3,096 Days
PENGUIN BOOKS
3,096 Days
Natascha Kampusch was born on 17 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 2006. On the day she escaped, her abductor, Wolfgang Priklopil, committed suicide by throwing himself under a train. 3,096 Days is her own account of her ordeal.
Natascha lives in Vienna.
3,096 Days
NATASCHA KAMPUSCH
With Heike Gronemeier and Corinna Milborn
Translated by Jill Kreuer
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England www.penguin.com
3,096 Tage first published in Germany by Ullstein Buchverlage 2010
First published in English by Penguin 2010
Copyright © Natascha Kampusch, 2010
Translation © Jill Kreuer, 2010
All rights reserved
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reproduce the following copyright material: quotation on p. v is from Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman, copyright © Judith Herman, 1992, reprinted with permission from Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group; the poem on pp. 87–8 is from Winnetou, by Karl May, copyright © Karl May, 2006, reprinted by permission of The Continuum International Publishing Group
The moral right of the author has been asserted Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher‘s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser ISBN: 978-0-670-92000-6
‘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
Dear Reader
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Natascha Kampusch
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Contents
1. My Crumbling World
My Childhood on the Outskirts of Vienna
2. What Could Happen Anyway?
The Last Day of My Old Life
3. Hoping in Vain for Rescue
My First Weeks in the Dungeon
4. Buried Alive
The Nightmare Begins
5. Falling into Nothingness
How My Identity Was Stolen
6. Torment and Hunger
The Daily Struggle to Survive
7. Caught Between Visions of Madness and a Perfect World
The Two Faces of the Kidnapper
8. Rock Bottom
When Physical Pain Eases the Psychological Torment
9. Afraid of Life
My Psychological Prison is Complete
10. For One, Only Death Remains
My Escape to Freedom
Epilogue
1
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 café. 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 finall
y 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 1960s. 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 Süssenbrunn 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 façades 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 7,000 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 o
pened 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.