10 Years of Freedom Page 14
I was most afraid of the hallway leading to the garage and down into the dungeon. A bundle of flax for sealing off pipes hung over the workshop pit. Every time when I came up the stairs, handcuffed to the kidnapper, I had seen that light yellow bundle hanging up there. As if a wig of my own hair that he had shaved off my head were hanging up there. You mustn’t leave any traces behind.
Surprisingly enough, I did not feel the anxiety I expected when we entered the garage. It was rather strange feeling of melancholy. That was perhaps because that I had only ever entered this room, supposedly secured by booby-traps, when I was allowed to go up into the hermetically sealed world of the house. After all, it was one step closer to freedom.
*
When the issue was discussed much later on in the media of whether I would sue the Republic of Austria for damages as a result of the errors in the police investigation during my captivity, my attorneys informed me that I was entitled to compensation from the estate of the kidnapper. It was a strange feeling, but one that brought about a bit of closure. After all he had robbed me of several years of my life. Why should I not be entitled to a portion of his estate? Psychologically speaking, he had taken so much from me that nothing in the world, no “valuables” could compensate for that. Certainly nothing of material value or of any other kind of value. Nevertheless, the newspapers were full of presumptuous commentaries and cartoons. Now she wants to file a lawsuit! She’s already swimming in money. She simply can’t get enough. And now she wants the house on top of all that?
What golden bathtub could I sit in like Scrooge McDuck, what shower of money raining down on me could give me back my adolescence, my “second life”? I sometimes wonder whether people heap such scorn and envy on lottery winners who come into money unexpectedly. What is the point of discussing whether compensation – no matter what shape or form – is justified or appropriate? How much is a year of your life worth? How much is a year of your life worth spent in torture and humiliation, locked away in a bunker? Not one cent, not even millions can make up for it. And anybody who had followed my story unbiased and free of judgment also knows that money was never my motivation. That the money I have received from donations or the sale of rights to my story has not only been used for me, but for charity purposes. The fact that accusations of unjustified enrichment are raised again and again is cynical and deeply hurtful. It shows that some people believe that money can sort everything out. A small, soothing consolation prize is not something that she needs to have, she already has enough. I am the one, not the kidnapper, who has been given a “life sentence”.
We reached an agreement with the mother of Wolfgang Priklopil that I was to be granted the house from the estate. I did not file a lawsuit against the Republic of Austria. It would likely have led to years of legal disputes, and you could already see the beginning contours of what excesses that could lead to.
I have become a homeowner, also because I did not want the house to fall into the wrong hands. I could not have stood for transforming that house into a kind of chamber of horrors or a place of pilgrimage for strange people who secretly harbour admiration for the kidnapper and his crime. I know from the insults levelled at me on the Internet, letters delivered to me, interviews with political leaders and representatives of the judicial system, notes sometimes hanging on the garden fence of the house that these people exist. Some of them are people who knew the kidnapper when he was young, who have difficulty believing that he did what he did, and who pray that he can find his way back to the straight and narrow path in the afterlife. After all, because he was such a nice, polite young man. Others know exactly what happened. That a precocious 10-year-old planned her kidnapping herself, dragging a respectable young man with a slight personality disorder down into the abyss and coercing him into committing this crime.
Those are the moments where words simply fail me. You can’t counter opinions like these with arguments. Not even with the truth. After all, because it cannot be verified, because the truth came from me.
Seen from a different angle, all this certainly takes on an aura of grotesqueness, that I must now pay electricity and water bills, not to mention property taxes, for a building I never wanted to live in. That somebody has to monitor the house regularly, check the heating and air it out. In the first several years I could not do that myself. A team of horses could not have dragged me back there. I also could not have managed to change anything in the house or in the garage. Not one screw, not one bucket of paint, not one book, not one vase was to be removed from its spot or even thrown away. As if I had to preserve it until I was ready to fill the house up entirely with myself.
The “ravages of time” finally dictated that I had to act. A storm had torn several shingles from the roof, moisture had gotten into the house, and mould had begun to grow in several corners. The hedges urgently needed trimming, and the swimming pool in the garden had become a biotope for moss. “An eyesore”, as many certainly said under their breath. I went to the house with a team of friends to clean it out; old furnishings and the remnants of renovation materials that could no longer be used were placed in a container. Experts were responsible for removing the moisture from the house and sprayed the particularly affected rooms with a special substance. Neighbours alerted the press. The photograph of me in a smock standing in front of debris and covered in dust bore the caption: “Is she now moving back into her house of horrors?”
*
A municipal decision was issued in 2013 requiring the dungeon to be filled in. Unapproved hollow spaces below the zero line are not permitted under the Lower Austrian Building Code. Understandably enough there had been no construction permit issued for my dungeon. It had been constructed illegally, and so as to avoid endangering public safety and to at least retroactively comply with the statutory provisions, the entire subterranean area was to be filled in. The hollow space was to be filled with around 18 cubic metres of coarse gravel, according to the expert jargon.
