellish ordeal. For three long hours my mother's boyfriend complained that they had to drive such a long way just because of my clumsiness. My mother tried to lighten the mood, but she couldn't make him cease his criticisms. I sat in the back seat and cried softly to myself. I was ashamed that I had fallen, and I was ashamed of the trouble I was causing everyone. Don't make trouble. Don't make a scene. Don't be hysterical. Big girls don't cry. These mantras from my childhood, heard a thousand times, had enabled me to bear the pain of my broken arm for a day and a half. Now, as we drove along the motorway, a voice inside my head was repeating them in between the tirades my mother's boyfriend was letting loose.

My teacher had to face disciplinary proceedings because she had failed to take me to the hospital immediately. It was certainly true that she had neglected her duty to supervise me. But I was myself largely responsible for the neglect. My confidence in my own perceptions was so minimal that not even with a broken arm did I have the feeling that I was allowed to ask for help.

In the meantime, I only saw my father at the weekends or when he took me with him on his delivery routes. He too had fallen in love again after separating from my mother. His girlfriend was nice, but reserved. Once she mused to me, 'Now I know why you are so difficult. Your parents don't love you.' I protested loudly, but the observation haunted my wounded childish soul. Maybe she was right? After all, she was a grown-up, and grown-ups were always right.

I couldn't shake the thought for days.

When 1 was nine I began using food to compensate for my frustrations. I had never been a thin child and had grown up in a family where food played a major role. My mother was the kind of woman who could eat as much as she wanted without gaining a pound. It might have been due to hyperactivity of the thyroid or just her active nature. She ate slices of bread with lard and cake, roast pork with caraway and ham sandwiches. She didn't gain any weight and never got tired of emphasizing that to others: 'I can eat whatever I want,' she piped, holding a slice of bread with a fatty spread on it in her hand. I inherited her lack of moderation with food, but not her ability to burn up all those calories.

On the other hand, my father was so fat that I was embarrassed as a child to be seen with him. His stomach was enormous and the skin stretched as taut as the belly of a woman eight months pregnant. When he lay on the couch, his stomach jutted upwards like a mountain, and as a child I often patted it, asking, 'When's the baby due?' My father would just laugh good-naturedly. Piles of meat were always stacked on his plate, and he had to have several large dumplings, which swam in a veritable ocean of sauce. He devoured huge portions and continued to eat even when he was no longer hungry.

When we went on our family daytrips at the weekend - first together with my mother, later with his new girlfriend - everything centred around food and eating. While other families went hiking in the mountains, biking or visited museums, we headed to culinary destinations. He drove to a new wine tavern or went on trips to country inns located in castles, not for the historical guided tours, but to take part in medieval-style banquets: piles of meat and dumplings that you pushed into your mouths with your hands, mugs of beer to wash them down - this was the kind of daytrip that appealed to my father.

And I was constantly surrounded by food in the two shops, the one in Siissenbrunn and the one in the Marco-Polo-Siedlung that my mother had taken over after splitting up with my father. When my mother picked me up from afterschool care and took me to the shop, I kept boredom at bay by eating: an ice cream, gummi bears, a piece of chocolate, a pickle. My mother usually gave in - she was too busy to pay close attention to everything I was stuffing into my mouth.

Now I began to overeat systematically. I would devour an entire packet of Bounty chocolate bars, drink a large bottle of Coke, and then top it off with more chocolate until my stomach was stretched ready to burst. When I was barely able to put anything more in my mouth, I began eating again. The last year before my abduction I gained so much weight that I had gone from being chubby to being a really fat young girl. I exercised even less, and the other kids teased me even more. And I compensated for my loneliness by eating all the more. On my tenth birthday I weighed forty-five kilos.

My mother would frustrate me further by saying, I like you anyway, no matter what you look like.' Or: 'You only have to put an ugly child in a pretty dress.' When I became offended, she laughed and said, 'Don't think I mean you, sweetie. Don't be so sensitive.' 'Sensitive' - that was the worst. You were not allowed to be sensitive. Today I am often surprised at how positively the word 'sensitive' is used. When I was a child, it was an insult for people who were too soft for this world. Back then I wished I could have been allowed to be softer. Later on, the toughness that chiefly my mother had imposed on me probably saved my life.

Surrounded by sweets of all sorts, I spent hours alone in front of the television or in my room with a book in my hand. I wanted to flee from this reality, which held nothing but humiliations in store for me, to other worlds. At home our TV had all of the channels available and nobody really paid any attention to what I was watching. I flipped through the channels aimlessly, watching kids' programmes, news and crime stories that frightened me, and still I soaked them up like a sponge. In the summer of 1997 one issue dominated the media: in the Salzkammergut, one of Austria's lake districts predominantly located in Upper Austria, the police discovered a child pornography ring. Horrified, I heard on the TV that seven grown men had lured an unknown number of small boys into a specially equipped room in a house by offering them small amounts of money. There, they molested them and made videos of what they did that were sold all over the world. On 24 January 1998 yet another scandal shook Austria. Videos of the molestation of girls between the ages of five and seven had been sent out through the mail. One video showed a man luring a sevenyear-old girl from her neighbourhood into an attic room, where he had severely molested her.

Even more disturbing to me were the reports of girls who had been murdered by a serial killer in Germany. To my recollection, hardly a month went by during my primary school years that the media didn't report yet another abducted, raped or murdered girl. The news programmes spared almost no detail describing the dramatic search operations and police investigations. I saw sniffer dogs in forests and divers who combed lakes and ponds for the bodies of the missing girls. Again and again I listened to the horrific stories of the family members: how the girls had disappeared while playing outdoors or simply failed to come home from school; how their parents had desperately searched for them until they received the terrible news that they would never see their children alive again.

The reports throughout the media at the time were so pervasive that we discussed them in school as well. The teachers explained to us how we could protect ourselves from attacks. We watched films where girls were molested by their older brothers, or where boys learned to say 'No!' to their grabby fathers. And our teachers reiterated the warnings that had been hammered into us children repeatedly at home: 'Never go anywhere with strangers! Never get into a strange car. Never accept sweets from a stranger. And cross to the other side of the street if something seems strange to you.'

When I look at the list of cases that occurred during those years, I'm as shaken as I was back then:

Yvonne (twelve years old) was beaten to death in July 1995 on Lake Pinnow (Brandenburg) because she resisted the man trying to rape her.

Annette (fifteen years old), from Mardorf on Lake Steinhude, was found naked, sexually molested and murdered in 1995 in a cornfield. The perpetrator was not caught.

Maria (seven years old) was abducted, molested and thrown into a pond in Haldensleben (SachsenAnhalt) in November 1995.

Elmedina (six years old) was abducted, molested and suffocated in February 1996 in Siegen.

Claudia (eleven years old) was abducted, molested and burned to death in Grevenbroich in May 1996. Ulrike (thirteen years old) never returned from an outing on a pony-drawn carriage on ii June 1996. Her body was found two years later.

Ramona (ten years old) disappeared without a trace from a shopping centre on 15 August 1996 in Jena. Her body was found in January 1997 near Eisenach.

Natalie (seven years old) was abducted, molested and murdered by a 29-year-old man on zo September 1996 in Epfach in Upper Bavaria on her way to school.

Kim (ten years old), from Varel in Frisia, was abducted, molested and murdered in January 1997. Anne-Katrin (eight years old) was found beaten to death on g June 1997 near her parents' house in Seebeck in Brandenburg.

Loren (nine years old) was molested and murdered in the basement of her parents' house in Prenzlau by a 2o-year-old man in July 1997.

Jennifer (eleven years old) was lured by her uncle into his car, molested and strangled on 13 January 1998 in Versmold near Gutersloh.

Carla (twelve years old) was attacked on her way to school on 22 January 1998 in Wilhermsdorf near Furth, molested and thrown unconscious into a pond. She died five days later in a coma.

The cases involvingJennifer and Carla hit me particularly hard. Jennifer's uncle confessed after his arrest that he wanted to sexually molest the girl in his car. When she resisted, he strangled her and hid her body in the woods. The reports really got under my skin. The psychologists interviewed on TV advised us back then not to resist the attackers so as not to risk being killed. Even more horrific were the TV reports about Carla's murder. I can still see the reporters in my mind's eye; I can picture them standing in front of the pond in Wilhermsdorf, explaining that the police could tell from the churned-up earth just how much the girl had resisted. The funeral service was broadcast on television. I sat in front of my TV with eyes wide open in fear. Only one thing calmed me when I saw her pictures in the news: I was not the blonde, delicate girl that child molesters seemed to prefer.

I had no idea how wrong I was.

2

What Could Happen Anyway?

The Last Day of My Old Life

The day after returning from my father's weekend house, I woke up angry and sad. The anger at my mother's wrath, which was aimed at my father but had been taken out on me, made my chest tighten. I was even more upset at the fact that she had forbidden me from ever seeing him again. It was one of those decisions that adults make over the heads of children, out of anger or caused by a sudden mood, without thinking that it isn't just about them, but rather about the deepest needs of those who are helplessly faced with such pronouncements.

I hated this feeling of powerlessness - a feeling that reminded me that I was still a child. I wanted to finally be more grown up in the hope that these altercations with my mother wouldn't get under my skin so much. I wanted to learn how to swallow my feelings, including those deep-seated fears that fights between parents always trigger in children.

As of my tenth birthday I had put the first and least selfsufficient phase of my life behind me. The magic date that was to officially mark my independence was drawing closer: just eight more years to go, then I would move out and get a job. Then I would no longer be dependent on the decisions of grown-ups around me who cared more about their petty quarrels and jealousies than my needs and wants. Just eight more years that I would take advantage of to prepare myself for a life in which I would make the decisions.

I had already taken an important step towards independence several weeks earlier: I had convinced my mother to allow me to walk to school by myself Although I was in the fourth grade, she had always driven me to school, dropping me off in front of the building. The trip didn't take more than five minutes. Every day I was embarrassed in front of the other kids for my helplessness, on display to everyone as I got out of the car and my mother gave me a goodbye kiss. I had been negotiating with her for quite a while that it was high time for me to get the hang of walking to school alone. I wanted to show not just my parents, but also myself, that I was no longer a little child. And that I could conquer my fears.

My insecurity was something that rankled me deep down inside. It would come over me even as I was making my way down the stairwell. It grew as I crossed the courtyard and became a dominating emotion as I ran through the streets of the council estate at Rennbahnsiedlung. I felt unprotected and tiny, and hated myself for feeling that way. That day I made a resolution: I wanted to try to be strong. I wanted that day to be the first day of my new life and the last day of my old one. Looking back, it seems rather ironic that it was precisely that day my life as I knew it actually did end, albeit in a way that I could not possibly have imagined.

Decisively, I pushed the patterned duvet aside and got out of bed. As always, my mother had laid out the clothes I was supposed to put on: a dress with a denim top and a skirt made of grey tartan flannel. I felt shapeless in it, constrained, as if the dress was holding me down tightly in a stage that I had long wanted to grow out of.

Grumbling, I slipped it on, then passed though the hallway into the kitchen. My mother had prepared my packed sandwiches and left them on the table wrapped in the napkin which bore the logo from the small cafe in the Marco-Polo-Siedlung and her name. When it was time to leave the house, I put on my red anorak and my rucksack. I petted the cats and said goodbye to them. Then I opened the door to the stairwell and went out. Almost out the door, I stopped and hesitated, thinking of what my mother had told me a dozen times before: 'You must never part in anger. You never know if we'll ever see each other again!' She could be angry, she was impulsive, and she would often slap me on the spur of the moment. But when it was time to say goodbye she was always very loving. Should I really leave without saying a word? I turned round, but then inside me rose the feeling of disappointment that the previous evening had left behind. I would not give her any more kisses and would instead punish her with my silence. Besides, what could happen anyway?

'What could happen anyway?' I mumbled half to myself. My words echoed down the staircase with its grey tiling. That question became the mantra that accompanied me out on to the street and through the block of houses to school. My mantra, arming me against my fear and my guilty conscience for not having said goodbye.

I left the council block, ran along an endless wall and waited at the pedestrian crossing. A tram rattled past, stuffed to the brim with people heading to work. My courage evaporated. Everything around me suddenly seemed much too big. The argument with my mother weighed on me, and the feeling that I was sinking in this new labyrinth of relationships between my quarrelling parents and their new partners, who did not accept me, made me fearful. I had wanted to feel the sensation of embarking on something new that day, but that once again gave way to the certainty that I would have to struggle to find my place in this entangled network of relationships. And how would I ever be able to change my life if a mere pedestrian crossing loomed before me like an insurmountable obstacle?

I began to cry and felt the overpowering desire to simply disappear and vanish into thin air. I let the traffic flow by and imagined myself walking into the street and being hit by a car. It would drag me along for a few metres, and then I would be dead. My rucksack would be lying right next to me and my red jacket would be like a stop light on the asphalt, crying out, Just look at what you've done to this girl!' My mother would come running out of the building, cry over me and realize all of her mistakes. Yes, she would. For certain.

Of course, I did not jump in front of a car, nor in front of the tram. I would never have wanted to draw so much attention to myself. Instead I pulled myself together, crossed the street and walked down Rennbahnweg towards my primary school, located on Brioschiweg. My route took me through a couple of quiet side streets lined with small family houses built in the 1950s with modest front gardens. In an area characterized by industrial buildings and residential estates with prefabricated concrete tower blocks, they seemed anachronistic and yet calming. As I turned on to Melangasse, I wiped the remaining tears from my face and trotted along with my head down.

I don't remember any longer what caused me to lift my head. A noise? A bird? In any case, my eyes focused on a delivery van. It was parked alongside the street on the right-hand side and seemed strangely out of place in these peaceful surroundings. A man was standing in front of the delivery van. He was lean, not very tall, seemed young and somehow glanced around aimlessly, as if he were waiting for something and didn't know what.

I slowed my pace and stiffened. A fear that I could hardly put my finger on returned instantly, making the hair on the back of my neck stand up and covering my arms with goose bumps. Immediately I felt the impulse to cross to the other side of the street. A rapid sequence of images and fragments of sentences raced through my head: don't talk to strange men ... don't climb into strange cars ... abduction ... child molestation ... the many horror stories I had heard on the TV about girls being abducted.

But if I really wanted to be grown up, I couldn't allow myself to give in to my impulse. I had to overcome my fear and I forced myself to keep walking. What could happen after all, I asked myself. The walk to school was my test. I would pass it without deviating.

Looking back, I can no longer say why the sight of the delivery van set off alarm bells inside me: it might have been intuition, although it is likely that any man I had encountered in an unusual situation on the street would have frightened me. Being abducted was, in my childish eyes, something that was a realistic possibility - but deep down inside it was still something that happened only on TV, and certainly not in my neighbourhood.

When I had come within about two metres of the man on the street, he looked me right in the eye. At that moment my fear vanished. He had blue eyes, and with his almost too-long hair he looked like a university student from one of those old made-forTV movies from the 1970s. His gaze seemed strangely empty. That is one poor man, I thought, because he gave me the feeling that he was in need of protection; at that very moment I felt the desire to help him. That may sound odd, like a child holding tight at all costs to the naive belief that there is good in everyone. But when he looked at me squarely for the first time that morning, he seemed lost and very vulnerable.

Yes, I would pass this test. I would walk by him, giving him the berth the narrow pavement afforded. I did not like bumping into people and wanted to move out of his way far enough so that I could avoid touching him.

Then everything happened so fast.

The very moment I lowered my eyes and went to walk past the man, he grabbed me by the waist and threw me through the open door into his delivery van. Everything happened in one fell swoop, as if it had been a choreographed scene, as if we had rehearsed it together. A choreography of terror.

Did I scream? I don't think so. And yet everything inside me was one single scream. It pushed upwards and became lodged far down in my throat: a silent scream as if one of those nightmares had become reality where you try to scream but no sound comes out; where you try to run but your legs move as if trapped in quicksand.

Did I fight back? Did I get in the way of his perfect choreography? I must have fought back, because the next day I had a black eye. I can't remember the pain inflicted by that blow, only the feeling of paralysing helplessness. The kidnapper had an easy time of it with me. He was 1.72 metres tall, while I was only 1.45 metres. I was plump and not particularly quick anyway. Plus, my heavy school bag hindered my mobility. The whole thing had only taken a few seconds.

The moment the delivery van door closed behind me I was well aware of the fact that I had been kidnapped and that I would probably die. In my mind's eye I saw the images from Jennifer's funeral. Jennifer had been molested in a car and killed when she tried to escape. Images of Carla's parents waiting for word of their daughter. Carla, who had been molested, was found unconscious floating in a pond and died a week later. I had wondered back then what that would be like: dying and what comes after. Whether you felt pain just before, and whether you really see a light.

