Authors: Natascha Kampusch
It wasn’t just that he loved order; it was necessary for his survival. A lack of order, supposed chaos and dirt threw him completely. He spent a great deal of his time keeping his cars (in addition to the delivery van, he also had a red BMW), his garden and his house meticulously clean and well maintained. It wasn’t enough for him if you cleaned up after cooking. The counter had to be wiped, every cutting board, every knife that had been used to prepare the meal, had to be washed, even while the food was on the cooker.
Rules were just as important as order. Priklopil could get wrapped up for hours in instructions on how to do something and followed them fastidiously. If the instructions for heating a ready-to-eat-meal said ‘Heat for four minutes’, then he took it out of the oven after exactly four minutes, no matter whether it was hot enough or not. It must have made a significant impression on him that despite adhering to all the rules he couldn’t quite get his life under control. It must have bothered him so much that one day he decided to break a major rule and kidnap me. But although that had made him a criminal, he maintained his belief in rules,
instructions and structures nearly religiously. At times he looked at me pensively and said, ‘How ridiculous that you didn’t come with instructions for use.’ It must have thrown him completely that his newest acquisition, a child, didn’t always function like it was supposed to, and on some days he didn’t know how to get it working again.
At the beginning of my imprisonment I had suspected that the kidnapper was an orphan and that the lack of warmth in his childhood had turned him into a criminal. Now that I had got to know him better, I realized that I had created a false image of him. He had had a very sheltered childhood in a classic family setting. Father, mother, child. His father Karl had worked for a large alcoholic beverage company as a travelling salesman and was on the road a great deal, where he apparently cheated on his wife repeatedly, as I found out later. But outward appearances were maintained. His parents stayed together. Priklopil told me about their weekend outings to Lake Neusiedl, family ski holidays and walks. His mother took loving care of her son. Maybe a bit too loving.
The more time I spent upstairs in the house, the stranger the presence of his mother, hovering over everything in the kidnapper’s life, seemed to me. It took me some time to figure out who the ominous person was who occupied the house at the weekends, forcing me to spend two or three days alone in my dungeon. I read the name ‘Waltraud Priklopil’ on the letters lying near the front door. I ate the food that she had cooked over the weekend. One meal for every day she left her son alone. And when I was allowed up into the house on Mondays, I noticed the traces she left behind: everything had been spotlessly cleaned. Not one speck of dust indicated that anyone lived there. Every weekend she scrubbed the floors and dusted for her son. Who in turn made me clean the house the rest of the week. Thursdays he drove me through all the rooms again and again with the cleaning cloth. Everything had to sparkle before his mother came. It was like an
absurd cleaning competition between mother and son that I was forced to bear the brunt of. Still, after my lonely weekends I was always happy when I discovered signs that his mother had been there: freshly ironed laundry, a cake in the kitchen. I never saw Waltraud Priklopil once in all those years, but through all those small signs she became a part of my world. I liked to imagine her as an older friend and pictured being able to sit with her at the kitchen table one day drinking a cup of tea. But we never got around to doing that.
Priklopil’s father died when he was twenty-four years old. The death of his father must have torn a gaping hole in his life. He seldom spoke of him, but you could tell that he had never got over the loss. He seemed to keep one room on the ground floor of the house unaltered to commemorate him. It was decorated in rustic style with an upholstered corner couch and wrought-iron lamps – what you would call a
Stüberl
in Austria, where people probably used to play cards and drink when his father was still alive. The product samples from the schnapps manufacturer he had worked for were still standing on the shelves. Even when the kidnapper later renovated the house, he left that room untouched.
Waltraud Priklopil seemed to have been hit hard by the death of her husband as well. I don’t wish to judge her life or interpret things that are perhaps not true. After all, I have never met her. But from my perspective, it seemed that after the death of her husband she clung even more tightly to her son, making him her substitute partner. Priklopil, who in the meantime had moved out to his own flat, moved back to the house in Strasshof, where he could never escape his mother’s influence. He constantly expected her to go through his wardrobe and dirty laundry, and paid meticulous attention to making sure that there were no traces of me to be found anywhere in the house. And he set the rhythm of his week and how he dealt with me exactly after his mother. Her
exaggerated mollycoddling and his acceptance of it were somewhat unnatural. She didn’t treat him like an adult and he didn’t act like one. He lived in his mother’s house – she had moved into Priklopil’s flat in Vienna – and let her take care of him in every way.
