10 Years of Freedom Read online

  I remember a 16-year-old boy in particular, who I met while waiting for an examination. He was in urgent need of an organ donation. His time was running out, and he knew that the worst case scenario meant that he would die soon. Even though I knew him for only a short time, our encounter meant something special to me. It showed me that in the end it is not that important how much time you spend with someone, but the fact that you had spent time with them at all. He was a person who had so much empathy, such an enormous will to live. He was extremely open and interested in other people. He was somebody who, despite experiencing extreme pain and the powerful effects of medication such as morphine, tried to live in the moment and to avoid giving negative emotions too much space. I don’t know if it is possible to understand what I’m saying, but in a way the extreme degree of his fate made him a mirror for me. We did not have to talk; we could sit there and just be, while the rest of the time I felt like I was caught up in the swirling eddy of my new life. Everything was just spinning around me, and it was hard to catch my breath or even think. Sometimes I wished I were a cat and could just sit in a chair, staring into space, collecting myself, gathering energy. But there was no peace to be had.

  I was overwhelmed by everything: the harsh, artificial lighting, the many noises, the smells, all of the meals to be eaten, all of the people. Everybody talked at the same time, and everybody wanted something: a conversation here, an examination there. A nurse was assigned to me, to accompany me to my examinations through the long corridors of the hospital, which I found frightening. Punctuating my day were questions asked again and again by the police, about my kidnapping, about the kidnapper and about my captivity, for hours on end.

  The first details were leaked to the public very early on. And this time it again did not take very long for word to spread about where I was staying. A pseudonym had been arranged for people to address me when I was on the floor. A number of nurses, however, did not use it; one of them even levelled the charge at me that I probably thought I was someone special, but that I most certainly wasn’t and that I should get used to living in the real world, and fast.

  At times I felt like all I wanted was to shrink from that reality, as much as it offended me with its relentlessness, fluctuating between swallowing me up and spitting me out. I tried to make myself a small as possible, to let everything wash over me, and I promised myself that I would emancipate myself as quickly as possible from these decisions being imposed on me from the outside.

  It was not a capricious idea on my part to give me a cover name. It was purely a security measure. If I had had my way, I would’ve much rather preferred to keep my own name. I was so happy to have it back again, even though I never particularly liked “Natascha” in the first place. I made the very conscious decision not to take on a new identity in conjunction with any kind of witness protection program. Or to go into hiding or emigrate. A new identity and a new background story would have had an impact on my entire environment. I wanted to resume the life I had once had, to pick up where I left off, no longer disassociating from any part of it. While I was in captivity disassociation and suppression were part of my everyday life. I was even forced to give up my name. A year after I was taken my kidnapper told me his idea, “You are no longer Natascha. You now belong to me. You are my creation.” I wasn’t anything anymore; all connection to my past, to my first life was to be completely eradicated. For months he had hammered into my brain that nobody was going to come looking for me anyway. Nobody missed me. My parents were happy to finally be rid of me. Otherwise they would have paid the ransom. Otherwise the police would have found me long ago. In order to completely sever ties, something my family had done long ago, I had to give up my name as the most visible token of my identity. He proposed “Maria”, because both of his grandmothers had been called Maria. When I naïvely told him that that was okay by me, and that I would quite like that because that was my middle name, one that I had always preferred to Natascha, Maria was no longer an option. He told me that I was a dumb cow, that I did not understand what the point was. “You no longer have a family. I am your family. I am your father, your mother, your grandma and your sisters. I am now your everything. You no longer have a past,” he said. He hit me across the head and hissed that it couldn’t possibly be that hard to find a new name.

  My gaze fell on a calendar on the small desk in my underground dungeon. It contained a list of saints’ days. I thumbed hurriedly through the pages, constantly waiting for the next blow to fall. Natascha, “strong, or born at Christmas”, was in the calendar for December 1. Bibiana was in the calendar on December 2. For the next seven years of my captivity I was Bibiana, or “Bibi”. However, on the inside I never gave up my identity this way, the way the kidnapper expected and demanded of me.

  Once free I most definitely did not want to give it up. What happened to me could not simply be put in a drawer and given a new label. The second phase of my life was also a part of me, and I had to learn how to cope with it. I had to have the right to talk about it when I felt like it, and not to talk about it when I felt like it. As “Ms. Meier from Linz” I probably could have spared myself many a headache, but I could not have led my life. Instead I would’ve had to take on yet another role. As if I had fallen into a strange makeup pot and a costume box that would disguise me until I was unrecognizable.

  I don’t remember what cover name and what brief back-story they made up in the hospital. But the fact that not everybody stuck to it and the fact that even the “closed” floor was really an “open” one in many areas meant that word first travelled to the entire hospital about who was a “patient” there. When I took a few steps out onto the corridor, I sometimes felt like I was in a zoo. Other patients or visitors would be standing in front of the doors to the floor, all eager to get a look at me. I felt like I was enclosed behind safety glass; you can look, but don’t feed the animals.