These images mixed with the jumble of thoughts that flashed through my mind at the same time. Is this really happening? To me? asked one voice. What a completely off-the-wall idea, kidnapping a child. That never turns out well, said another. Why me? I'm short and chubby, I don't really fit the profile of a typical abduction victim, pleaded another.

The kidnapper's voice brought me back to the present. He ordered me to sit down on the floor at the back of the van and barked at me not to move. If I didn't do what he said, I would be in for a nasty surprise. Then he climbed over the front seat and drove off.

Because the cab and the back of the delivery van were not separated, I was able to see him from the back. And I heard him frantically punching numbers into his car phone. But he couldn't seem to reach anyone.

In the meantime the questions continued to pound in my head: Will he blackmail my family for ransom? Who will pay it? Where is he taking me? What kind of car is this? What time is it? The windows of the delivery van were blacked out with the exception of a narrow strip along the upper edge. From the floor of the van I couldn't tell where we were going, and I didn't dare lift my head to look out of the windows. It seemed we had been driving for quite some time and were not headed anywhere in particular. I quickly lost any sense of space or time. But the treetops and the utility poles that kept whizzing by made me feel like we were driving around in circles in my neighbourhood.

Talk. You have to talk to him. But how? How do you talk to a criminal? Criminals don't deserve any respect, so it didn't seem appropriate to address him using the Sie form in German used for strangers and persons of respect. So I decided on du, the form of address that had, until now, been reserved for people who were close to me.

Absurdly enough, I asked him first what size shoes he wore. I had remembered that from watching TV shows like Aktenzeichen XYungelost*.{* A German television show produced in cooperation with the Swiss and Austrian public service broadcasters describing unsolved crimes and eliciting help from viewers in finding the perpetrator(s); similar to the BBC programme Crimewatch.}

You had to be able to give an exact description of the perpetrator; even the slightest detail was important. Naturally, I didn't get an answer. Instead the man snapped at me to be quiet and nothing would happen to me. Even today I don't know how

I managed to get up enough courage to disregard his order. Maybe because I was certain that I was going to die anyway - that things couldn't get any worse.

Are you going to molest me?' was my next question.

This time I got an answer. 'You're too young for that,' he said. 'I would never do that.' Then he made another phone call.

After he had hung up he said, 'I'm going to take you to a forest and turn you over to the others. Then I'll be able to wash my hands of this business.' He repeated that sentence several times, rapid-fire and agitated: 'I will turn you over, and then I'll have nothing more to do with you. We'll never see each other again.'

If he had intended to scare me, then he had found exactly the right words. The pronouncement that he was going to hand me over to 'others' took my breath away. I went rigid with fear. He didn't need to say anything more; I knew what he meant. Child pornography rings had been all over the media for months. Since last summer hardly a week had gone by without some discussion of the people who abducted and molested children while filming it on video. In my mind's eye I saw everything perfectly: groups of men would pull me into a basement and grope me all over while others took pictures. Up until that moment I had been convinced that I was soon going to die. What seemed in store for me now appeared even worse.

I don't remember how long we drove until we came to a stop. We were in a pine forest like the many found on the outskirts of Vienna. The kidnapper turned off the engine and made another phone call. Something appeared to have gone wrong. 'They're not coming. They're not here!' he cursed to himself. He seemed frightened, agitated. But maybe that was also just a trick: maybe he wanted me to take his side against these 'others' he was supposed to hand me over to and who had left him hanging; maybe he had just made them up to increase my fear and to paralyse me.

The kidnapper got out and ordered me not to move. I obeyed silently. Hadn't Jennifer wanted to flee from such a car? How had she tried to do that? And what had she done wrong? My thoughts were all jumbled up inside my head. If he hadn't locked the door, I could maybe open it. But then what? In just two strides he'd be on me. I couldn't run very fast. I had no idea what forest we were in and what direction I should run in. And then there were the 'others' who were supposed to come and get me, who could be anywhere. I pictured it vividly in my mind, how they would chase me, grab me and throw me to the ground. And then I saw myself as a corpse in the woods, buried under a pine tree.

I thought of my parents. My mother would come to pick me up from afterschool care in the afternoon. And the woman who ran the programme would say to her, 'But Natascha hasn't been here!' My mother would be beside herself and I had no way to protect her. It cut my heart to think of her coming to get me and not finding me. 'What could happen anyway?' I had thought as I had left that morning without saying a word of goodbye, without giving her a kiss. You never know if we'll see each other again.

The kidnapper's words made me jump. 'They're not coming.' Then he got back in the car, started the engine and drove off again. This time I recognized the gables and rooftops of the houses that I could just make out through the narrow strips of window along the sides. I could tell where he was steering the car to -back to the edge of the city and then on to the arterial road leading towards the town of Ganserndorf.

'Where are we going?' I asked.

'To Strasshof,' the kidnapper said forthrightly.

As we drove through Sussenbrunn, a deep sadness engulfed me. We passed my mother's old shop, which she had recently closed down. Just three weeks before she would have been sitting here at the desk in the mornings, doing the office work. I could still picture her and I wanted to cry out, but I only produced a weak whimper when we drove by the street that led to my grandmother's house. Here I had spent the happiest moments of my childhood.

The car came to a standstill in a garage. The kidnapper ordered me to remain lying down on the floor in the back and turned the engine off. Then he got out, fetched a blue blanket, threw it over me and wrapped me up tight. I could hardly breathe, and I was surrounded by absolute darkness. When he picked me up like a wrapped package and carried me out of the car, panic struck me. I had to get out of that blanket. And I had to go to the toilet.

My voice sounded muffled and foreign under the blanket when I asked him to put me down and let me go to the toilet. He stopped for a moment, then unwrapped me and led me through a hallway to a small guest toilet. From the hallway I was able to catch a glimpse of the adjoining rooms. The furnishings appeared fusty and expensive - yet another indication to me that I had really fallen victim to a crime. In the TV police shows that I knew, criminals always had large houses with expensive furnishings.

The kidnapper stood in front of the door and waited. I immediately locked the door and breathed a sigh of relief. But the moment of relief lasted only a few seconds. The room had no windows and I was trapped. The only way out was through the door and I couldn't stay locked behind that door forever. Especially as it would have been easy for him to break it open.

When I came out of the toilet after a while, the kidnapper wrapped me up in the blanket again: darkness, stuffiness. He lifted me up and I felt him carry me several steps downwards: a cellar? Once at the bottom of the stairs, he laid me on the floor, pulled on the blanket to move me forward, threw me again over his shoulder and continued onwards. It seemed an eternity before he put me down again. Then I heard his footsteps moving away from me.

I held my breath and listened. Nothing. There was absolutely nothing to hear. Still, it was a long time before I dared to cautiously peel the blanket off. There was absolute darkness all around. It smelled of dust and the stale air was strangely warm. Beneath me I could feel the cold, naked floor. I rolled myself into a ball on the blanket and whimpered softly. My own voice sounded so peculiar in the silence that I became frightened and stopped. I don't remember how long I remained lying there. At first I tried to count the seconds and the minutes. Twenty-one, twenty-two ... I mumbled to myself, to time the length of the seconds. I tried to keep track of the minutes on my fingers. I kept losing count, and I couldn't allow that to happen, not now! I had to concentrate, remember every detail! But I quickly lost all sense of time. The darkness, the odour that caused disgust to well up in me - all of this lay upon me like a black cloth.

When the kidnapper came back, he had brought a light bulb that he screwed into a fixture on the wall. The harsh light that blazed outwards so suddenly blinded me and brought no relief - because now I could see where I was. The room was small and empty, the walls covered with wood panelling; a bare pallet bed was affixed to the wall on hooks. The floor was light-coloured laminate. A toilet with no lid stood in the corner and a double stainless-steel sink was along one wall.

Was this what a criminal gang's secret hiding place looked like? A sex club? The walls covered in light-coloured wood reminded me of a sauna and triggered a chain of ideas: sauna in the basement - child molester - criminal. I pictured fat, sweaty men setting upon me. For me a sauna in the basement was the place people like that lured their victims in order to molest them. But there was no stove and none of those wooden buckets that you usually see in saunas.

The kidnapper instructed me to stand in front of him at a certain distance and not to move. Then he began to remove the wooden pallet bed and to unscrew from the wall the hooks that had been holding it up. During all of this, he spoke to me in a voice that people usually reserve for household pets: gentle and placating. I was not to be afraid, everything was going to be all right, if only I would do what he told me. He looked at me the way the proud owner looks at his new car; or worse - like a child eyeing his new toy, full of anticipation and at the same time uncertain of everything he can do with it.

After some time my panic began to subside and I got up the courage to address him. I begged him to let me go: 'I won't tell anybody anything. If you let me go, nobody will notice anything. I'll just say that I ran away. If you don't keep me overnight, nothing will happen to you.' I tried to explain to him that he had just committed a grave mistake, that they were already looking for me and were certain to find me. I appealed to his sense of responsibility and I begged for sympathy. But it was no use. He made it unequivocally clear to me that I would be spending the night in this dungeon.

Had I been able to foresee that this room would be both my refuge and my prison for 3,o9G nights, I don't know how I would have reacted. Looking back today, I realize that just knowing I would have to remain in the basement that first night triggered a reaction that probably saved my life - and was dangerous as well. What appeared to be outside the realm of the thinkable was now a fact: I was locked in the basement of a criminal and I was not going to be freed, at least not today. A shockwave passed through my world, and reality shifted just a little. I accepted what had happened and, instead of railing against my new situation with desperation and indignation, I acquiesced. As an adult you know that you give up a little piece of yourself whenever you have to tolerate circumstances that, before they occur, are completely outside the realm of the imagination. A crack appears in the foundation on which your own personality rests. And yet adapting is the only correct response, as it ensures your survival. Children act more intuitively. I was intimidated and did not resist, but rather I began to make myself at home - at least for one night.

With hindsight it seems to me quite bizarre how my panic gave way to a kind of pragmatism. How quickly I comprehended that my pleading would be futile and every additional word would bounce right off this strange man. How instinctively I felt that I had to accept the situation in order to get through this one endless night in the cellar.

When the kidnapper had unscrewed the pallet bed from the wall, he asked me what I required. An absurd situation, as if I were staying the night in a hotel and had forgotten my toiletries. A hairbrush, a toothbrush, toothpaste and a toothbrush cup. An empty yogurt cup will do.' I was functioning.

He explained to me that he would have to go to Vienna to fetch a mattress for me from his flat there.

'Is this your house?' I asked, but received no answer. 'Why can't you keep me in your flat in Vienna?'

He said that it would be too dangerous: thin walls, nosy neighbours, I might scream. I promised him I would be quiet if he would only take me to Vienna. But it was no use.

The moment he left the room, walking backwards, and locked the door, my survival strategy started to waver. I would have done anything to get him to stay or take me with him; anything so as not to be alone.

I crouched on the floor. My arms and legs felt strangely numb and it was difficult to unstick my tongue from the roof of my mouth. My thoughts centred on school, as I sought to impose a chronological structure that I could hold on to. But I had long lost any sense of time. What subject would be being taught right now? Was the long lunchtime break over already? When did they notice that I wasn't coming today? And when would they realize that I wouldn't be coming any more? Would they tell my parents? How would they react?

The thought of my parents brought tears to my eyes. But I mustn't cry. I had to be strong, remain in control. An Indian knows no pain and, besides, tomorrow everything would most certainly be over. And then everything would be all right again. Moved by the shock of almost having lost me, my parents would get back together and treat me with love. I pictured them sitting together eating at the table, full of pride and admiration as they asked me how I had coped so well with everything. I imagined my first day back at school. Would they laugh at me? Or would they celebrate me as a miracle because I had escaped while all the others who had had similar experiences had ended up as corpses in a pond or in the woods? I imagined how triumphant it would be - and also a bit embarrassing - when they all crowded around me, tirelessly asking, 'Did the police rescue you?' Would the police be able to rescue me at all? How would they be able to find me? 'How were you able to escape?'

'Where did you get the courage to escape?' Would I even have the courage to escape?

Panic was once again creeping up inside me. I had no idea how I was supposed to get out of here. On TV you just 'overpowered' criminals. But how? Would I even have to kill him perhaps? I knew that you could die from a stab to the liver. I had read that in the newspaper. But where was the liver exactly? Would I be able to find the right location? What was I supposed to stab with anyway? And was I capable of doing it? Killing a person, me, a little girl? My thoughts turned to God. Would it be permissible in my situation for me to kill someone, even if I had no other choice? Thou shalt not kill. I tried to remember whether we had discussed that commandment in religion classes - and whether there were exceptions in the Bible. I couldn't think of any.

A muffled noise tore me from my thoughts. The kidnapper was back.

He had with him a narrow, approximately eight-centimetrethick foam mat that he placed on the floor. It looked as if it were Austrian army issue, or a cover from a sun lounger. When I sat down on it, the air immediately came whooshing out of the thin fabric, and I once again felt the hard floor beneath me. The kidnapper had brought me everything I had asked for. Even biscuits. Butter biscuits with a thick layer of chocolate on them. My favourite biscuits, which I was actually no longer allowed to eat because I was too chubby. I associated these biscuits with an unbridled longing and a series of humiliating moments: that look when somebody said to me, 'But you weren't going to eat that. You're too plump anyway;' the shame, when all the other children reached for one and my hand was held back; and the feeling of pleasure when the chocolate slowly melted in my mouth.

My hands began to shake as the kidnapper opened the packet of biscuits. I wanted to have them, but my mouth went completely dry out of fear and nervousness. I knew that I would not be able to get them down. He held the package under my nose until I took one out, which I crumbled up into small pieces. As I did so, a couple of pieces of chocolate broke off, which I put in my mouth. I could not eat any more than that.

After a while, the kidnapper turned away from me and walked over to my school bag, which lay on the floor in a corner. When he picked it up and got ready to go, I begged him to leave me the bag- the thought of losing the only personal items I had with me in this unsettling environment made me feel completely at sea. He stared at me with a confused expression on his face, saying, 'You could have hidden a transmitter in there and you could use it to call for help. You're trying to trick me and you're playing the innocent on purpose! You're smarter than you admit to!'

The sudden change in his mood frightened me. Had I done something wrong? And what kind of transmitter was I supposed to have in my bag, which contained only my packed snacks, aside from a couple of books and writing utensils? At the time I had no clue why he was behaving so strangely. Today I realize that those words were the first indication that the kidnapper was paranoid and mentally ill. Back then there were no such transmitters that children could have been given so that they could be located - and even today, where the possibility exists, it is highly unusual. However, the kidnapper believed there was a real danger that I could have had such a futuristic means of communication hidden in my bag. So real that in his delusion he was afraid that a small child would bring tumbling down the world that existed only in his head.

His role in that world shifted lightning fast: one moment he seemed to want to make my forced incarceration in his basement as pleasant as possible; the next moment he saw me - a small girl with no strength, no weapon and certainly no transmitter - as an enemy who was out to get him. I had fallen victim to a crazy person and had become a play figure in the sick world inside his head. But back then I did not recognize that. I knew nothing about mental illness, about compulsions and delusional disorders that create a different reality within the person suffering from them. I treated him like any other adult whose thoughts and motives I would never have been able to see through as a child.

My begging and pleading was futile; the kidnapper took my rucksack and turned to the door. It opened inwards and had no handle on the inside of the dungeon, but rather a small, round knob so loosely attached to the wood that you could even pull it out.

As the door clicked shut, I began to cry. I was all alone, locked in a bare room somewhere beneath the earth. Without my rucksack, without the sandwiches my mother had made for me just hours before. Without the napkins they were wrapped up in. It felt as if he had torn a piece of me away, as if he had cut off my connection to my mother and my old life.

I cowered in a corner on the mattress and whimpered softly to myself. The wood-panelled walls seemed to be moving in on me, the ceiling seemed to be caving downwards. My breathing was rapid and shallow - I could hardly get any air - while my fear kept closing in around me. It was a horrific feeling.

As an adult I've often reflected on how I managed to live through that moment. The situation was so frightening that it could have shattered me. But the human mind can cope with the most astonishing situations - by tricking itself and withdrawing so as not to have to capitulate when faced with circumstances that cannot be logically comprehended.

Today I know that I regressed psychologically. The mind of the ten-year-old girl I was regressed back to that of a small child four or five years of age. A child that accepted the world around her as a given, for whom not the logical perception of reality, but rather the small rituals of a child's daily life offered the fixed points of reference that we require in order to have that feeling of normality - to keep from completely breaking down. My situation was so far out of the scope of anything anyone could possibly fathom that I subconsciously regressed to that stage: I felt small, at the mercy of someone else and free of responsibility. That person who was later to return to my dungeon was the only adult present and therefore the person of authority who would know what was to be done. I would only have to do what he asked and everything would be all right. Then everything would proceed as it always did: the bedtime ritual, my mother's hand on my duvet, the goodnight kiss and an attachment figure who would leave a night-light on and quietly tiptoe out of the room.