I don’t know whether he lived off her money as well. He had lost his job as a communications technician at Siemens, where he had done his apprenticeship, even before my abduction. After that, he was probably registered as unemployed for years. Sometimes he told me that he would go to a job interview from time to time, but then intentionally act stupid so that they wouldn’t give him the job. This allowed him to keep the Employment Service happy and hold onto his unemployment benefit at the same time. Later, as mentioned above, he helped his friend and business partner, Ernst Holzapfel, renovate flats. Ernst Holzapfel, whom I sought out after my escape, describes Priklopil as correct, proper and reliable. Perhaps socially backward, as he never had any other friends, let alone girlfriends. But, above all, unremarkable.
This well-turned-out young man, incapable of setting boundaries vis-à-vis his mother, courteous to the neighbours, and proper in a way bordering on pedantic, also kept up outward appearances. He put his repressed feelings in the cellar, allowing them later to come up into the darkened kitchen from time to time. Where I was.
I was a witness to Wolfgang Priklopil’s two sides, which were probably unknown to anyone else. One was a strong tendency to power and domination. The other was an utterly insatiable need for love and approval. He had abducted and ‘shaped’ me in order to be able to express both these contradictory sides.
Sometime in the year 2000, I saw, at least on paper, who was hiding behind those outward appearances. ‘You can call me Wolfgang,’ he casually said one day while we were working.
‘What is your full name?’ I asked back.
‘Wolfgang Priklopil,’ he answered.
That was the name I had seen upstairs in the house on the address labels of the advertisement brochures he had neatly stacked on the kitchen table. Now I had confirmation. At the same time I realized at that moment that I would not leave his house alive. Otherwise he would never have entrusted me with his full name.
From then on I sometimes called him ‘Wolfgang’ or even ‘Wolfi’, a nickname that gives the appearance of a certain kind of closeness, while at the same time his treatment of me reached a new level of violence. Looking back, it seems to me that I was trying to reach the person behind the mask, while the person before me systematically tormented and beat me.
Priklopil was mentally very ill. His paranoia went even beyond the level that you would expect from someone who puts an abducted child in a cellar. His fantasies of omnipotence blended with his paranoia. In many, he played the role of absolute ruler.
Consequently, he told me one day that he was one of those Egyptian gods from the science-fiction series
Stargate
that I liked to watch. The ‘evil ones’ among the aliens were modelled after Egyptian gods who sought out young men as host bodies. They penetrated the body through the mouth or the back of the neck and lived as parasites in the body, completely taking over the host in the end. These gods had a particular piece of jewellery that they used to force people to their knees and humiliate them. ‘I am an Egyptian god,’ Priklopil said to me one day in the dungeon. ‘You must do everything I say.’
At first I was unable to tell whether this was meant as a strange joke or whether he was trying to use my favourite TV series to force even more humiliations upon me. I suspected that he really did think himself a god, in whose absurd fantasy world the only role left for me was that of the oppressed, which would simultaneously lift him up.
His references to Egyptian gods frightened me. After all, I really was trapped under the earth as if in a sarcophagus; buried alive in a room that could have become my burial chamber. I lived in the pathologically paranoid world of a psychopath. If I didn’t want to lose myself completely, I had to have a part in shaping it as much as possible. Back when he had told me to call him ‘Maestro’, I had seen from his reaction that I was not just a pawn of his will, but that I had modest means at my disposal to define boundaries. Similar to the way the kidnapper had opened up a wound in me, into which he had for years poured the poison that my parents had left me in the lurch, I felt that I had a few grains of salt in my hand that could prove painful to him as well.
‘Call me “My Lord”,’ he demanded. It was absurd that Priklopil, whose position of power was so obvious on the surface, was so dependent on this verbal show of humility.
When I refused to call him ‘My Lord’, he screamed and raged, and one time he beat me for it. But with my refusal, I not only maintained a bit of personal dignity, but had also found a lever I could use. Even if I had to pay for it with immeasurable pain.