The police and the Lower Austrian Criminal Police Office had already used ground-penetrating radar during their first inspections of the crime scene to determine that the area had a number of shafts that were connected to my prison either directly or indirectly. Excavation work in the garden behind the house uncovered a half meter of ceiling constructions made from concrete, gravel and iron parts in a number of areas, a half-metre below the topsoil. To this day it has not been definitively determined whether or not parts of the subterranean construction had been there long before the kidnapper had devised his plan to kidnap me.
Bringing in the course gravel was easier said than done. Through the garage, down into the workshop pit, through the small tunnel behind the safe – here you could only crawl through backwards – through the small anteroom to the dungeon: This would only be possible with buckets and shovels. The same applied to opening up the ventilation shaft from above. The only solution was to tear open the dungeon from the outside. A local construction company was contracted to do the work.
The next day a construction worker began hammering an enormous hole into the floor of the garage with heavy hammers. The noise attracted curious neighbours. One said, “Ah, you’re finally filling in the bunker?” As if it had been widely known that a subterranean world had already been there long before. By that evening, after about ten hours of work, a 30 to 40 centimetre hole had been hammered into the concrete, but the ceiling of the dungeon was nowhere in sight. The next day, heavy equipment was brought in. A jackhammer pounded away for hours, the noise permeating the neighbourhood. That afternoon, the ceiling finally fell in. It was over a half a meter below the floor level. It was 60 centimetres thick and was made from cement, sand, metal bars and fist-size stones. The kidnapper could not have constructed this by himself. There was nothing slapdash about it like the interior of the installation. This was the work of professionals. Did nobody from the local authorities really know that a bunker was located on the property? Perhaps long be
fore Priklopil’s parents built the house on the undeveloped property?
The cellar surrounding the dungeon was cleared out. Shelving, buckets of paint, skis, tools that I had held in my hand while renovating the house, were disposed of. All of the remaining items still in the dungeon were brought up. The construction workers threw everything into a pile. The shelf where I had placed my soap and toothbrush broke apart after a strong kick, as did the Allibert bathroom cabinet. At least I was able to rescue the hook where my blue and white chequered dress had hung all those years. On top of the pile representing the second phase of my life was the torn picture of Don Bosco that I had pinned to my bulletin board. He probably would’ve said, “Go on. Leave all the junk there and try to grow fresh flowers on this pile of manure.”
After the dungeon was filled in with gravel, the access stairs via the workshop pit and the anteroom in front of the steel reinforced door to my dungeon were filled in with concrete. In addition to the relief I felt that closure, in the true sense of the word, had been reached, another emotion rose to the surface of my consciousness. A kind of surreal, and yet painful grief and a goodbye to a very formative period in my life. I was happy that now there was nothing more to indicate that that crime had taken place here, at least on the outside. But on the inside, the wounds were still there.
*
To this day I am still undecided whether and even how I should wake the house from its deep slumber. In an interview several years ago I said once that I would perhaps demolish the house one day with explosives. That would at least make room for something new, something good to be created in its place.
It is difficult to find a solution for the house that makes sense. In the last several years I have tried to make it available for various charitable purposes, but its ominous past hangs over it. Who could imagine setting up a preschool there, or making it a residence for refugees? Even if you could forget the history of that place, something that the house itself cannot help, for one moment, there would still be innumerable statutory provisions that would make repurposing difficult. I still have not given up hope that someday the house can become something that will benefit others, whatever shape that may take.
8
“A Matter of Decency”
My Involvement in Sri Lanka
During my captivity I so desperately wished for help – and it never came. I know how it feels to need help, and in the end to have to depend on only yourself. That’s why standing up for others with the means available to me was and still remains a matter close to my heart.
I had the desire to help even as a child. Sometimes I stole a few small coins from the jar my mother kept in her shop for making change and gave them to homeless people or beggars who hung around the “Rennbahnsiedlung”, our council housing plan. My heart hammering in my chest and gripping the coins tightly in my hand I would march up to them and say, “This is for you. Please don’t drink it away.” Often enough I would then see them at the kiosk with a handful of Austrian schillings, enough for a beer or some liquor. I did not like it, and even today I still have my problems with it. Maybe because as a child I saw too many people who had lost part of their lives to alcohol. They had little purpose in life, no job, no goals, and their daily existence was so marked by hopelessness and frustration that they would try to numb or drown it in alcohol.
My greatest hero was Don Bosco. His real name was Giovanni (John) Melchiorre Bosco, a Catholic priest and missionary who lived in the 19th century and was canonized as a saint in 1934. In 1859 he founded the Salesians of Don Bosco, and in 1872 he established the sister order Salesian Sisters of Saint John Bosco, also known as the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians. I heard about him and his work for the first time in religion class and immediately decided to follow in his footsteps to become a priest. But that is unfortunately a position reserved only for men still today, at least in the Catholic Church.