This intuitive withdrawal into the mental state of a small child was the second important transformation that took place the first day of my imprisonment. It was the desperate attempt to create a small, familiar oasis in a hopeless situation. When the kidnapper came back to the dungeon later, I asked him to stay with me, to put me to bed properly and to tell me a goodnight story. I even asked him for a goodnight kiss like my mother used to give me before softly closing the door to my room behind her. Everything to preserve the illusion of normality. And he played along. He took a reader with fairy tales and short stories out of my book bag, which he had put down somewhere in the dungeon, laid me down on the mattress, covered me with a thin blanket and sat down on the floor. Then he began to read The Princess and the Pea, Part z. In the beginning he kept stumbling over the words. Almost timidly and in a soft voice, he told me the story of the prince and the princess. At the end he kissed my forehead. For a moment I felt like I was lying in a soft bed in a safe child's bedroom. He even left the light on.

It was only when the door closed behind him that the protective illusion burst like a bubble.

I could not sleep that night. I tossed and turned uneasily on the thin mattress in the clothes that I had not wanted to take off. The outfit that made me look so shapeless was the last thing that remained of my life from that day on.

3

Hoping in Vain for Rescue

My First Weeks in the Dungeon

'The Austrian authorities are focusing on the disappearance of a girl, the ten-year-old Natascha Kampusch. Natascha was last seen on 2 March. Her route to school, where she was last seen, is relatively long. Reportedly, a girl in a red anorak was pulled into a white van.'

Aktenzeichen XYungeiost, 27 March 1998

I had listened to the kidnapper for quite some time before he came into the dungeon the next day. Back then I did not know how well the entrance was secured - but I could tell from the sounds gradually coming nearer that it took him a long time to open my dungeon.

I was standing in the corner, my eyes glued to the door, when he entered the room which measured five square metres. He seemed younger than on the day of my abduction: a lanky man with soft, youthful features. His brown hair was neatly parted, like a model pupil at a proper university-preparatory school. His face was gentle and at first glance seemed to promise nothing evil. It was only when you observed him for a longer period of time that you noticed the traces of madness that lurked behind his conservative, bourgeois exterior, an exterior that wouldn't begin to show deep cracks until later.

I immediately pelted him with questions: 'When are you going to let me go?' 'Why are you keeping me here?' 'What are you going to do with me?'

He gave me one-syllable answers and registered each one of my movements as you would if you were keeping an eye on a captive animal. Not once did he turn his back on me, and I always had to keep a distance of about one metre between him and me.

I tried to threaten him. 'If you don't let me go immediately, you're going to be in big trouble! The police have been out looking for me. They are going to find me and be here very soon! And then you'll have to go to jail! You don't want that, do you? Let me go and everything will be all right. Please, you'll let me go?'

He promised to let me go soon. As if with that he had answered all my questions, he turned round, pulled the knob out of the door and bolted it from the outside.

I listened in desperation in the hope that he would come back to me. Nothing. I was completely cut off from the outside world. No sounds penetrated, not one flicker of light peeped through the cracks in the wall panelling. The air was musty and covered my skin like a damp film that I could not brush off. The only sound to keep me company was the rattling of the fan that blew air from the attic via the garage into my dungeon through a pipe in the ceiling. The noise was pure torture: day and night it continued to whir throughout the tiny room until it became unreal and shrill, forcing me to press my hands to my ears in despair to block out the noise. When the fan overheated, it began to smell and the blades warped. The scraping noise got slower and a new sound was added: tock, tock, tock. Interrupted only by the scraping. There were days when that torturous noise filled not only every corner of the room, but also every corner of my mind.

During my first few days in the dungeon the kidnapper left the light on round the clock. I had asked him to because I was afraid to be alone in the total darkness the dungeon was plunged into as soon as he unscrewed the light bulb. But the constant, glaring light was nearly as bad. It hurt my eyes and forced me into an artificial state of wakefulness that I couldn't shake. Even when I pulled the blanket over my head to soften the brightness of the light, my sleep was superficial and disturbed. My fear and the harsh light never allowed me to do more than doze lightly, and I always started awake with the feeling that it was bright daylight outside. But in the artificial light of the hermetically sealed basement there was no difference between day and night.

Today I know that it was, and in some countries still is, a widespread means of torture to constantly subject prisoners to artificial light. Plants shrivel up when exposed to the extreme and constant effects of light, and animals die. For people it is perfidious torture, more effective than physical violence. It destroys biorhythms and sleep patterns to such an extent that the body reacts as if paralysed by deep exhaustion, and the brain can no longer function correctly even after only a few days. Just as cruel and effective is the torture of bombarding someone continuously with inescapable noise. Like a scraping, whirring fan.

I felt as if I had been preserved alive in an underground safe. My prison was not entirely square, measuring about 2.70 metres long and 1.80 wide and just under 2.40 high. Eleven and a half cubic metres of stuffy air. Not quite five square metres of floor, across which I paced like a tiger in a cage, from one wall to the other. Six small steps one way, six steps back, was the length. Four steps one way and four back was the width. I could walk around the perimeter in twenty paces.

Pacing dampened my panic only slightly. As soon as I remained standing, as soon as the sound of my feet hitting the floor faded, my panic rose again. I was nauseated and I was afraid of losing my mind. What was going to happen anyway? Twenty-one, twentytwo ... sixty. Six forward, four to the left. Four to the right, six back.

The feeling that there was no way out gripped me again and again. At the same time I knew that I couldn't allow myself to be smothered by my fear, that I had to do something. I took one of the mineral water bottles, in which the kidnapper had brought me fresh tap water, and hammered with all my might against the wooden panelling. First rhythmically, then energetically until my arm went numb. In the end it was no more than a desperate drumming mixed in with my cries for help. Until the bottle slipped out of my hand.

No one came. No one had heard me, perhaps not even the kidnapper. I collapsed on the mattress exhausted and curled up like a small animal. My cries were transformed into sobs. Crying gave release to my despair at least for a short time and calmed me. It reminded me of my childhood, when I would cry over nothing - and then quickly forget the reason why.

The previous evening my mother had notified the police. When I didn't come home at the usual time, she first called afterschool care, then the school. Nobody could explain my disappearance. The next day, the police began looking for me. From old newspaper articles I know that hundreds of police officers searched the area around my primary school and my council estate using dogs. There were no clues that would have justified limiting the radius of the search. Back courtyards, side streets and parks were combed, as were the banks of the Danube. Helicopters flew overhead and posters were hung up at every school. Every hour people called with tips, purportedly having seen me in various places. However, none of these tips led in the right direction.

In the first few days of my imprisonment I tried again and again to imagine what my mother must have been doing at that moment. How she would be looking for me everywhere, and how her hope would dwindle from day to day. I missed her so much that the loss I felt threatened to eat me up inside. I would've given anything to have had her with me with her power and strength.

Looking back, I am amazed how much importance the media has attached to my argument with my mother in the interpretation of my case. As if my leaving without saying goodbye provided insights into my relationship with my mother. Even though I'd felt rejected and disregarded, especially during my parents' draining separation, it should have been clear to anyone that any child in such an extreme situation would almost automatically be crying out for his or her mother. Without my mother or father, I was without protection, and knowing that they had no news of me saddened me deeply. There were days that my anxious worrying about my parents put a greater strain on me than my own fear. I spent hours thinking about how I might at least communicate to them that I was still alive. So that they wouldn't completely despair. And so that they wouldn't give up looking for me.

During the initial time I spent in the dungeon, I hoped every day, every hour, that the door would open and someone would rescue me. The hope that someone couldn't possibly make me disappear so easily carried me through the endless hours in the cellar. But days and days passed, and no one came. Except for the kidnapper.

Looking back, it seems obvious that he had been planning the abduction for a long time: otherwise why else would he have spent years building a dungeon that could only be opened from the outside and was just barely large enough to allow a person to survive in there? But the kidnapper was, as I witnessed over the years of my imprisonment, a paranoid, fearful person, convinced that the world was evil and that people were after him. It could be just as true that he built the dungeon as a bunker in preparation for a nuclear strike or World War III, as his own place of refuge from all of those he thought were pursuing him.

Nobody today can tell us which answer is the right one. Even statements made by his former co-worker Ernst Holzapfel allow for both interpretations. In a statement to the police, he later said that the kidnapper had once asked him how to soundproof a room so that not even a hammer drill could be heard anywhere in the house.

To me, at least, the kidnapper did not behave like a man who had been preparing for years to abduct a child and whose longcherished wish had just been fulfilled. Quite the opposite: he seemed like someone whom a distant acquaintance had suddenly saddled with an unwanted child, and who did not know what to do with this little creature that had needs he didn't know how to cope with.

In my first days in the dungeon, the kidnapper treated me like a very small child. I found this accommodating, as I had inwardly regressed to the emotional level of a kindergarten-aged child. He brought me anything I wanted to eat - and I behaved as if I were spending the night with a distantly related great aunt who could be credibly convinced that chocolate was an appropriate breakfast food. The very first morning, he asked me what I wanted to eat. I wanted fruit tea and croissants. In fact, the kidnapper came back with a thermos filled with rosehip tea and a brioche croissant from one of the most well-known bakeries in town. The printing on the paper bag confirmed my suspicions that I was being held somewhere in Strasshof. Another time I asked for salty sticks with honey and mustard. This 'order' was also promptly delivered. It seemed very strange to me that this man fulfilled my every request, given that he had taken everything else away from me.

His penchant for treating me like a small child also had its downside. He would peel every orange for me and put it in my mouth piece by piece, as if I were unable to feed myself. Once, when I asked for chewing gum, he refused - for fear that I would choke on it. In the evenings he forced my mouth open and brushed my teeth as one would a three-year-old who cannot yet hold her toothbrush. After a few days he grabbed my hand roughly and, gripping it tightly, cut my fingernails.

I felt pushed aside, as if he had taken the remaining dignity I was trying to preserve in that situation. At the same time I also knew that I was largely responsible for finding myself on this level, a level that protected me to a certain extent. Because the very first day I had realized how widely the kidnapper fluctuated in his paranoia, between treating me as if I were too small on the one hand or too independent on the other.

I acquiesced in my role, and when the kidnapper returned to the dungeon the next time to bring me food, I did everything I could to keep him there. I pleaded. I begged. I vied for his attention so that he would occupy himself with me, play with me. My time in the solitary dungeon was driving me mad.

So there we were after a few days; I was sitting with my kidnapper in my jail playing Chinese checkers, Nine Men's Morris, Parcheesi. The situation seemed unreal to me, as if taken from an absurd film. Nobody in the world outside would believe that an abduction victim would do anything to make her kidnapper play Parcheesi. But the world outside was no longer my world. I was a child and alone, and there was only one person who could relieve this oppressive loneliness.

I sat on the mat with my kidnapper, rolled the dice and moved the pieces. I stared at the patterns on the playing board, at the small colourful pieces, and tried to forget about my surroundings and imagine the kidnapper as a fatherly friend who was generous in taking time to play with a child. The better I succeeded in allowing myself to be absorbed by the game, the further away the panic receded. I knew that it was lurking in a corner somewhere, always ready to pounce. And when I was about to win a game, I would surreptitiously make a mistake so as to put off the threat of being alone.

In those first days, the presence of the kidnapper seemed to me a guarantee that I would be spared the final cruelty. Because in all his visits he talked about the people who had supposedly 'ordered' my kidnapping and with whom he had spoken on the telephone so frantically during my abduction. I continued to assume that they must have something to do with a child pornography ring. He repeatedly mumbled something about people who would come to take pictures of me 'and do other things as well', which confirmed my fears. The fact that the stories he was feeding me didn't agree at all, that these ominous people probably didn't even exist, were thoughts that went through my head sometimes. It is likely that he made up these people supposedly behind the kidnapping to intimidate me. But I couldn't know for sure, and even if they were invented, they fulfilled their purpose. I lived in constant fear that at any moment a horde of evil men would come into my dungeon and attack me.

The images and the scraps of stories that I had snapped up over the last few months from the media coalesced into ever-more frightening scenarios. I attempted to push them to the back of my mind - and pictured at the same time everything that the kidnapper might do with me. How that was supposed to work with a child. What objects they would use. Whether they would do it right here in the dungeon, or take me to a villa, a sauna or an attic room, like in the case that had most recently been portrayed in the media.

When I was alone, I tried to position myself at all times so that I could keep an eye on the door. At night I slept like a caged animal, closing only one eye, constantly on the alert. I didn't want to be surprised while I was defencelessly sleeping by the men that I was supposedly to be handed over to. I was tense every second, pumped full of adrenaline and driven by a fear that I was unable to escape in that small room. The fear of my supposed 'true kidnappers' made the man who abducted me at their behest appear to offer caring, friendly support; as long as I was with him, the anticipated horror would not take place.

In the days after my abduction, my dungeon began to fill up with all sorts of objects. First, the kidnapper brought me some fresh clothes. I had only what I was wearing: knickers, tights, dress, anorak. He had burned my shoes in order to erase any possible traces of me. Those were the shoes with the thick platform soles that I had got for my tenth birthday. When I had walked into the kitchen that day, a cake with ten candles was sitting on the table, next to it a box wrapped in shiny, coloured paper. I took a deep breath and blew the candles out. Then I pulled off the tape and tore the paper aside. For weeks I had been bugging my mother to buy me shoes like the ones everybody else was wearing. She had categorically refused, saying that they were inappropriate for children and that you couldn't walk properly in them. And now, there they were in front of me: black suede ballerinas with a narrow strap across the instep; underneath, a thick corrugated rubber platform sole. I was delighted! Those shoes, which immediately added three centimetres to my height, would most certainly pave the way for my new self-assured life to begin.

My last present from my mother. And he had burned them. In doing so, he had not only taken from me yet another link to my old life, but also a symbol of the strength that I had hoped to glean from those shoes.

Now the kidnapper gave me one of his old jumpers and khakigreen fine-rib T-shirts that he had obviously kept from his military conscription. It mitigated the outer cold in the night. To protect myself against the cold that seized me on the inside, I continued to wear one of my own items of clothing.

After two weeks he brought me a sunlounger to replace the thin foam mat. The reclining surface was suspended on metal springs that squeaked at the slightest movement. For the next half-year this sound would be my companion during the long days and nights in my dungeon. Because I froze so - it was chilly in the dungeon all year round - the kidnapper dragged a large, heavy electric heater to the tiny room. And he brought my school things back. The bag, so he told me, had been burned along with my shoes.

My first thought was to send my parents a message. I took out paper and a pen and began to write to them. I spent many hours carefully wording that letter - and even found a way to tell them where I was. I knew that I was being held somewhere in Strasshof, where my sister's parents-in-law lived. I hoped that the mention of her family would be enough to put my parents - and the police - on the right trail.

To prove that I had written the letter myself, I enclosed a photograph from my pencil case, of me ice-skating the previous winter, wrapped up in thick overalls, a smile on my face and my cheeks red. It seemed a snapshot from a world very far away, a world filled with the loud laughing of children, pop music from rattling loudspeakers and vast swathes of cold, fresh air. A world where, after spending an afternoon on the ice, you could go home, take a hot bath and watch TV while drinking hot chocolate. I stared at the photograph for minutes on end, memorizing every detail so as never to forget the feeling I associated with that outing. I probably knew that I would have to preserve every single happy memory in order to recall them in the darkest moments. Then I placed the photograph with the letter and made an envelope from another sheet of paper.

With a mixture of naivety and confidence, I waited for the kidnapper.

When he came, I made an effort to be calm and friendly. 'You have to send this letter to my parents so that they know that I'm alive!' He opened the envelope, read what I had written, and refused. I begged and pleaded with him not to leave my parents in the dark much longer. I appealed to the conscience I presumed him to have. 'You mustn't turn into such a bad person,' I told him.

What he had done was wrong, but making my parents suffer was much worse. I kept searching for new reasons why and wherefore, and assured him that nothing could happen to him as a result of the letter. He had read it himself and could see that I had not betrayed him ... The kidnapper said 'no' for a long time - then suddenly gave in. He assured me that he would post the letter to my parents.

It was completely naive of me, but I so wanted to believe him. I lay down on my sunlounger and imagined how my parents would open the letter, how they would find the hidden clues and rescue me. Patience, I just had to have a little patience, and then this nightmare would be over.

The next day, my fantasy came crashing down like a house of cards. The kidnapper came into my dungeon with an injured finger, claiming that 'someone' had torn the letter from him in a dispute, injuring him as he fought to get it back. He hinted that it had been the people who supposedly had ordered my abduction and who didn't want me to contact my parents. The fictitious 'bad guys' from the pornography ring became threateningly real. At the same time, the kidnapper donned the role of protector. After all, he had wanted to grant my request and had made such a great effort that he had been hurt in the process.