  And it wasn’t far from the hospital grapevine to the outside world. Photographers climbed trees waiting to take the first picture of me. Reporters tried to sneak into the hospital disguised as nurses. A newspaper wrote that I had the “most sought-after face in the world.” Because nobody had seen it, but everybody wanted to know what the “cellar girl” looked like.

  The media frenzy had already begun on the day of my escape. A number of journalists had apparently been listening to the police radio, when it was reported on 23 August 2006 that possibly a “confused young woman” had appeared in an n garden, claiming to have been kidnapped years ago. The police headquarters in the Lower Austrian capital of St. Pölten, which received the emergency call around 2 PM, sent a police car from Gänserndorf to Strasshof to verify her, my identity.

  Just a few hours later my mother got a call from a journalist who had interviewed her from time to time over the years. It was clear that she would not call simply out of the blue to have a chat, but only if there was something she wanted or if there was a new development in the case. After beating around the bush a while – she did not want to raise any false hopes – the reporter finally divulged that her missing daughter Natascha may have been taken to the police station in Deutsch-Wagram. It took a while after that call for the criminal police office to phone my mother to tell her that it was “99 percent certain” that her long years of waiting and hoping were over.

  In August 2006 my mother had gone to Annaberg, near the pilgrimage site of Mariazell in Lower Austria, with my half-sister Sabina and my nieces and nephews for a few days of holiday. The farm where they were staying had become almost like a second home for her and the children over the last several years. Every year she lit a candle for me in the basilica. That year she did not. On that day in August the chapel was closed for renovations. A strange coincidence.

  When she came out of the farmhouse, it wasn’t just the grey police Volkswagen waiting to bring her to me, but camera teams and reporters from the regional broadcaster of the Austrian broadcasting system were on hand as
well, peppering her with questions that she could not answer. And after they had taken down my personal information at the police station in Deutsch-Wagram and I was taken to an anteroom for questioning by police officers, members of the gutter press took up their positions outside.

  For months in captivity I had imagined what my escape might be like and how life would go on afterwards. However, the police had no pre-conceived strategy they could have pulled out of a drawer somewhere. Looking back, the mood was very strange, a mixture of joy, incredulousness and remarkable naïveté. I still remember that I asked them several times to protect me.

  On one hand from the kidnapper, as at that time nobody knew anything about what had happened to him. I was afraid that he would end up nabbing me again, that he would make good on his threats to kill everybody, should I ever dare to flee. I was afraid that he would hurt my parents or even an innocent bystander in his fury or desperation. And I was afraid that he would make good on his threat to kill himself. Escape meant death. For me, for everybody I encountered along the way, for him. Over the last several years it had been a kind of tacit agreement between the two of us, that only one of us would survive if I should run away. If I had really managed to do it, if here at the station I had eluded his grasp, sooner or later I would be responsible for a person’s death.

  I know the statements I have made in the past on that count have not always been understood. But I was simply of the opinion that you have to assume responsibility for your actions. And my actions put the kidnapper in a position from which there was no escape for him, which only pointed in one direction. Once I even did the math for him, telling him that he would be 60 when he got out of prison, if he were to let me go free and turn himself in to the police. However, the forcible confinement of a person for longer than a month is punishable by a maximum of 10 years in prison in Austria, and not by 20, as I had thought. At the time he said that he would not survive his sentence in prison, with all the dirt, germs and the other prisoners. They were certain to be violent and brutal, he thought. To my ears it seemed like cruel irony. But in his own twisted perception of himself and the world, it was only logical.

  Aside from the kidnapper, I also wanted to be protected somewhat from the world outside. Not from freedom, but from what was wrapped up in this newfound freedom. During my initial time in captivity I was completely cut off from the outside world. I existed within a closed system. Or perhaps I should say in two closed systems. In the world of the kidnapper and in the world of my imagination. The rest of the world entered into my isolation only after a time by way of books or cassette tapes with audio plays for children; later on I was allowed to listen to selected frequencies on a radio and watch certain TV channels or programs recorded by the kidnapper. In this way the media gradually became my window to the world. And it was the media that enabled me to measure the passage of time day after day in my underground dungeon.

  Much, much later, when he was certain that he had moulded “his creature” sufficiently, I was also allowed to watch “trash TV” from time to time. For Priklopil this tripe, broadcast primarily on private commercial TV channels, was a window into the degenerate world of the underclass, where people are unemployed, drunk, violent and tacky. Totally different from his perfect family, whose obvious problems were hidden behind a whitewashed façade and couldn’t easily be seen. However, for years many people attributed exactly these characteristics to my family. No wonder that the girl “ran away”, growing up in such an environment, they said. These insults reached a low point in the statements made by a former justice of the Austrian Supreme Court02, who said that I could have been inclined to accept the offer of an “alternative life far from my family and temptingly portrayed” by the kidnapper.