It is possible that I was so fascinated by him and his very special educational approach because in a way I saw myself reflected in the children he worked with. Children who were caught between worlds. Only allowed to be a child for short time, having to take on responsibility early in life or never loved enough. I myself did not have an intact environment in the way of a happy family consisting of a dad, a mom and a child, but I had a loving family. Both of my parents gave me the feeling that I was loved, that their failure at times was more due to circumstances, their lack of ability to cope with their separation that was felt in all areas of their daily lives.
In our neighbourhood at Rennbahnweg there were innumerable examples of “failed” families. Mothers who screamed at their children down in the courtyard, pushing them to the ground and beating them cruelly. Men who would literally beat their wives up and then boast at the kiosk while drinking liquor with their buddies that they showed their “old lady” who was boss once again. You could see those women skulking around the supermarket aisles having tried to carefully conceal their bruises with makeup. Older boys would lounge around the corridors leading to the individual housing blocks, molesting people as they walked by, and demanding money as a “toll” for being allowed to pass through. When I walked across the courtyards and the stairwells with my mother, she would always grab my hand a bit tighter. She tried to protect me as well as she could, and explain to me why she did not want me to play downstairs in the sandbox, and why she thought some of our neighbours were vulgar. Although her chief guiding motto in life was “Help yourself, because nobody else is going to do it”, she made clear to me that there was something like a chain of causality. Those who had never experienced love and security, but a great deal of violence instead, would be very likely to repeat those behaviours with others.
While being held captive I asked myself repeatedly later on what the kidnapper must have experienced, what he was lacking, that made him capable of committing such a crime. That he could believe that his crime was the solution to his problems. A loser in the real world, who drew his strength from oppressing a child. An unstable person seeking the recognition that he probably did not receive enough of earlier in life. A man who possibly suffered a great deal under the dominance of his parents, but who in reality was never able to break free from them and was now trying to violently re-create this dynamic in his cellar world by reversing the roles. However, in the end this is just speculation. Even if it were true, it would naturally absolve him of nothing. At best it is merely an attempt to explain what is essentially unexplainable.
According to St. John Bosco, the raising and educating of children, either by parents or institutions, should be marked by genuine human kindness, supported by reason and rooted in faith. His actions were guided by the motto “I much prefer broken windows to broken hearts”. A large poster of him hung on the outside of the door to my room. It was a portrait depicting him in warm, dark colours. As if I had wanted to signal to anyone about to come in my room that he was watching over me, that he kept an eye on me. While in captivity I tried to draw his face with his kind eyes from memory. Beneath the picture I wrote, “The power of evil draws its life from the cowardice of the good”.
*
“A person does not have to be rich in order to give.” That is also a quote from St. John Bosco. You have to want to help. After my escape that’s exactly what I wanted to do. In my first interview I was asked how I planned to deal with the media’s enormous interest in me, and whether or not it wasn’t a bit too much to take:
A bit too much? Well, yes. But on the other hand it has become clear to me that my fame (…) has given me a certain responsibility that I would also like to use. It has become clear to me (…) that you should use it (…) to benefit many people who can be helped. So I’m planning to set up a foundation, and I would like to carry out a number of aid projects that deal with issues like persons who have disappeared never to be found, like myself. There are also the kidnapped, abused and tortured and murdered young women for example who have gone missing
in Mexico (…) and have been abused in the most brutal way. Furthermore, I am planning to set up a programme enabling people to help themselves in their fight against hunger, because I know how humiliating it is to let people go hungry.
Looking back, it was perhaps too early, indeed just two weeks after my escape, to be talking about such issues. I underestimated just how much of an impact all of the tumult would have on me, how much time I would need to find my footing again in my new life in freedom. First I had to help myself and regain the necessary stability, which gave me the inner strength to advocate for others.
In the meantime I have supported a number of individuals, in South America but also in Austria. I have donated when a serious natural disaster has taken place somewhere in the world. Just like many others who see the images of misery and suffering on the news, something like that is very moving to me. The violent forces of nature are in their own way very different than the violence exacted by humans. It triggers primeval fears and is something that we are unable to counter.
At Christmas in 2004 I saw pictures on TV that I was unable to process for a long time. People who were fleeing from floodwaters in panic, climbing onto rooftops and trees. People who were swept away by the foaming maelstrom, crushed between falling walls, floating cars and wooden beams. An earthquake in the Indian Ocean had triggered a devastating tsunami that struck the coastal areas of the surrounding countries. Over 230,000 died and over 1.7 million were homeless as a result. Nobody knew what was happening as the ocean slowly withdrew. A number of locals collected fish and mussels while tourists filmed the strange spectacle, commenting on what had just taken place with wonder and fascination. And then when the ocean returned again all at once, their voices becoming increasingly shrill and deafening. I sat transfixed in front of the small television in my dungeon. The terrible images and sounds haunted me for days. The picture that I painted at the time is still hanging in my apartment today.