Today I know that he had never intended to post that letter and had probably burned it, just like all the other objects that he had taken from me. Back then I wanted to believe him.

In the first few weeks the kidnapper did everything to avoid destroying his image as my purported protector. He even fulfilled my greatest wish: a computer. It was an old Commodore C64 with very little memory capaciry. But it came with a few floppy disks with games I could use to distract myself My favourite was an 'eating' game. You moved a small man through an underground labyrinth in order to avoid monsters and 'eat up' bonus points. It was a somewhat more sophisticated version of Pac-Man. I spent hours and hours scoring points. When the kidnapper was in the dungeon, we sometimes played together on a split screen. Back then he often let me, the small child, win. Today I see the analogy to my own situation in the cellar, where monsters were able to penetrate at any time, monsters that you had to run away from. My bonus points were rewards, like the computer, 'won' by 'impeccable' behaviour.

When I got tired of that one, I switched to Space Pilot, where you had to fly through space and shoot alien spaceships. The third game on my C64 was a strategic game called Kaiser, or Emperor. In it, you ruled over people and challenged others to become Emperor. He liked that game best. He would send his people to war with enthusiasm. He would also let them starve or make them perform forced labour as long as it served to increase his power and wouldn't decimate the hordes he needed for his armies.

All of this still took place in a virtual world. But it wouldn't take long for him to show me his other face.

'If you don't do what I tell you, I will have to turn your light off.ff

'If you're not good, then I'll have to tie you up.'

In my situation I had absolutely no chance of not being 'good', and I didn't know what he meant. Sometimes a sudden movement on my part was enough to cause his mood to change. Or when I looked directly at him, despite his order that I should keep my eyes strictly on the floor. Everything that didn't fit the fixed template that he had prescribed for my behaviour spurred his paranoia. Then he would berate me and accuse me time and time again of only wanting to trick him, deceive him. It was in all likelihood the uncertainty about whether I really could communicate with the outside world that drove him to abuse me verbally like that. He did not like it when I insisted on my point of view that he was wrongly accusing me. He wanted recognition when he brought me something, praise for the effort that he had had to undertake on my account - for example, in dragging the heavy heater down into the dungeon. Even back then he began to demand gratitude from me. And even back then I tried to deny it to him as much as I could, saying, 'I'm only here because you've locked me up.' Secretly, I couldn't do anything but rejoice when he brought me food and other items I desperately needed.

Today, as an adult, it seems amazing to me that my fear, my recurrent panic, was not directed towards the kidnapper's person. It may have been my reaction to his nondescript appearance and his insecurity, or his strategy aimed at giving me as much of a sense of security as possible in this unbearable situation by making himself indispensable as an attachment figure. The threatening part of my situation was the dungeon under the earth, the closedin walls and locked door, and the people who had supposedly ordered my abduction. The kidnapper himself created the impression sometimes that his crime had been merely a pose that he had struck, but which did not fit with his personality. In my childish imagination, he had decided at some point to become a criminal and commit an evil deed. I never doubted that his actions constituted a crime that had to be punished. But I separated the crime distinctly from the person who had committed it. The bad guy was most certainly a role he was only playing.

'From now you'll have to cook for yourself.'

One morning during the first week, the kidnapper came into the dungeon carrying a box made out of dark plywood. He put it up against the wall, put a hotplate and a small oven on it and plugged both of them in. Then he disappeared again. When he came back, he was carrying a stainless-steel pot and a pile of readyto-eat food: tins of beans and goulash, and a selection of those instant meals that come in small white plastic dishes and colourful cardboard packages and are warmed using steam. Then he explained to me how the hotplate worked.

I was happy to have got back a small piece of my independence. But when I poured the first tin of beans into the small pot and placed it on the hotplate, I didn't know how hot to make it or how long it would take for the food to cook. I had never cooked anything before, and I felt alone and out of my depth. And I missed my mother.

Looking back, it seems astonishing to me that he let a tenyear-old cook, especially as he was otherwise so keen to see me as the small, helpless child. But from then on, I warmed one meal a day on the hotplate myself. The kidnapper came to the dungeon every morning and then one more time, either at noon or in the evening. In the morning he brought me a cup of tea or hot chocolate, a piece of cake or a bowl of cereal. At noon or in the evening, depending on when he had time, he would come with tomato salad and cold-cut sandwiches, or with a hot meal that he shared with me. Noodles with meat and sauce, a rice dish with meat, Austrian home-style cooking that his mother had made for him.

Back then I had no idea where the food came from or how he lived. Or whether he even had a family who was in on his crime and sat comfortably with him in his living room, while I lay on my thin mattress in the basement. Or whether the people who had supposedly ordered my abduction lived up in the house with him, only sending him down to bring me proper supplies. In fact, he made certain that I ate healthy food and regularly brought me dairy products and fruit.

One day he brought me a couple of lemons, which gave me an idea. It was a childish and naive plan, but it seemed ingenious to me at the time: I was going to fake an illness which would force the kidnapper to take me to a doctor. I had always heard my grandmother and her friends tell stories about the time during the Russian occupation in eastern Austria after World War II, how the women avoided being raped or carried off, which was the order of the day back then. One of their tricks was to smear red jam into their face so that it looked like an awful skin disease. Yet another trick involved lemons.

Once I was alone again, I took my ruler and carefully separated the razor-thin skin from the fleshy part of the lemon and carefully glued it to my arm using lotion. It looked disgusting, as if I truly had a purulent infection. When the kidnapper came back, I held up my arm to him and faked terrible pain. I whimpered and asked him to please take me to the doctor. He stared at me steadfastly, then with one gesture he wiped the lemon skin from my arm.

That day he turned my light off. Lying in the darkness, I racked my brains to think of more ways I could try to force him to let me go. I couldn't think of any.

My only hope in those days rested with the police. At that point I was still counting on being freed and hoped that my rescue would take place before he handed me over to the ominous people who had ostensibly ordered my abduction - or found somebody else who could figure out what to do with an abducted girl. Every day I waited for men in uniform to break down the walls of my dungeon. In fact, in the world outside the large-scale search for me had been called off after only three days. The search of the surroundings had been unsuccessful and now the police were questioning all the people closest to me. Only the media issued daily requests for information, with my picture and always the same description:

The girl is about 1.45 metres tall, weighing forty-five kilograms and has a plump stature. She has straight, light-brown hair with a fringe and blue eyes. At the time of her disappearance, the ten-year-old was wearing a red ski jacket with a hood, a denim dress with a top whose sleeves are grey-and-white checked, light blue tights and black suede shoes size 34. Natascha Kampusch wears glasses with light-blue plastic oval frames and a yellow nose bridge. According to the police, she has a slight squint. The girl was carrying a blue plastic rucksack with a yellow cover and turquoise straps.

From the case file I know that over 130 tips had been received after four days. People said they had seen me with my mother in a supermarket in Vienna, alone at a motorway rest stop, once in the town of Wels and three times in the province of Tyrol. The police in Kitzbuhel, Tyrol, searched for me for days. A team of Austrian law enforcement officers travelled to Hungary where somebody reported having seen me in Sopron. The small Hungarian village where I had spent the previous weekend with my father at his holiday house was searched systematically from top to bottom by the Hungarian police. A neighbourhood watch was set up, and my father's house was placed under surveillance, because it was thought that I still had my child's photo identification with me from the weekend and could have run away there. One man called the police and demanded a ransom of one million Austrian schillings for me. A copycat and a con-artist, like so many to come.

Six days after my abduction, the head of the investigation told the media, 'In Austria, as in Hungary, uniformed police officers are searching for Natascha by putting up posters. No one is giving up. However, the hope of finding the child alive has vanished.' Not one of the many tips turned out to lead to a hot trail.

And yet, the police failed to pursue the one tip that would have led them to me: on Tuesday, one day after my abduction, a twelveyear-old girl reported having seen a child abducted in a white delivery van with darkened windows on Melangasse. However, the police did not at first take this piece of information seriously.

In my dungeon I had no idea that the outside world had already begun grappling with the thought that I could be dead. I was convinced that the large-scale search was still underway. Whenever I lay on my sunlounger, staring at the low, white ceiling with the bare bulb, I imagined the police talking to each one of my schoolmates, and played their answers through in my mind. I pictured the women who supervised afterschool care, as they described again and again when and where they had seen me for the last time. I considered who of our many neighbours would have watched me leave the house, and if anyone had witnessed the abduction and seen the white delivery van on Melangasse.

Even more intensely, I pondered fantasies that the kidnapper had demanded a ransom after all and would let me go once the money was handed over. Every time I warmed my food on the hotplate, I carefully tore off the small pictures of the meals and hid them in the pocket of my dress. I knew from films that kidnappers sometimes had to prove that their victims were still alive for the ransom to be handed over. I was prepared: with the pictures I could prove that I had regularly had something to eat. And I could also use them to prove to myself that I was still alive.

To be on the safe side, I chipped off a small piece of the veneer from the hotplate and placed it in my dress pocket as well. That way nothing could go wrong. I imagined that the kidnapper would drop me off at an undisclosed location after the payment of the ransom and leave me alone there. My parents would be told of my location and come to get me. Afterwards we would alert the police, and I would hand over the veneer chip to the officers. Then all the police would have to do would be to search all of the garages in Strasshof for basement dungeons. The hotplate with the missing chip from its veneer would be the vital piece of evidence.

In my head I stored every detail I knew about the kidnapper so that I could describe him after I was set free. I was largely limited to outside appearance, which disclosed little about him. When he visited me in the dungeon, he wore old T-shirts and Adidas tracksuit bottoms - practical clothing so that he could fit through the narrow passageway which led to my prison.

How old did I think he was? I compared him to the adults in my family: younger than my mother, but older than my sisters who, back then, were around thirty. Although he looked young, one time I came straight out and said, 'You are thirty-five.' I didn't find out until much later that I was correct.

But I did, in fact, find out his name - only to immediately forget it. 'Look, that's my name,' he said once, annoyed by my constant questions, holding his business card in front of my face for a number of seconds. 'Wolfgang Priklopil' it said. 'Of course, that's not really my name,' he quickly added, laughing. I believed him. It didn't seem credible that a dangerous criminal would have such a mundane name as 'Wolfgang'. I could hardly decipher his last name so quickly anyway. It is difficult and hard for an overwrought child to remember. 'Or maybe my name is Holzapfel,' he asserted, before he closed the door behind him once again. At the time I had no idea what that name was supposed to mean. Today I know that Ernst Holzapfel was something akin to Wolfgang Priklopil's best friend.

The closer 25 March came, the more nervous I grew. Since my abduction I had asked Priklopil every day what the date and time were in order to keep from becoming completely disorientated. For me there was no day or night, and although spring had sprung outside, my dungeon became freezing cold as soon as I turned off the heater. One morning he answered, 'Monday, 23 March.' I had not had even the slightest contact with the outside world for three weeks. And my mother's birthday was in two days.

That date was highly symbolic for me. If I was forced to see it go by without wishing my mother a happy birthday, my imprisonment would have gone from a temporary nightmare to something undeniably real. Until now I had only missed a few days of school. But not being home for an important family celebration would be a significant milestone. 'That was the birthday Natascha wasn't here,' I heard my mother telling her grandchildren, looking back. Or even worse: 'That was the first birthday Natascha wasn't here.'

It troubled me deeply that I had left her in anger and now I could not even tell my mother on her birthday that I hadn't meant it and loved her after all. I tried to stop time in my head, tried in desperation to think of how I could send her a message. Maybe it would work out this time, unlike with my letter. I would forgo leaving any hidden hints of my location in the letter. A sign of life for her birthday, that was all I wanted.

At our next meal together, I pleaded with the kidnapper for so long that he said he would bring a cassette recorder to the dungeon the next day. I would be able to record a message for my mother!

I gathered up all my strength to sound cheerful on the tape: 'Dear Mummy. I am fine. Don't worry about me. Happy birthday. I miss you enormously.' I had to stop several times because tears were pouring down my cheeks and I didn't want my mother to hear me sob.

When I was finished, Priklopil took the cassette and assured me that he would call my mother and play it for her. I didn't want anything more than to believe him. For me it was an immense relief that my mother would now not have to worry so much about me.

She never heard the tape.

For the kidnapper, his assertion that he had played the recording for my mother was an important manoeuvre in his manipulative bid for dominance, because shortly thereafter he changed his strategy. He no longer spoke of the people who had supposedly ordered my abduction, but rather of a kidnapping for ransom.

He maintained again and again that he had contacted my parents, but they obviously had no interest in seeing me freed: 'Your parents don't love you at all.' 'They don't want you back.'

'They are happy to finally be rid of you.'

These statements were like acid, penetrating the open wounds of a child who had previously felt unloved. Although I never once believed that my parents did not want to see me free, I knew that they didn't have much money. But I was completely convinced that they would do everything they could to come up with the ransom somehow.

'I know my parents love me. They've always told me so,' I told him, bravely resisting the kidnapper's malicious remarks, the kidnapper who very much regretted unfortunately never having received an answer from them.

But the doubts that had been planted before my imprisonment cropped up.

He systematically undermined my belief in my family, and with it an important pillar of my already tattered self-esteem. The certainty of having my family behind me, a family that would do everything to rescue me, slowly faded. Because days and days passed, and nobody came to free me.

Why had I, of all people, become a victim of such a crime? Why had he picked me out and locked me up? Those questions began to torture me, and they still occupy my thoughts today. It was so difficult to comprehend the reasons for his crime that I cast about desperately for an answer. I wanted the abduction to have some kind of meaning, a clear logic that had remained hidden to me up until that point, which would make it more than just a random attack against me. Even today it is difficult to cope with knowing that I forfeited my youth just to a whim and the mental illness of one single man.

I never received an answer to that question from the kidnapper himself, although I continued to probe time and again. Only once did he say, 'I saw you in a school picture and picked you out.' But then he immediately retracted his statement. Later he would say, 'You came to me like a stray cat. Cats you are allowed to keep.' Or, 'I saved you. You should be grateful.' Towards the end of my imprisonment, he was probably the most honest: 'I always wanted to have a slave.' But years would pass before he would say those words.

I have never found out why he chose to abduct me of all people. Because it seemed the obvious choice to select me as a victim? Priklopil grew up in the same district of Vienna as I did. During the time I accompanied my father on his delivery rounds to the bars, he was a young man at the end of his twenties, moving in the same shady circles that we did. During my primary school years I was amazed again and again at how many people greeted me so cheerfully because they recognized me from my father's delivery round. He may have been one of the men who noticed me then.

It is possible, however, that other people brought me to his attention. Perhaps his story about the pornography ring was true. Back then there were enough such organizations in Germany and Austria which would not have hesitated to abduct children for their cruel purposes. And the discovery of a dungeon in Marc Dutroux's house in Belgium had been made only two years previously. Still, I do not know even today whether Priklopil - as he continued to claim in the beginning - had kidnapped me on the orders of others, or whether he acted alone. It is too frightening to speculate that somewhere out there the true culprits are still free. However, during my imprisonment there was no indication of any criminal accomplices, aside from the initial references made by Priklopil.

Back then, I had a very clear picture of what abduction victims looked like. They were blonde girls, small and very thin, nearly transparent, who floated helplessly and angelically through the world. I imagined them as creatures whose hair was so silky that one absolutely had to touch it. Their beauty intoxicated sick men, making them commit crimes of violence just to be near them. I, on the other hand, was dark-haired, and felt cloddish and unattractive. And more so than ever on the morning of my abduction. I didn't fit my own image of a kidnapped girl.

Looking back, I know that this image was skewed. It is the nondescript children with very little self-esteem that criminals choose to prey on. Beauty is not a factor in abduction or sexual violence. Studies have shown that mentally and physically disabled persons, as well as children with few family connections, run a higher risk of falling victim to a criminal. Next in the 'rankings' come children such as I was on the morning of z March: I was intimidated, afraid and had just stopped crying. I was insecure, walking to school on my own for the first time, and my small steps were hesitant. Perhaps he saw that. Perhaps he noticed how worthless I felt and decided spontaneously that day that I was to be his victim.

Lacking any outward indication as to why I of all people had become his victim, back in the dungeon I began to blame myself. The arguments with my mother the evening before my abduction ran on endless repeat before my eyes. I was afraid of the thought that the abduction had been my punishment for having been a bad daughter, for having left without making any attempt at reconciliation. I turned everything over and over in my head. I examined my past for all the mistakes I had made. Every little unkind word. Every situation in which I had not been polite, good or nice. Today I know that it is common for victims to blame themselves for the crime perpetrated against them. Back then it was a maelstrom that swept me along and I could do nothing to resist it.