  I would‘ve liked to trade places with these people, sitting behind their large desks, in their large, posh flats, pontificating on about the so-called precariat, that it is obviously so terrible that a person would willingly lock themselves in a tiny hole just to get away from it all. Families that did not fit the proper mould could simply not produce anything good, they opined. Victims that did not fit the proper mould, like I was and still am, can only have put themselves in such a situation voluntarily, not by force. By either having planned the kidnapping themselves or, once kidnapped, by accepting this life joyfully as an alternative, they stated.

  I sometimes wonder what boxes people who make such nonsensical statements think in. What perception do they have of the world and the people in it, and thereby of themselves? It must be one full of hate, contempt and devoid of any shred of empathy and at the same time completely out of touch with reality.

  *

  Inspired by the success of the commercial broadcasters, the public broadcasters quickly followed suit with tabloid magazine shows aimed at satisfying the audience’s appetite for the sensational. These shows, which were my window to the world, taught me a great deal about these mechanisms, the unearthing of supposed secrets and scandals, the hyping of triviality into enormous sensationalism.

  The end to my kidnapping case was now an actual sensation that did not need any further hyping whatsoever. Just the fact that I had survived at all was an achievement, and for such an incredibly long period of time. Particularly as just over a month after my disappearance the police had announced that we had to expect the worst and that my remains would surely be discovered one day. I think my parents were the only ones who could not reconcile themselves to that thought. Perhaps out of pure fear, perhaps because they truly - each of them in their own way - believed unfailingly that I would come back.

  At the police station in Deutsch-Wagram I repeatedly said in any case, “Please do not alert the press yet. Give me some time to process all of this.” I don’t know whether the officers at the time thought that I was making myself overly important, or whether they simply underestimated what was happening. “Come on, girl. Stop your worrying now. The press isn’t going to get in here!” As if the police station were on Mars and had become dislocated from the space-time continuum.

  In fact, there was a sea of people out in front of the police station. Standing shoulder to shoulder, the reporters elbowed each other, pushing and shoving to get the best spots. One look out the window at the end of my first round of questioning finally made it crystal clear to every last police officer that there was no way I could stay there. But – where was I to go? Several telephone calls later the decision was made to transfer me to the building, where the Vienna Criminal Police Office was once located, for the time being. The building allowed for vehicle access through a courtyard and had corridors and rooms that could be cordoned off as necessary. This was unlike a normal police station, which needed to continue its day-to-day operations. However, the question was how I was supposed to leave the police station in the first place. There was no back door, no street that provided an alternative route into the city.

  The answer came in the shape of a blue blanket the officers usually used if they had to spend the night at the station on call. In a way, this blanket brought me full circle. Once we had arrived at his parents’ house at Heinestraße 60 in Strasshof, the kidnapper had also thrown a blue blanket over my head before dragging me from the van and placing me in the underground dungeon. The first few hours after my kidnapping, that blanket was the only thing I had with me underground. There was no mattress, no light. I could see nothing, hear nothing, except for the blood swishing through my veins. I felt the narrowness, the coldness, the bare floor. It smelled mouldy and like stale, warm, moist air that settled on me like a film and evoked a feeling of disgust. I was terribly afraid, and it took me an eternity until I dared free myself from the blue blanket. Finally, I rolled myself up in it, whimpering, when any feeling of time was long gone. Even though I tried so hard and kept telling myself, “Concentrate. Count. You have to count. Use your fingers and keep the passage of time in your memory.” An attempt to impose structure on eternity.

  What is time? What
is time in captivity? Does it last a couple of hours, a day, a week, a month, a year? I think that if I had known that it would last for 3,096 days, I would’ve gone crazy. If I had known how massive my underground prison was and how cleverly the kidnapper had secured my hiding place, I might have given up much sooner. I might not have held on to the end. The fear of what would happen if he did not come down one day. The fear of dying of hunger, of thirst, and of being found as mummified remains purely by chance decades later was not something I felt on the first, or the second or even on the third day. Back then I still hoped that he would come to his senses, and that I would go free after the ransom was paid or following a heroic police rescue. After that, fear was my constant companion. In my first night I had no clue about any of that. I had only that blue blanket that gave me some warmth and protection.

  Now I needed a blanket in order to take just a few steps from the police station to the car, wedged in between two police officers. Once we stepped outside, the cameras sprang into action. People called out loudly in the chaos, “A picture!” “A quick interview.” Again and again calling out my name that I hadn‘t heard for so long, “Natascha, Natascha!”

  The car took me to Vienna. The clicking of the cameras and the bright lights of the harsh camera flash hounded me for days. During one of my first weeks at the Vienna General Hospital there was a severe electrical storm one night. I was afraid to open my eyes, because I was certain that the photographers were standing around my bed, never ceasing to take pictures.

  When the car arrived in front of the former Criminal Police Office, journalists were already gathered around the main entrance. Apparently this next step had also somehow been leaked. But we entered the building from the rear entrance, without anyone being able to take any more photographs of me.