The excruciating brightness that had kept me awake during my first few nights had given way to total darkness. When the kidnapper unscrewed the light bulb in the evening and closed the door behind him, I felt as if I had been cut off from everything: blind, deaf from the constant whirring of the fan, unable to orientate myself spatially or sometimes even sense myself Psychologists call this 'sensory deprivation'. Being cut off from all sensory input. Back then the only thing I knew was that I was in danger of losing my mind in that lonely darkness.

From the moment when he left me alone in the evening until breakfast the next day, I was trapped in a state of uncertainty, completely devoid of light. I could do nothing other than lie there and stare into the darkness. Sometimes I still screamed or beat against the walls in the desperate hope that somebody would hear me.

In all my fear and loneliness, I had to rely only on myself I tried to buck myself up and fight back my panic using 'rational' means. These were words that saved me back then. Like others who crochet for hours and have a fine doily to show for their efforts, I wove words together in my head, writing long letters to myself and short stories that nobody would put on paper.

The point of departure for my stories was mainly my plans for the future. I imagined every detail of how life would be after my rescue. I would do better at' all of my subjects at school and overcome my fear of other people. I promised myself to exercise more and lose weight so that I could take part in the other children's games. I pictured myself going to another school once I was freed - after all, I was in fourth grade*{* In the Austrian school system, fourth grade marks the end of the primary school phase, after which the pupils switch schools, choosing which kind of educational path to take, i.e. either aimed at learning a trade or eventually going to university} - and how the other kids would react to me. Would they know me from the reports of my abduction? Would they believe me and accept me as one of their own? What I liked best was to imagine myself reuniting with my parents. How they would take me in their arms, how my father would lift me up and toss me through the air. How the intact world of my earlier childhood would return, making me forget the period of quarrelling and humiliation.

Other nights, such visions of the future were not enough. Then I took on the role of my absent mother, in a way splitting myself into two parts and giving myself encouragement: 'This is just like a holiday. Although you're away from home, on holiday you can't just call on the telephone. There is no telephone on holiday, and you can't interrupt a holiday just because you've had one bad night. And when the holiday's over, you'll come back home to us, and then school will be starting up again.'

During these monologues I pictured my mother in front of me. I heard her say with a determined voice, 'Get yourself together, there's no point in getting all worked up. You have to get through this, and afterwards everything will be okay again.' Yes. If I could only be strong, everything would be okay again.

And when none of that helped, I tried to recall a situation in which I had felt safe and loved. A bottle of Franzbranntwein that I had asked the kidnapper to get for me helped. My grandmother had always rubbed it on her skin. The sharp, fresh odour immediately transported me to her house in Sussenbrunn and gave me a warm sense of security. When my brain was no longer enough, my nose took over, helping me not to lose my connection to myself - and my mind.

Over time I tried to become accustomed to the kidnapper. I intuitively adapted myself to him, the way you adapt to the incomprehensible customs of people in a foreign country.

Today I think the fact that I was still a child may have helped me. As an adult, I don't think I would have been able to get through, even partially intact, this extreme form of being told exactly what to do and the psychological torture I was subjected to as a prisoner in the cellar. From the very beginning of their lives children are programmed to perceive the adults closest to them as unquestioned authorities, who provide orientation and set the standards for what is right and what is wrong. Children are told what to wear and when to go to bed. They are to eat what is put on the table, and anything undesirable is suppressed. Parents are always denying their children something they want to have. Even when adults take chocolate away from children, or the few euros they received from a relative for their birthday, that constitutes interference. Children must learn to accept that and trust that their parents are doing the right thing. Otherwise the discrepancy between their own desires and the discouraging behaviour of their loved ones will break them.

I was used to following instructions from adults, even when it went against the grain. If it had been up to me, I never would have gone to afterschool care. Particularly to one which dictated to children when they were allowed to take care of their most basic bodily functions, i.e. when they could eat, sleep or go to the toilet. And I would not have gone to my mother's shop every day after afterschool care, where I attempted to stave off boredom by eating ice cream and pickles.

Even robbing children of their freedom, at least temporarily, was to me nothing outside the realm of the conceivable, although I had never experienced it myself. Back then in some families it was still common to punish unruly children by locking them in a dark cellar. And old women on the tram scolded mothers of misbehaving children by saying, 'Well, if it was mine, I would lock it up.'

Children can adapt even to the most adverse circumstances. In the parents who beat them, they still see the part that loves them, and in a mouldy shack they see their home. My new home was a dungeon, my attachment figure, the kidnapper. My whole world had veered off course, and he was the only person in this nightmare which had become my world. I was completely dependent on him, as only infants and toddlers are on their parents. Every gesture of affection, every bite of food, light, air - my entire physical and psychological survival depended on the one man who had locked me in his basement dungeon. And in claiming that my parents failed to respond to his demands for ransom, he made me emotionally dependent on him as well.

If I wanted to survive in this new world, I had to cooperate with him. For somebody who has never been in such an extreme situation of oppression, this may be difficult to comprehend. But today I am proud of the fact that I was able to take this step towards the person who had robbed me of everything. Because that step saved my life, even though I had to dedicate more and more energy to maintaining this 'positive approach' to the kidnapper. He successively transformed himself into a slave driver and dictator. But I never departed from my image of him.

Still, his outward show of playing benefactor by trying to make my life in the dungeon as pleasant as possible remained intact. In fact, a kind of daily routine developed. Several weeks after the abduction, Priklopil brought into the dungeon a patio table, two folding chairs, a dishtowel I was permitted to use as a tablecloth and some dishes. When the kidnapper arrived with food, I would put the dishtowel on the table. I would place two glasses on it and put the forks neatly next to the plates. The only thing missing was serviettes, which he was too miserly to provide. Then we would sit down together at the folding table, eat the pre-cooked meal and drink fruit juice. At that time he was not yet rationing anything and I enjoyed being able to drink as much as I wanted. A kind of cosiness set in and I began to look forward to these meals together with the kidnapper. They broke up my loneliness. They became important to me.

These situations were so entirely absurd that I was unable to put them in any sort of familiar category from my world up until that point in time - this small, dark world that suddenly held me captive had in every way so little in common with any standard of normality. I had to create new standards. Perhaps I was in a fairy tale? In a place taken from the imaginings of the Brothers Grimm, far away from the normal world? Of course. Hadn't an aura of evil already enshrouded Strasshof from before? My sister's despised in-laws lived in a section of Strasshof called 'Silberwald', literally 'Silver Forest'. As a small child, I had been afraid of meeting them during their visits to my sister's flat. The place name and the negative atmosphere in that family had already turned Silberwald - and therefore Strasshof - into a forest under a witch's spell even before my kidnapping. Yes, I had certainly ended up in a fairy tale, whose deeper meaning was unknown to me.

The only thing that did not sit well with the evil fairy tale was the bathing in the evening. I couldn't remember ever reading anything about bathing in fairy tales. The dungeon had only a double stainless-steel sink and cold water. The hot water pipes the kidnapper had installed were not yet functional, which is why he brought me warm water in plastic bottles. I had to undress, sit in one of the sinks and put my feet in the other. In the beginning he simply poured warm water over me. Later I came up with the idea of punching small holes in the bottles to make a kind of shower. Because there was very little room to move about, he had to help me wash. I was unaccustomed to being naked in front of him, a strange man. What was he thinking all the while? I eyed him uncertainly, but he scrubbed me down like a car. There was neither anything tender nor anything salacious in his gestures. He attended to me as one would maintain a household appliance.

It was exactly at the time when the image of the evil fairy tale imposed itself on my reality that the police finally began to follow up the tip provided by the girl who had witnessed my abduction.

On 18 March the statement of that single witness was published, together with the announcement that the owners of 700 white delivery vans would be examined over the next few days. The kidnapper had enough time to prepare.

On Good Friday, the thirty-fifth day of my imprisonment, the police came to Strasshof and demanded that Wolfgang Priklopil show them his car. He had filled it with construction debris and told the police that he was using the delivery van for renovation work on his house. On a March, Priklopil said, according to police records, he had spent the whole day at home and that there were no witnesses. The kidnapper had no alibi, a fact that the police continued to cover up even years after I had escaped.

The police were satisfied and decided to forgo searching the house, which Priklopil supposedly freely invited them to do. While I sat in the dungeon, waiting to be rescued and trying not to lose my mind, they merely took a few Polaroid photographs of the car I had been kidnapped in and added them to my case files. In my rescue fantasies down in the cellar, specialists combed the area, looking for traces of my DNA or tiny pieces of fabric from my clothing. But, above ground, things were different; the police did none of that. They apologized to Priklopil and left without ever having examined the car or the house any more closely.

I didn't find out until after I had escaped how close the kidnapper had come to being arrested if only the police had truly taken the matter seriously. However, only two days later it became clear to me that I would never go free.

In 1998 Easter Sunday fell on ra April. The kidnapper brought me a small basket with colourful chocolate eggs and a chocolate Easter bunny. We 'celebrated' Christ's resurrection in the light of the bare light bulb, sitting at a small patio table in my airless dungeon. I was happy to receive the goodies and tried with all my might to push aside my thoughts of the outside world, of Easter celebrations in previous years. Grass. Light. Sun. Trees. Air. People. My parents.

That day the kidnapper told me that he had given up hope of ransoming me, because my parents had still not got in touch with him. 'Obviously they don't care about you enough,' he said. Then came the judgement. A life sentence. 'You've seen my face and you know me already too well. Now I can no longer let you go. I will never take you back to your parents, but I will take care of you here as well as I can.'

All my hopes were dashed at a stroke that Easter Sunday. I cried and begged him to let me go. 'But I have my whole life ahead of me. You can't just lock me up here! What about school, what about my parents?' I swore to God and everything that I held sacred that I wouldn't betray him. But he didn't believe me, saying that once free I would forget my oath only too quickly, or give in to pressure from the police. I tried to make it clear to him that he didn't want to spend the rest of his life with a crime victim in the cellar, and begged him to blindfold me and take me far away. I would never find the house again and I had no name that would lead the police to him. I even made plans for him to escape. He could go abroad; after all, life in another country would be much better than locking me away forever in a dungeon and having to take care of me.

I whimpered, begged and at some point I began to scream, 'The police will find me! And then they will lock you up. Or shoot you dead! And if not, then my parents will find me!' My voice cracked.

Priklopil remained completely calm. 'They don't care about you, have you already forgotten? And if they come to the house, I will kill them.' Then he left the dungeon backwards, closing the door from the outside.

I was alone.

It wasn't until ten years later, two long years after my escape and in the wake of a police scandal centring on the errors in the investigation and their cover-up that I found out I had come close to being rescued a second time that Easter holiday without even knowing it. On 14 April, the Tuesday after Easter, the police made public yet another tip. Witnesses had told them that they had seen a delivery van with darkened windows in the vicinity of my council estate the morning of my abduction. The number plate read 'Ganserndorf', the administrative district where Strasshof was located.

However, the police did not make public a second tip. A member of the Vienna police's canine unit had called the police station. The officer on duty recorded the following report from him verbatim:

On 14 April 1998 at 2.45 p.m. an unknown person called and reported the following information:

Regarding the search for a white delivery vehicle with darkened windows in the district of Ganserndorf and with regards to the disappearance of Kampusch, Natasche [sic!], there is a person in Strasshof/Nordbahn who could be connected to her disappearance and owns a white delivery van, model Mercedes, with darkened windows. This man is known as a 'loner' who has extreme difficulties relating to his environment and problems dealing with other people. He is said to be living with his mother in Strasshof/Nordbahn, Heinestrasse Go (single-family dwelling), which is fully equipped with an electric alarm system. The man reportedly may have weapons in the house. His white delivery van, model Mercedes, number plate unknown, has often been seen in front of his house at Heinestrasse 6o with completely darkened windows along the sides and in the back. The man was previously employed by SIEMENS as a communication engineer and may still be working there. It is possible that the man lives in the house with his elderly mother and is said to have a penchant for 'children' with regard to his sexuality. It is unknown whether he has any prior police record in that regard.

The man's name was not known to the caller, who only knows him from the neighbourhood. The man is approximately thirty-five years old, has blond hair, is lanky and r75-18o centimetres tall. The anonymous caller was not able to provide any information that was more specific.

4

Buried Alive

The Nightmare Begins

The rabbit-hole went straight on like a tunnel for some way, and then dipped suddenly down, so suddenly that Alice had not a moment to think about stopping herself before she found herself falling down what seemed to be a very deep well. [ . . . ] Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end? [ . . . ]

'Come, there's no use in crying like that!' said Alice to herself, rather sharply. I advise you to leave off this minute!' She generally gave herself very good advice (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. 'But it's no use now,' thought poor Alice, 'to pretend to be two people! Why, there's hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!'

Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

One of the first books I read in the dungeon was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. The book touched me in an unpleasant, spooky way. Alice, a girl probably my age, follows a talking white rabbit into its hole in a dream. As soon as she enters, she falls down into the depths and lands in a room with doors all around. She's trapped in an in-between world under the earth, and the way up is blocked. Alice finds a key to the smallest door and a small bottle with a magic potion that makes her shrink. She has hardly gone through the tiny opening when the door closes behind her. In the underground world she has now entered, nothing seems right. Sizes change constantly, the talking animals she meets there do things that defy all logic. But nobody seems to be bothered by it. Everything is madly off-kilter, off-balance. The entire book is one single, lurid nightmare, in which all of the laws of nature have been suspended. Nothing and no one is normal. The girl is all alone in a world that she does not understand, where she has no one to confide in. She has to buck herself up, forbid herself to cry and act according to the rules of others. She attends the Mad Hatter's endless tea parties where all sorts of crazy guests cavort, and takes part in the Queen of Heart's cruel game of croquet, at the end of which all the other players are sentenced to death. 'Off with their heads!' shouts the Queen, laughing madly.

Alice is able to leave this world deep below the earth because she wakes up from her dream. When I opened my eyes after just a few hours of sleep, my nightmare was still there. It was my reality.

The entire book seemed like an exaggerated description of my own situation. I too was trapped beneath the ground in a room that the kidnapper had secured against the outside world with a number of doors. And I too found myself trapped in a world where all the rules I was familiar with no longer applied. Everything that had held true in my life until that point was meaningless here. I had become part of a psychopath's sick fantasy, a fantasy I did not understand. Could not understand. There was no link any more to the other world I had just recently been a part of. No familiar voice, no familiar sounds that would prove to me that the world up above was still there. How was I supposed to maintain a link to the real world and to myself in that situation?

I hoped against hope that I, like Alice, would suddenly awake. In my old room, amazed at my crazy, frightening dream that had nothing in common with my 'real world'. But it wasn't my dream I was trapped in, it was my kidnapper's. And he wasn't sleeping either, but had dedicated his life to turning a terrible fantasy into reality, a fantasy from which there was no escape, not even for him.

From that time on I ceased all attempts to persuade the kidnapper to let me go. I knew that there was no point.

The world I was living in had shrunk to five square metres. If I wasn't to go crazy in it, I would have to try to conquer it for myself. And not wait, trembling, for the cruel call 'Off with her head!' like the playing card people from Alice in Wonderland; and not submit like all the other fantasy creatures from that twisted reality. But rather try to create a refuge in this dark place, which the kidnapper could infiltrate but within which I could weave as much as possible of myself and my old world around me - like a protective cocoon.

I began to make myself at home in the dungeon and turn the kidnapper's prison into my space, into my room. The first things I asked for were a calendar and an alarm clock. I was trapped in a time warp where the kidnapper alone was the master of time. The hours and minutes blurred into a thick mass that weighed dully on everything. Like a deity, Priklopil had the power over light and darkness in my world. 'God spoke: Let there be light. And there was light. And God called the light Day and the darkness he called Night.' A bare bulb dictated to me when I was to sleep and when I was to be awake.

I had asked the kidnapper every day what day of the week it was, what the date was. I don't know whether he lied to me, but that didn't matter. The most important thing for me was to feel a connection to my former life 'up there'. Whether it was a school day or a weekend off: Whether bank holidays or birthdays I wanted to spend with my family were drawing near. Measuring time, I learned back then, is probably the most important anchor you can have in a world in which you run the risk of otherwise simply dissolving. The calendar helped me to regain a modicum of orientation - and images that the kidnapper had no access to. I now knew whether other children would be getting up early or were allowed to sleep in. In my imagination I followed my mother's daily routine. Today she would go to the shop. Tomorrow she might visit a friend. And at the weekend she might go on an outing with her boyfriend. In this way the sober numbers and names of the days of the week took on a life of their own, giving me support and structure.

Almost more important was the alarm clock.

I asked for one of those old-fashioned ones that mark the passing of the seconds with a loud monotone ticking sound. My beloved grandmother had such an alarm clock. When I was younger, I had despised the loud ticking that bothered me when I was trying to fall asleep and even crept into my dreams. Now I held tight to that ticking like somebody under water clings on to her last straw in order to get just a little bit of air from above into her lungs. With every tick-tock that alarm clock proved to me that time had not come to a standstill and the earth had continued to turn. In stasis, without any sense of time or space, the alarm clock was my ticking connection to the real world outside.

When I really tried, I could concentrate so intensely on that noise that at least for a couple of minutes I was able to block out the tedious whirring of the fan that filled my room to the threshold of pain. In the evening, as I lay on my lounger unable to fall asleep, the ticking of the alarm clock was like a long lifeline which I could use to climb out of my dungeon and slip into my childhood bed in my grandmother's home. There I was able to fall asleep peacefully in the knowledge that she was in the next room watching over me. On evenings such as these I would often rub some Franzbranntvvein on my hand. When I held it up to my face and the characteristic smell rose into my nose, a feeling of closeness would course through me. Just like back when I would bury my face in my grandmother's apron as a child. In this way I was able to fall sleep.

Throughout the day I busied myself by making the tiny room as habitable as possible. I asked the kidnapper to bring me cleaning supplies so as to ward off the damp smell of cellar and death that hung over everything. A fine, black mould had formed on the floor of the dungeon from the additional moisture caused by my presence. That mould made the air even more stale and breathing even more difficult. In one spot the laminate was moist because dampness had risen up from the ground. The spot was a constant, painful reminder that I was apparently far beneath the earth's surface. The kidnapper brought me a red broom and dustpan set, a bottle of 'Pril' washing-up liquid, an air freshener and exactly those cleaning wipes scented with thyme that I had seen before in television commercials.

Now I carefully swept every corner of my dungeon and wiped the floor clean. I began my scrubbing at the door. The wall there was only slightly wider than the narrow door. From there the wall led at an oblique angle to the part of the room where the toilet and the double sink were. I would spend hours using decalcifying cleaning materials to wipe away the small traces of water drops on the metal of the sink until it took on a brilliant shine, and wipe the toilet so clean that it rose out of the floor like a valuable porcelain flower. Then I worked my way carefully from the door through the rest of the room: first along the longer wall, and then along the shorter one until I reached the narrow wall opposite the door. Finally, I would push my lounger aside and clean the centre of the room. I was very careful not to use too many cleaning wipes so as not to make the damp worse.

When I was finished, a chemical version of freshness, nature and life hung in the air that I soaked up greedily. If I then sprayed a bit of air freshener, I could let myself go for a moment. The lavender scent did not smell particularly good, but it gave me the illusion of meadows in bloom. And when I closed my eyes, the picture printed on the spray can became a set that dropped down in front of the walls of my prison. In my thoughts I ran along the endless, blue-violet rows of lavender, felt the earth beneath my feet and smelled the tangy scent of the flowers. The warm air was filled with the buzzing of bees and the sun burned down on the back of my neck. Above me, the cerulean sky, endlessly high, endlessly wide. The fields extended to the horizon, with no walls, with no limitations. I ran so fast that I had the feeling that I could fly. And nothing in this blue-violet endlessness stopped me.

When I opened my eyes again, the bare walls brought me back from my fantasy journey with a thud.

Images. I needed more images, images from my world that I could shape. That did not fit the kidnapper's sick fantasy that jumped out at me from every corner of the room. Slowly but surely I began to turn the tongue-and-groove wood panels covering the walls into colourful pictures using the crayons from my school bag. I wanted to leave something of me behind, the way prisoners write on the walls of their cells. Drawing images and making notches for every single day, and writing sayings. Prisoners don't do that out of boredom, I now understood. Drawing is a way to counter the feeling of powerlessness and of being at the mercy of others. They do it to prove to themselves and all those who ever enter that cell that they exist - or at least had once existed.

Drawing my murals served another purpose: I created a film set in which I could imagine that I was home. First I tried to draw the entryway to our apartment. I drew a long door handle on the door to the dungeon, the small dresser that still stands in the hallway in my mother's flat today on the wall next to it. Meticulously I outlined it and drew the handles of the drawers. I didn't have enough crayons to draw more, but it was enough to create the illusion. Now when I lay on my lounger looking at the door, I could imagine that it would open at any moment and my mother would walk in to greet me, placing her key on the dresser.

The next thing I drew on the wall was a family tree. My name was all the way at the bottom, then came the names of my sisters, their husbands and children, then my mother's and her boyfriend's, my father's and his girlfriend's, and then the names of my grandparents. I spent a lot of time designing my family tree. It gave me a place in the world and assured me that I was part of a family, part of a whole unit, and not a free-floating atom meandering in space outside the real world - the way I often felt I was.

I drew a large car on the wall opposite. It was supposed to be a Mercedes SL in silver, my favourite car. I even had a model at home and planned to buy one someday when I was an adult. It had large, full breasts instead of wheels. I had seen that once in some graffiti painted on a concrete wall near our council estate. I don't know exactly why I chose that motif Apparently I wanted something that was strong and presumably grown-up. Over the last few months in primary school I had provoked my teachers at times. Before school started, we were allowed to write on the blackboard with chalk if we erased it in time for class to start. While other children drew flowers and comic characters, I scribbled 'Protest!', 'Revolution!' or 'Teachers out!' It was not behaviour that seemed appropriate in that small classroom of twenty children where we learned our school subjects, sheltered as if in an eternal kindergarten environment. I don't know whether I was further along the path towards puberty than my classmates, or whether I just wanted to show off to those who otherwise only teased me. At any rate, in the dungeon the small rebellion that lay in that drawing gave me strength. Just like the swear word that I wrote on the wall in small letters in a hidden spot: 'a-'. I wanted to show my power to resist; I wanted to do something forbidden. I don't appear to have impressed the kidnapper with it. At least, he refrained from commenting on the picture.

The most important change came as a result of the arrival in my dungeon of a television set and a video recorder. I had asked Priklopil repeatedly for them, and one day he did bring them for me, placing them next to the computer on the dresser. After weeks in which 'life' appeared to me in only one form, namely in the person of the kidnapper, I was now able to bring a colourful imitation of human company into my dungeon with the help of the television screen.

In the beginning, the kidnapper had simply recorded at random the television programmes on a given day. But it was probably too much effort to edit out the news programmes which still reported on the search for me. He never would have allowed me to receive any hint that people in the world outside had not forgotten me. The image that my life was of no value to anyone, particularly to my parents, was, after all, one of the most important psychological instruments he had to keep me pliable and dependent on him.

For that reason he later only recorded individual shows or brought me old video cassettes with films that he had recorded in the early 1990s. The furry alien in ALF, I Dream of Jeannie, Al Bundy in Married with Children and the Taylors from Home Improvement became replacements for family and friends. Every day I looked forward to meeting them again, and observed them probably more closely than any other television viewer. Every facet of their interactions, every scrap of dialogue, no matter how minuscule, fascinated and interested me. I analysed every detail of the set backdrops which demarcated the horizon at my disposal. They were my only 'windows' into other homes, and yet were crafted in such a thin and paltry way that the illusion that I had access to 'real life' quickly caved in. Perhaps that was also one of the reasons why I later found science fiction so gripping: Star Trek, Stargate, Back to the Future, etc ... anything that had to do with space or time travel fascinated me. The heroes in those films strike out to discover new territory, unknown galaxies. And, unlike me, they had the technical means to simply beam themselves away from difficult locations and life-threatening situations.

One spring day that I knew only from the calendar, the kidnapper brought a radio to the dungeon. Inside, I leapt with joy. A radio - that would truly mean a link to the real world! News, the familiar morning shows that I had always listened to in the kitchen while eating breakfast, music - and perhaps an off-hand clue that my parents had not forgotten me after all.

'Of course, you cannot listen to any Austrian stations,' said the kidnapper, destroying my illusions with one casual remark as he plugged the radio into the socket and turned it on. Still, I was able to hear music. But when the announcer said something, I couldn't understand a word. The kidnapper had manipulated the radio so that I could only receive Czech stations.

I spent hours fiddling with the small radio that could have been my gateway to the world outside. Always in the hope of finding a German word, a familiar jingle. Nothing. Only a voice I did not understand. This, on the one hand, gave me the impression that I was not alone, but on the other hand reinforced my feelings of alienation, of being excluded.

Desperate, I turned the knob back and forth, millimetre by millimetre, readjusting the antenna again and again. But outside that one frequency, the only thing I could hear was static.

Later on the kidnapper gave me a Walkman. Because I suspected that he had music from older bands at home, I asked for tapes of The Beatles and Abba. When the light was turned off in the evening, I now no longer had to lie in the darkness with my fear, but could listen to music, as long as the batteries held out. The same songs over and over.

The most important means I had at my disposal for combating boredom and for keeping me from going crazy was books. The first book the kidnapper brought me was The Flying Classroom by Erich Kastner, followed by a series of classics, such as Uncle Tom's Cabin, Robinson Crusoe, Tom Sawyer, Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book, Treasure Island and Kon-Tiki. I devoured the paperback comic books with stories of Donald Duck, his three nephews, his miserly Uncle Scrooge and the inventive Professor Ludwig von Drake. Later I asked for Agatha Christie, whose books I was familiar with from my mother, and read whole piles of crime novels, like Jerry Cotton, and science-fiction stories. The novels catapulted me into another world and absorbed my attention to such an extent that I forgot where I was for hours. And that is precisely what made reading so significant to my survival. While television and radio allowed me to bring the illusion of the company of others into my dungeon, reading enabled me to leave it for hours in my thoughts.

The books by Karl May held a particular importance for me during my initial time in captivity when I was still a ten-year-old girl. I devoured the adventures of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, and read the stories about the North American Wild West. A song sung by German settlers for the dying Winnetou touched me so deeply that I copied it word for word and pasted the paper to the wall using Nivea lotion, as I had neither Sellotape nor any other adhesive or glue in the dungeon. It is a prayer to Mary the mother of God:

The light of day seeks to depart;

Now the quiet night is falling.

Oh, if only the heart's suffering

Could pass just like the day!

I lay my plea at your feet;

Oh carry it upwards to God's throne

And, Madonna, be saluted

In the devout tone of prayer: Ave Maria!

The light of faith seeks to depart;

Now, the night of doubt is falling.

Youth's trust in God

Is to be taken from me.

In old age, Madonna, please preserve

In me my youth's happy confidence.

Shelter my harp and my psalter,

You are my salvation, you are my light! Ave Maria!

The light of life seeks to depart;

Now, death's night is falling.

The soul seeks to spread its wings

And die I must.

Madonna, into your hands

I place my last, fervent plea:

Please solicit for me a trusting end

And a blissful resurrection from the dead! Ave Maria!

I read, whispered and prayed this poem so often that I can still recite it from memory today. It seemed as if it had been written especially for me. The 'light of life' had also been taken away from me, and in dark hours I saw no way out of my dungeon other than death.

The kidnapper knew how dependent I was on a continuous supply of films, music and reading matter, which gave him a new instrument of power over me. By withholding these things, he was able to exert pressure.

Whenever I had behaved 'improperly' in his eyes, I had to count on him slamming shut the door on the world of words and sounds that promised at least somewhat of a diversion. This was particularly awful at the weekend. By now, the kidnapper usually came to my dungeon every day in the morning, and mostly once again in the afternoon or evening. But at the weekend, I was all alone. I wouldn't see him from noon on Friday, sometimes even from Thursday evening, until Sunday. He would bring me two days of ready-to-eat meals, some fresh food and mineral water that he brought from Vienna. And videos and books. During the week I received a video cassette full of television serials, two hours, and when I really begged, four. It wasn't a lot. Every day, I had to get through twenty-four hours all by myself, interrupted only by the kidnapper's visits. At the weekend, I was given four to eight hours of entertainment on cassette, and the next book in the series that I was currently reading. But only if I met his demands. Only when I was 'good' did he give me that vitally important sustenance for my mind. He was the only one who knew what he understood by 'being good'. Sometimes only a minor infraction was enough for him to punish my behaviour.

'You've used too much air freshener. I'm going to take it away from you.'

'You were singing.'

You did this, you did that.

With the videos and books, he knew exactly which button to push. Having torn me away from my real family, it felt as if he had then taken hostage my replacement family, made up of novels and television series, in order to make me do what he said.

The man who had in the beginning made such an effort to make my life in the dungeon 'pleasant' and who had driven to the other side of Vienna just to get a particular audio story starring the character Bibi Blocksberg, had undergone a gradual transformation since he had announced that he would never let me go.

At this time, the kidnapper began to dominate me more and more. Of course, he had had me completely under his control from the very beginning. Locked in his cellar, cooped up in only five square metres of space, I really couldn't do much to oppose him anyway. However, the longer I remained in captivity, the less this obvious manifestation of his power satisfied him. Now he wanted to bring every gesture, every word and every function of my body under his control.

It started with the timer switch. The kidnapper had had the power over light and darkness from the very beginning. When he came down to my dungeon in the morning, he turned on the electricity, and when he left in the evening, he turned it off again. Now he installed a timer switch which controlled the electric power in the room. While in the beginning I had been allowed now and then to have the light on for longer, now I had to submit to a merciless rhythm I had no control over. At seven in the morning, the electricity was turned on. For thirteen hours, I was able to lead a cheap imitation of life in a tiny, airless room: seeing, hearing, feeling warmth and cooking. Everything was synthetic. A light bulb can never replace the sun, ready-to-eat meals are only distantly reminiscent of family dinners around a shared table, and the flat people flickering across the television screen are only an empty substitute for real humans. But as long as the power was on, I could at least maintain the illusion that there was life outside myself.

The electricity was turned off at eight o'clock in the evening. From one second to the next I found myself in total darkness. The television would cease working in the middle of a series, and I had to put my book down in the middle of a sentence. And if I was not already lying in bed, I had to feel my way on all fours to my lounger. Light bulb, television set, the recorder, radio, computer, hotplate, cooker and heat - everything that brought life into my dungeon was turned off. Only the sounds of the ticking alarm clock and the excruciating whirring of the fan filled the room. For the next few hours, I was dependent on my imagination to prevent me from going crazy and keep my fear at bay.

It was a daily rhythm similar to life in a penitentiary, strictly prescribed from the outside, with no second of deviation, no consideration for my needs. It was a demonstration of power. The kidnapper loved schedules, and with the timer switch he imposed them on me.

In the beginning I still had my battery-operated Walkman, which allowed me to keep the leaden darkness at bay somewhat, when the timer switch had decreed that I had exhausted my ration of light and music. But the kidnapper did not like the fact that I could use my Walkman to circumvent his divine command of light and darkness. He began to monitor my battery status. If he thought that I used my Walkman too long or too often, he would take it away from me until I promised to behave better. One time he had apparently not yet closed the outer door to my dungeon, before I was already sitting on my lounger, wearing the headphones from my Walkman and loudly singing along to a Beatles song. He must've heard my voice and came back to the dungeon in a wild rage. Priklopil punished me for singing so loudly by taking away my light and my food. In the next few days I was forced to fall asleep without music.

His second instrument of control was the intercom system. When he came to my dungeon to install the cable, he told me, 'From now on you can ring upstairs and call me.' In the beginning I was very happy about that and I felt as though a great weight of fear had lifted off my chest. The thought that I would suddenly be faced with an emergency had plagued me since the beginning of my imprisonment. Over the weekend at least I was often alone and couldn't even get the attention of the only person who knew where I was, the kidnapper. I had played out innumerable situations in my head. A cable fire, a burst pipe, a sudden allergy attack ... I could even have died a miserable death in the dungeon by choking on some sausage skin, while the kidnapper was at home upstairs. After all, he only came when he wanted to. For that reason the intercom seemed to be a lifeline. It wasn't until later that the real significance of the device dawned on me. An intercom works in both directions. The kidnapper used it to control me. To demonstrate his omnipotence and to assure me that he could hear every sound I made and could comment on everything.

The first version the kidnapper installed consisted essentially of a button that I was to press if I needed something. Then a red light would light up upstairs in a hidden place in his house. However, he wasn't able to see the light every time, nor was he willing to undertake the complicated procedures necessary to open the dungeon without knowing what exactly I wanted. And he couldn't come down at all at the weekends. It was only much later that I found out this was due to his mother's weekend visits, when she would stay overnight in the house. It would have been too much trouble and too conspicuous to remove the many obstacles between the garage and my dungeon as long as she was there.

Shortly thereafter, he replaced the temporary device with another system you could talk through. By pressing the button, he could now issue his instructions and questions to my dungeon. 'Have you rationed your food?'

'Have you brushed your teeth?' 'Have you turned the television off?' 'How many pages have you read?' 'Have you done your maths exercises?'

I jumped out of my skin every time his voice pierced the stillness. He threatened me with consequences because I had been too slow in answering. Or had eaten too much.

'Have you already eaten everything ahead of schedule?' 'Didn't I tell you that you were only allowed to eat one piece of bread in the evening?'

The intercom was the perfect instrument for terrorizing me - until I discovered that it afforded me a little bit of power as well. Looking back today, it seems surprising to me that the kidnapper, with his manifest need to control everything, never figured out that a ten-year-old girl would inspect the device very carefully. But that's exactly what I did after a few days.

The intercom had three buttons. When you pressed 'Speak', the line was open on both ends. This was a setting that he had shown me. If the intercom was on 'Listen', I could hear his voice, but he couldn't hear me. And then there was a third button: when you pressed it, the line was open on my end, but up above everything was silent.

In my direct confrontations with him I had learned to let what he said go in one ear and out the other. Now I had a button that did just that. When these questions, control attempts and accusations got too much for me, I pressed the third button. It gave me deep satisfaction when his voice fell silent and it was I who had pressed the button to make that happen. I loved that button because it enabled me to shut the kidnapper out of my life for a short time. When Priklopil found out about my small, index finger-led rebellion, he was stunned at first, then indignant and angry. It took him nearly an hour to open the many doors and locks every time he wanted to speak to me face to face. But it was clear that he would have to think of something else.

In fact, it wasn't long before he removed the intercom with the wonderful third button. Instead, he came into the dungeon carrying a Siemens radio. He took the insides out of the case and began to tinker with it. At the time I didn't know a thing about the kidnapper, and it was only much later that I found out that Wolfgang Priklopil had been a communications engineer at Siemens. However, the fact that he understood how alarms, radios and other electrical systems worked was something that was not news to me.

This rebuilt radio became a terrible instrument of torture for me. It had a microphone that was so powerful it could broadcast up above every noise I made in my room. The kidnapper could simply listen in on my 'life' without warning and monitor me every second to check whether I was following his orders. Whether I had turned off the television. Whether the radio was on. Whether I was still scraping my spoon across my plate. Whether I was still breathing.

His questions pursued me even under my blanket: 'Have you not eaten your banana?'

'Have you been a greedy pig again?' 'Have you washed your face?'

'Did you turn off your television after one episode?'

I couldn't even lie to him because I didn't know how long he had been eavesdropping. And if I did it one more time anyway, or failed to answer right away, he yelled into the loudspeaker until everything in my head hammered. Or he came into my dungeon unannounced and punished me by taking away my prized possessions: books, videos, food. I had to provide a penitent account of my misconduct, of every moment of my life in the dungeon, no matter how minute. As if there was anything that I could have concealed from him.

Yet another way for him to make sure I felt that he had total control over me was to leave the headset hanging upstairs. Then, in addition to the whirring of the fan, distorted, unbearably loud static permeated my prison, filling up every last inch of space and forcing me to feel him in every corner of the tiny cellar room.

He is here. Always. He is breathing at the other end of the line. He could begin to bellow at any time, and I would recoil, even if I was anticipating it at any second. There was no escape from his voice.

Today I'm not surprised that as a child I believed he could see me in the dungeon. After all, I didn't know whether or not he had installed cameras. I felt watched every second of the day, even while I was sleeping. Perhaps he had installed a heat-imaging camera so that he could monitor me even as I lay on my lounger in complete darkness. The thought paralysed me and I hardly dared turn over in my sleep at night. During the day, I looked round ten times before I went to the toilet. I had no idea whether or not he was watching me - and whether perhaps others were there as well.

In total panic, I began to search the entire dungeon for peepholes or cameras, always afraid that he would see what I was doing and come downstairs immediately. I filled the tiniest cracks in the wood panelling with toothpaste until I was sure that there were no more gaps. Still, the feeling of constantly being watched remained.

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers; and in guessing at it myself, and in reasoning from what I have seen written upon their faces, and what to my certain knowledge they feel within, I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in it which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow-creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore the more I denounce it.

Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation

The author Charles Dickens wrote these words about solitary confinement in 1842, which had set a precedent in the US and is still in use today. My solitary confinement, the time that I spent exclusively in the dungeon without once being able to leave those five square metres of space, lasted over six months; my total imprisonment 3,096 days.

The feeling that that time spent in complete darkness or constant artificial light created in me was not something I was able to put into words at the time. When I look at the many studies today examining the effects of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation, I can understand precisely what happened to me back then.

One of the studies documents the following effects of solitary confinement:

Significant Decrease in the Ability of the Vegetative Nervous System Function

· Significant disruptions in hormone levels

· Absence of menstruation in women with no other physiological, organic cause due to age or pregnancy (secondary amenorrhoea)

· Increased feeling of having to eat: Zynorexia/cravings, hyperorexia, compulsive overeating

· In contrast, reduction or absence of thirst

· Severe hot flushes and/or sensations of coldness not attributable to any corresponding change in the ambient temperature or to illness (fever, chills, etc.)

Significantly Impaired Perception and Cognitive Ability · Serious inability to process perceptions

· Serious inability to feel one's own body .

· Serious general difficulties in concentrating

· Serious difficulry, even the complete inabiliry, to read or register what has been read, comprehend it and place it within a meaningful context

· Serious difficulties, even the complete inability, to speak or process thoughts in written form (agraphia, dysgraphia)

· Serious difficulties in articulating and verbalizing thoughts, which is demonstrated in problems with syntax, grammar and word selection and can even extend to aphasia, aphrasia and agnosia.

· Serious difficulties or the complete inability to follow conversations (shown to be the result of slowed function in the primary acoustic cortex of the temporal lobes due to lack of stimulation)

Additional Limitations

· Carrying out conversations with oneself to compensate for the social and acoustic lack of stimulation · Clear loss of intensity of feeling (e.g. vis-a-vis family members and friends)

· Situatively euphoric feelings which later transform into a depressed mood

Long-term Health Consequences

· Difficulties in social contacts, including the inability to engage in emotionally close and long-term romantic relationships

· Depression

· Negative impact on self-esteem

· Returning to imprisonment situation in dreams

· Blood pressure disorders requiring treatment

· Skin disorders requiring treatment

· Inability to recover in particular cognitive skills (e.g. in mathematics) the prisoner had mastered before solitary confinement

The prisoners felt that the effects of living in sensory deprivation were particularly horrible. Sensory deprivation has an effect on the brain, disrupts the vegetative nervous system and turns selfconfident people into dependants who are wide open to being influenced by anyone they encounter during this phase of darkness and isolation. This also applies to adults who voluntarily choose such a situation. In January aoo8 the BBC broadcast a programme called Total Isolation which affected me deeply: six volunteers allowed themselves to be locked up in a cell in a nuclear bunker for forty-eight hours. Alone and deprived of light, they found themselves in my situation, confronted by the same darkness and loneliness, albeit not the same fear or length of time. Despite the comparatively short time span, all six reported later that they had lost all sense of time and had experienced intense hallucinations and visions. When the forty-eight hours were over, all of them had lost the ability to perform simple tasks. Not one of them could think of the right answer when asked to come up with a word beginning with the letter 'F'. One of them had lost 36 per cent of his memory. Four of them were much more easily manipulated than before their isolation. They believed everything the first person they met after their voluntary imprisonment said to them. I only ever encountered the kidnapper.

When I read about such studies and experiments today, I am amazed that I managed to survive that period. In many ways the situation was comparable to the one that the adults had imposed upon themselves for the purposes of the study. Aside from the fact that my time in isolation lasted much, much longer, my case included yet another aggravating factor: I had absolutely no idea why I of all people had come to find myself in this situation. While political prisoners can hold tight to their mission, and even those who have been wrongly condemned know that a justice system, with its laws, institutions and procedures, is behind their seclusion, I was unable to discern even any kind of logical hostility in my imprisonment. There was none.

It may have helped me that I was still just a child and could adapt to the most adverse circumstances more easily than adults would ever have been able to. But it also required of me a selfdiscipline that, looking back, seems nearly inhuman. During the night, I used fantasy voyages to navigate the darkness. During the day, I stubbornly held tight to my plan to take my life into my own hands on my eighteenth birthday. I was firmly resolved to obtain the necessary knowledge to do so, and asked for reading matter and schoolbooks. In spite of the circumstances, I clung stubbornly to my own identity and the existence of my family.

As the first Mother's Day drew near, I made my mother a gift. I had neither glue nor scissors. The kidnapper gave me nothing I could use to hurt either myself or him. So I took my crayons from my school bag and drew several large red hearts on paper, carefully tore them out and stuck them on top of each other using Nivea lotion. I vividly imagined myself giving the hearts to my mother when I was free again. She would then know that I hadn't forgotten Mother's Day even though I couldn't be with her.

In the meantime, the kidnapper reacted more and more negatively when he saw that I spent time on such things, when I talked about my parents, my home and even my school. 'Your parents don't want you. They don't love you,' he repeated again and again. I refused to believe him, saying, 'That's not true, my parents love me. They told me so.' And I knew down in the deepest recesses of my heart that I was right. But my parents were so inaccessible that I felt as if I were on another planet. And yet only eighteen kilometres separated my dungeon from my mother's flat. Twenty-five minutes by car, a distance in the real world that was, in my mad world, subjected to a dimensional shift. I was so much further away than eighteen kilometres, in the midst of a world ruled by the despotic King of Hearts, in which the playing card people recoiled every time his voice boomed out.

When he was with me, he controlled my every gesture and facial expression: I was forced to stand the way he ordered me to, and I was never allowed to look him directly in the face. In his presence, he barked at me, I was to keep my gaze lowered. I was not permitted to speak if not asked to. He forced me to be submissive in his presence and demanded gratitude for every little thing he did for me: 'I saved you,' he said over and over, and seemed to mean it. He was my lifeline to the outside - light, food, books, all of these I could only get from him, and all of these he could deny me at any time. And he did so later with the consequence that I was forced to the brink of starvation.

Increasingly worn down as I was by the constant monitoring and isolation, still I did not feel any gratitude towards him. To be sure, he had not killed me or raped me, as I had feared at the beginning and had nearly expected. But at no time did I forget that his actions were a crime that I could condemn him for whenever I wanted to - and for which I never had to be thankful to him.

One day he ordered me to call him 'Maestro'.

At first I didn't take him seriously. It seemed much too ridiculous for words that someone should want to be called 'Maestro'. Yet he insisted on it, again and again: 'You will address me as "Maestro"!' At that point I knew that I mustn't give in. Those who resist continue to live. Those who are dead can no longer defend themselves. I didn't want to be dead, not even inside, which is why I had to defy him.

It reminded me of a passage from Alice in Wonderland: "'Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin," thought Alice; "but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!"' Before me stood someone whose humanity shrank, whose facade crumbled, revealing a glimpse of a weak person. A failure in the real world, who drew his strength from his oppression of a small child. A pitiful picture. A grin that demanded that I call him 'Maestro'.

When I recall the situation today, I know why I refused to call him that at the time. Children are masters at manipulation. I must have instinctively felt how important it was to him - and that in my hand I held the key to exercising a certain power over him myself. At that moment I didn't think of the possible consequences that my refusal could entail. The only thing that crossed my mind was that I had already been successful with such behaviour before.

Back home in the Marco-Polo-Siedlung, I had sometimes walked the attack dogs belonging to my mother's customers. Their owners had impressed upon me never to allow the dogs to have too much leash - they would have exploited having too much room to move about. I should keep the leash close to their collar to show them at all times that any attempt at escape would be met with resistance. And I was never permitted to show them any fear. If you could do that, the dogs, even in the hands of a child as I was at the time, were tame and submissive.

When Priklopil now stood before me, I resolved not to allow myself to be intimidated by the frightening situation and keep the leash close to his collar. 'I'm not going to do that,' I told him to his face in a firm voice. He opened his eyes wide in surprise, protested and demanded from me again and again that I call him 'Maestro'. But finally he dropped the issue.

That was a key experience, even if that wasn't perhaps that clear to me at the time. I had demonstrated strength and the kidnapper had backed down. The cat's arrogant grin had disappeared. What was left was a person who had committed an evil deed, on whose moods my existence depended, but who in a way was also dependent on me.

In the following weeks and months I found it easier to deal with him when I pictured him as a poor, unloved child. Somewhere in the many crime stories and made-for-television films that I had watched before, I had picked up that people were evil if they had not been loved by their mothers and had had too little warmth at home. Today I realize that it was a protective mechanism necessary to my survival that I tried to see the kidnapper as a person who was not essentially evil, but had only become so in the course of his life. In no way did this mitigate what he had done, but it helped me to forgive him. By imagining on the one hand that he had perhaps had terrible experiences as an orphan in a home, from which he was still suffering today. And on the other hand by telling myself again and again that he surely also had a positive side. That he gave me the things I asked for, brought me sweets, took care of me. I think that in my complete dependence on him this was the only way for me to maintain the relationship with the kidnapper so necessary for me to survive. Had I met him only with hatred, that hatred would have eaten me up and robbed me of the strength I needed to make it through. Because I could catch at that moment a glimpse of the small, misguided and weak person behind the mask of the kidnapper, I was able to approach him.

Then there came the actual moment when I told him that. I looked at him and said, 'I forgive you, because everybody makes mistakes sometimes.' It was a step that may seem strange and sick to some people. After all, his 'mistake' had cost me my freedom. But it was the only right thing to do. I had to get along with this person, otherwise I would not survive.

Still, I never trusted him; that was impossible. But I came to terms with him. I 'consoled' him for the crime he had committed against me and appealed at the same time to his conscience, so that he would regret what he had done and at least treat me well. He paid me back by fulfilling small requests: a magazine about horses, a pen, a new book. Sometimes he would even say to me, 'I'll give you anything you want!' Then I would answer him, 'If you'll give me anything I want, why won't you let me go? I miss my parents so much.' But his answer was always the same, and I knew what it would be: my parents didn't love me - and he would never let me go.

After a few months in the dungeon, I asked him for the first time to embrace me. I needed the consolation of a touch, the feeling of human warmth. It was difficult. He had great problems with closeness, with touching. I myself on the other hand fell immediately into a blind panic and claustrophobia when he held me too tightly. But after several attempts we managed to find a way-not too close, not too tight, so that I could bear the embrace, and yet tight enough so that I could imagine feeling a loving, caring touch. It was my first physical contact with another human being in many months. For a ten-year-old child, it had been an endlessly long time.

5

Falling into Nothingness

How My Identity Was Stolen

In the autumn of 1998, over half a year since my abduction, I became completely discouraged and saddened. While my schoolmates had embarked on a new phase of their lives after the fourth grade, I was stuck here, crossing off the days on the calendar. Lost time. Lonely time. I missed my parents so much that I rolled myself up into a little ball at night, longing to hear a loving word from them, longing for an embrace. I felt small and weak, and was on the brink of capitulation. My mother had always drawn me a hot bath whenever I felt dejected and discouraged as a small child. She would put colourful bath beads that shone like silk and bubble bath in the water so that I sank under piles of crackling, fragrant clouds of foam. After my bath, she would wrap me in a thick towel, dry me, then lay me in bed and tuck me in. I always associated that with a profound feeling of security. A feeling I had had to do without for so long.

The kidnapper found it difficult to cope with my depression. When he came to the dungeon and found me sitting pathetically on my lounger, he eyed me agitatedly. He never directly addressed my mood, but tried to cheer me up with games, an extra piece of fruit or an additional episode of a television show on video. But my dark mood continued. How could I help it? After all, I was not suffering from a lack of entertainment media, but rather from the fact that I was chained through no fault of my own to the fantasy of the man who had already long ago sentenced me to life in prison.

I longed for the feeling that had always coursed through me after such a hot bath. When the kidnapper visited me in my dungeon during that time, I began to attempt to persuade him. A bath. Couldn't I take a bath just once? I asked him over and over. I don't know whether or not I got on his nerves at some point, or whether he decided for himself that perhaps it was really high time for a full bath. In any case, after a few days of asking and begging, he surprised me with the promise that I would be allowed to take a bath. If I was good.

I was allowed to leave the dungeon! I was allowed to go upstairs and bathe!

But what was this 'upstairs'? What would await me there? I vacillated between happiness, uncertainty and hope. Maybe he would leave me alone and maybe I could seize the opportunity to flee...

It wasn't until several days had gone by that the kidnapper came to let me out of the dungeon. And he used those days to quell any thoughts of escape in me: 'If you scream, I will have to hurt you. All of the windows and exits have been secured with explosive devices. If you open a window, you will end up blowing yourself up.' He impressed upon me that I had to stay away from windows and to make sure that I was not seen from outside. And if I failed to follow his orders down to the last detail, he would kill me on the spot. I did not doubt him for a minute. He had kidnapped me and locked me up. Why should he not also be capable of killing me?

When he finally opened the door to my dungeon one evening and ordered me to follow him, I could only hesitate in taking my first steps. In the diffuse light behind the door to my prison, I recognized a small, somewhat elevated and obliquely designed anteroom with a chest. Behind that was a heavy wooden door through which you entered a second anteroom. There my gaze fell on a massive, round-bodied monster on the narrow side of the wall on the left. A door made of reinforced concrete. Weighing 150 kilograms. Inserted in a nearly fifty-centimetre thick wall and locked from the outside with an iron-threaded bolt inserted into the masonry.

That is what it says in the police files. I can hardly put into words the feelings that surfaced in me when I got a look at that door. I had been encased in concrete. Hermetically sealed. The kidnapper warned me over and over of the explosive devices, the alarm systems, the cables with which he could electrify the entrance to my dungeon. A maximum-security prison for a child. What would become of me if something happened to him? My fear of choking on sausage skin seemed utterly ridiculous when I imagined him falling, breaking his arm and being taken to the hospital. Buried alive. Full stop.

I couldn't breathe. I had to get out of here. Immediately.

The reinforced concrete door opened up to allow me to view a small passageway. Height: 68.5 centimetres. Width: 48.5 centimetres. If I stood up, the lower edge of the access way was approximately at my knee level. The kidnapper was already waiting on the other side. I saw his legs outlined against the bright background. Then I got down on my knees and crawled forward on all fours. The black walls appeared to have been tarred, and the air was stale and damp. Once I had manoeuvred myself through the passageway, I was standing in an assembly pit for cars. Directly adjacent to the passageway were a dresser and a safe that had been moved aside.

The kidnapper once again told me to follow him. A narrow staircase, with walls of grey concrete tile, the steps high and slippery. Three down, nine up, through a trap door, and I was standing in the garage.

I stood as if paralysed. Two wooden doors. The heavy concrete door. The narrow passageway. In front of it a massive safe that the kidnapper, when I was in the dungeon, pushed in front of the entrance using a crowbar, screwed into the wall and, in addition, secured electrically. A dresser that concealed the safe and the passageway. Floorboards that covered the trap door leading down to the assembly pit.

I had already known that I would not be able to break open the door to my prison, that every attempt to flee my dungeon was futile. I had suspected that I could beat my hands against the walls and scream as long as I wanted to, nobody would hear me. But at that moment up in the garage, I understood instantaneously that nobody would ever find me either. The entrance to the dungeon was so perfectly camouflaged that the likelihood that the police would discover me when searching the house was frighteningly small.

My shock did not subside until an even stronger sensation imposed itself over my feeling of fear: air that poured into my lungs. I breathed in deeply, again and again, like someone dying of thirst who has reached a life-saving oasis at the very last second and dives into the life-giving water headfirst. After months in the cellar, I had completely forgotten how good it felt to breathe air that wasn't dry and dusty, blown by a fan into my tiny hole in the cellar. The whirring of the fan, which had wedged itself in my ears as an inescapable noise, waned for a moment; my eyes carefully scanned the unfamiliar contours and my initial tension dissolved.

But it returned immediately when the kidnapper indicated with a gesture that I was not to make a sound. Then he led me through an anteroom and up four stairs into the house. It was dim, as all the blinds had been let down. A kitchen, hallway, living room, foyer. The rooms I entered one after the other seemed unbelievable to me, almost ridiculously large and spacious. Since 2 March I had been kept in surroundings in which the greatest distance measured two metres. I could keep an eye on the small room from any angle and see what awaited me next. Here, the dimensions of the rooms swallowed me up like a large wave. Here, an unpleasant surprise, or evil, could be lurking behind every door, behind every window. After all, I did not know whether the kidnapper lived alone or how many people had been involved in my abduction - and what they would do with me if they saw me 'upstairs'. He had spoken of the 'others' so often that I expected them to be behind every corner. It also appeared plausible to me that he had a family that was in on it who were only waiting to torment me. For me, any conceivable kind of crime seemed within the realm of the possible.

The kidnapper appeared excited and nervous. On the way to the bathroom, he hissed at me repeatedly, 'Don't forget the windows and the alarm system. Do what I tell you. I'll kill you if you scream.' After I had seen the access way to my dungeon, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind when he told me that the entire house was armed with explosives.

While I let myself be led to the bathroom with my eyes lowered, as he wished, my thoughts raced. I racked my brains fiercely as to how I could overpower him and escape. I could think of nothing. I was not a coward as a child, but I had always been fearful. He was so much stronger and quicker than I was - if I had tried to run away, he would have been on me in two steps. And opening the doors and windows would obviously have been suicide. I continued to believe in the ominous security measures until after my escape.

However, it was not just the outward constraints, the many insurmountable walls and doors, the physical strength of the kidnapper, which prevented me from attempting escape. The cornerstone of my mental prison, from which I was less and less able to break away over the course of my imprisonment, had already been laid. I was intimidated and fearful. 'If you cooperate, nothing will happen to you.' The kidnapper had inculcated that belief into me from the very beginning, threatening me with the worst kinds of punishment, including death, if I resisted him. I was a child and used to obeying the authority of grown-ups - all the more if disobedience entailed consequences. He was the authority present. Even if the main door had stood wide open at that moment, I don't know if I would've had the courage to run. A house cat, allowed for the first time in her life to go outdoors, will remain, frightened, at the threshold and meow pitifully, because she does not know how to cope with her sudden freedom. And behind me was not the protective house I could return to, but rather a man who was willing to follow through with his crime to the death. I was already so deeply in my imprisonment that my imprisonment was already equally deep inside me.

The kidnapper ran a bubble bath and stayed as I undressed and got in. It bothered me that he wouldn't even leave me alone in the bathroom. On the other hand, I was already used to him seeing me naked from showering in the dungeon, so I only protested meekly. Once I sank into the warm water and closed my eyes, I was able to blot out everything around me. White peaks of foam piled over my fear, danced through the dark dungeon, washed me out of the house and carried me away with them. Into our bathroom at home, into the arms of my mother, who was waiting with a large, pre-warmed towel, and ready to take me straight to bed.

The wonderful image burst like a soap bubble when the kidnapper admonished me to hurry up. The towel was rough and smelled strange. Nobody took me to bed; instead, I descended into my dark dungeon. I heard him lock the wooden doors behind me, close the concrete door and bolt it. I imagined him going through the narrow passageway, heaving the safe into the opening again, screwing it into the wall and pushing the dresser in front of it. I wished I hadn't seen how hermetically I had been sealed off from the outside world. I lay down on my lounger, curled up and tried to recreate the feeling of the bubble bath and warm water on my skin. The feeling of being at home.

A little while later, in the autumn of 1998, the kidnapper once again showed me his caring side. Maybe he just had a guilty conscience; whatever the reason, my dungeon was to be made somewhat more inhabitable.

The work proceeded slowly; every piece of panelling, every bucket of paint had to be carried all the way down individually. Bookcases and cupboards could only be put together once in my dungeon.

I was allowed to pick a colour for the walls and decided in favour of wood-chip wallpaper that I wanted to have painted in pastel pink. Just like the wall in my room back home. The name of the colour was 'Elba gliinzend'. Later he used the same colour for his living room. There couldn't be any leftover tin of paint in a colour not used somewhere upstairs, he explained to me, always prepared for a police raid, always eager to nip any potential suspicions in the bud. As if the police back then had still been interested in me, as if they would have investigated such things, when they hadn't once examined the abduction car despite the two tips from the public.

My memories of my first days and weeks in the dungeon vanished piece by piece with the sections of drywall he used to cover up the wooden panelling. The sketch of the hallway dresser, my family tree, the Ave Maria'. But what I was getting instead seemed to be much better anyway: a wall that made me feel as if I were at home. When it was finally papered and painted, my small dungeon stank so strongly of chemicals that I was nauseated for days. The fumes from the fresh paint were too much for the small fan.

Then we proceeded to install my bunk bed. Priklopil brought boards and posts made of light-coloured pine into my dungeon, which he carefully screwed together. When the bed was finished, it took up nearly the entire width of the room and had a height of approximately one metre fifty. I was permitted to decorate the ceiling above it. I decided on three red hearts, which I carefully painted on. They were meant for my mother. When I looked at them, I could think of her.

The most complicated part was installing the ladder. It wouldn't fit through the door due to the difficult angle at which the anteroom was separated from the dungeon. The kidnapper tried it again and again, until he suddenly disappeared and came back with a battery-powered screwdriver, which he used to dismantle the wooden wall subdividing the anteroom. Then he dragged the ladder into the dungeon - and that very same day put the wall back up again.

As he was putting together my new bookcases, I witnessed for the first time a side of the kidnapper that terrified me deeply. Up until that point he had yelled at me sometimes, he had denigrated me, cursed at me, and threatened me with all sorts of terrible punishments in order to force my cooperation. But never had he lost control over himself.

He stood in front of me holding the drill and was in the process of affixing a board with screws. Working together in the dungeon had made me somewhat more trusting and I simply burst out with a question: 'Why are you screwing that board on right there?' For a second I had forgotten that I was only allowed to speak when he gave me permission. In a fraction of a second, the kidnapper flew into a rage, bellowed at me - and then he threw the heavy drill at me. I managed to duck at the very last moment before it slammed into the wall behind me. I was so stunned that it took my breath away, and I stared at him wide-eyed.

The sudden outburst of anger had not touched me physically. The drill hadn't even come into contact with me. But the incident burrowed itself deep into my psyche. Because it showed a new dimension in my relationship with the kidnapper: I now knew that he would hurt me if I did not obey him. It made me even more frightened and submissive.

The first night after the kidnapper's outburst, I lay upon the thin mattress in my new bunk bed. The rattling of the fan felt as if it was directly next to my ears and boring its way into my brain, until I would have loved to scream out in desperation. The cold air from the attic blew directly on my feet. While I had always slept on my back at home, stretched out, I now had to roll myself up on my side like a foetus and wrap the blanket tightly around my feet to avoid the unpleasant draught. But the bed was much softer than the sunlounger. I could turn over and I had more room. And most of all I had my new wood-chip wallpaper.

I stretched out my hand, touched it and closed my eyes. I let the furniture in my room at home glide by in my thoughts, the dolls and stuffed animals as well. The position of the window, the door, the curtains, the smell. If I could just imagine it all intensely enough, I could fall asleep with my hand on the wall of the dungeon - and wake up the next day, still with my hand against the wall, in my room back home. Then my mother would bring me tea in bed, I would remove my hand from the wallpaper and everything would be okay.

Now I fell asleep every evening with my hand resting on the wallpaper, and was certain that one day I would in fact wake up again in my own room. During that initial phase, I believed in it as in a magic formula that would come true at some point. Later, touching the wallpaper was a promise to myself that I renewed every day. And I kept it: eight years later, when I visited my mother for the first time after my imprisonment I lay down on the bed in my room, where nothing had changed, and closed my eyes. When I touched the wall with my hand, all of those moments were there again - especially the first: the small, ten-year-old Natascha who was trying desperately not to lose confidence in herself, placing her hand on the wall in the dungeon for the first time. 'I'm here again,' I whispered. 'You see, it worked.'

Falling into Nothingness

The more the year wore on, the deeper my sadness became. When I crossed off the first few days in December, I was so gloomy that the chocolate 'Krampus'*{'Krampus' is a mythical creature who is said to accompany St Nicholas during the Christmas season, warning and punishing bad children.

A celebration on 6 December when children receive sweets for having been good during the year.}

the kidnapper brought me for St Nicholas Dayt couldn't cheer me up. Christmas was coming closer and closer. And the thought of spending the holidays alone in my dungeon was absolutely unbearable.

Just as for any other child, Christmas was one of the highlights of the year for me. The smell of cookies, the decorated tree, the anticipation of gifts, the entire family coming together to celebrate the holiday. I was picturing these images as I apathetically pulled the foil wrapper off the chocolate. It was an image of childhood days, an image that had little in common with the last few Christmases that I had spent with my family. My nephews had come to visit us like always, but they had already received their presents at home. I was the only child opening gifts. As for tree decorations, my mother had a weakness for the latest trends, so our tree glittered with tinsel and purple balls. Underneath lay a pile of presents for me. While I opened one present after the other, the grown-ups sat on the couch, listening to the radio and looking at a tattoo magazine together. These were Christmases that disappointed me deeply. I had not even been able to persuade anyone to sing a Christmas carol with me, although I was so proud of the fact that I knew the songs that we had practised at school by heart.

It wasn't until the next day, when we celebrated with my grandmother, that I began to feel the Christmas spirit. All of us gathered in an adjacent room and solemnly sang 'Silent Night'. Then I listened for the anticipated small bell to ring. The Christkind*{* The figure in Austria believed to bring children presents at Christmas, akin to Santa Claus. The word translates directly as 'Christ child'.} had been there. When we opened the door to the room, the Christmas tree shimmered in the light of real beeswax candles and gave off a wonderful smell. My grandmother always had a traditional, rustic Christmas tree, decorated with straw stars and glass baubles as delicate as soap bubbles.

That's how I imagined Christmas to be - and that's how it would have been this year as well. But I was going to spend the most significant family holiday of the year without my family. The idea frightened me. On the other hand, I had to admit that Christmas with my family had always been a disappointment anyway. And that I, in my isolation, was surely romanticizing the past. But I could try to make Christmas in my dungeon as similar as possible to how I remembered the Christmas holidays spent at my grandmother's.

The kidnapper played along. Back then I was infinitely grateful to him for making some semblance of a real Christmas possible. Today I think that he probably didn't do it for me, but rather because of his own inner compulsion. For him, too, celebrating holidays was enormously important - they provided structure, they followed certain rules, and he was unable to live without rules and structures which he obeyed with ridiculous stringency. Nevertheless, he still didn't have to grant my Christmas requests. The fact that he did may have had to do with the fact that he had been raised to meet expectations and conform to the image that others wanted to have of him. Today I know that he had failed time and again, primarily in his relationship with his father, on precisely those counts. The approval that he urgently wanted to receive from his father obviously was denied to him for long periods. Towards me, this attitude surfaced only in phases, but when it did he was particularly absurd. After all, he was the one who had kidnapped me and locked me in the cellar. It's not a scenario in which you take the expectations of the other person, namely your victim, into account. It was as if he were choking someone and asking them at the same time whether they were lying comfortably and if the pressure was okay. However, at the time I blocked all of that out. I was full of grateful, childish wonder that the kidnapper was making such a fuss for me.

I knew that I wouldn't be able to have a real Christmas tree, so I asked for one made of plastic. We opened the box together and put the tree on one of the small cupboards. I was given a couple of angels and some sweets, and spent a great deal of time decorating the small tree.

On Christmas Eve I was alone watching television until the light was turned off, desperately trying not to think of my family at home. The kidnapper was at his mother's house, or she was visiting his, just as would happen on all the Christmases to come. But I didn't know that at the time. It wasn't until the next day that he celebrated with me. I was amazed that he gave me everything I asked for. I had asked for a small educational computer like the one I had received from my parents the year before. It was nowhere near as good as the first one I had got, but I was overjoyed that I could study without going to school. After all, I didn't want to be completely left behind should I manage to escape. I also got a pad of drawing paper and a box of watercolours. It was the same as the one that my father had given to me once, with twenty-four colours, including gold and silver, as if the kidnapper had given me a piece of my life back. The third package contained a paintby-numbers set with oil paints. I had had that at home too, and I looked forward to the many hours of activity that the painstaking painting promised. The only thing that the kidnapper did not give me was turpentine. He was probably afraid that it would cause harmful fumes in the dungeon.

The days after Christmas I was busy with painting and my educational. computer. I tried to see the positive side of my situation and suppress all longing for my family as much as possible by recalling the negative aspects of our last Christmases together. I tried to persuade myself that it was interesting to experience the holiday the way other grown-ups celebrated it. And I was exceedingly grateful that I had even had a Christmas celebration at all.

I spent my first New Year's Eve in captivity alone in complete darkness. I lay on my bunk bed and strained to hear whether I could make out the fireworks that would be set off at midnight up in the other world. But only the monotonous ticking of the alarm clock and the rattling of the fan penetrated my ears. Later I found out that the kidnapper always spent New Year's Eve with his friend Holzapfel. He prepared meticulously, buying the largest, most expensive rockets. Once, I must've been fourteen or fifteen, I was allowed to watch from inside the house as he set off a rocket in the early evening. At sixteen I was even allowed outside in the garden to watch a rocket sprinkle a shower of silver balls across the sky. But that was at a time when my captivity had become a fixed component of my 'self'. That's why the kidnapper dared take me with him out into the garden in the first place. He knew that by then my inner prison had grown such high walls that I would not seize the opportunity to escape.

The year in which I had been abducted was over, and I was still being held captive. The world outside moved even further into the distance and my memories of my former life became dimmer and unreal. I found it difficult to believe that a year earlier I had been a primary school girl, who played in the afternoon, went on outings with her parents and led a normal life.