I experienced the same situation when he commanded me for the first time to kneel in front of him. He was sitting on the couch, waiting for me to serve him something to eat, when out of the blue he ordered, ‘Kneel down!’ I answered him calmly, ‘I won’t do that.’ He jumped up in anger and pressed me down to the floor. I made a quick turn so that I would land on my rear end at least instead of my knees. He wasn’t to have the satisfaction, not even for a second, of me kneeling in front of him. He grabbed me, turned me on my side and bent my legs as if I were a rubber doll. He pressed my calves against the back of my thighs, lifted me like a corded package off the floor and tried to push me down into a kneeling position again. I made myself heavy and stiff and twisted desperately in his grip. He punched and kicked me. But, in the end, I had the upper hand. In all the years he vehemently demanded
that I call him ‘Lord’, I never did so. And I never kneeled before him.
Often it would’ve been easier to kneel and I would have saved myself a number of blows and kicks. But in that situation of total oppression and complete dependence on the kidnapper, I had to preserve a modicum of room to manoeuvre. The roles we were to play were very clear, and as prisoner I was without question the victim. However, this battle over the word ‘Lord’ and the kneeling became a secondary theatre where we fought for power as if in a proxy war. I was in an inferior position when he humiliated and mistreated me as he liked. I was in an inferior position when he locked me up, turned off my electricity and used me as forced labour. But on that point, I stood up to him. I called him ‘Criminal’ when he wanted me to call him ‘Lord’. Sometimes I said ‘Honey’ or ‘Darling’ instead of ‘My Lord’ in order to illustrate the grotesqueness of the situation that he had placed us both in. And he punished me every time for it.
It took immeasurable strength to remain consistent in my behaviour towards him throughout the entire period of my imprisonment. Always resisting. Always saying no. Always defending myself against attacks and always explaining calmly to him that he had gone too far and had no right to treat me that way. Even on days when I had given up on myself and felt completely worthless, I couldn’t afford to show any weakness. On days like that, I told myself in my childish view of things that I was doing it for him. So that he wouldn’t become an even more evil person. As if it were my responsibility to prevent him from completely falling into a moral abyss.
Whenever he had his outbursts of rage, beating me with his fists and feet, there was nothing I could do. Similarly, I was powerless to do anything about the forced labour, being locked up or the hunger and the humiliations suffered while cleaning the house. This kind of oppression formed the framework in which I lived;
they were an integral component of my world. The only way for me to deal with it was to forgive the kidnapper his transgressions. I forgave him for kidnapping me and I forgave him every single time he beat me and tormented me. This act of forgiveness gave me back the power over my experience and made it possible to live with it. If I had not adopted this attitude instinctively from the very beginning, I would probably have destroyed myself in anger and hatred – or I would have been broken by the humiliations that I was subjected to daily. In this way, I would have been eliminated; this way would have entailed even more dire consequences than giving up my old identity, my past, my name. By forgiving him, I pushed his deeds away from me. They could no longer make me small or destroy me; after all, I had forgiven them. They were evil deeds that he had committed and would rebound only on him, no longer on me.
And I had my small victories. My refusal to call him ‘My Lord’ or ‘Maestro’. My refusal to kneel. My appeals to his conscience, which sometimes fell on fertile ground. They were vital to my survival. They gave me the illusion that I was an equal partner in the relationship within certain parameters – because they gave me a kind of counter-power over him. And it showed me something very important: namely, that I still existed as a person and had not been degraded to an object with no will of her own.
Parallel to his fantasies of oppression, Priklopil nurtured a deep longing for a ‘perfect’ world. I, his prisoner, was to be at his disposal for this as a prop and as a person. He tried to make me into the partner he had never had. ‘Real’ women were out of the question. His hatred of women was deep-seated and irreconcilable, and burst out of him again and again in little remarks. I don’t know whether he had had any contact with women earlier, or even a girlfriend during his time in Vienna. During my imprisonment, the only ‘woman in his life’ was his mother – a dependent relationship with
an over-idealized figure. Release from this dominance, which he was unable to achieve in reality, was to come about in the world of my dungeon by reversing the relationship – by choosing me to take on the role of submissive woman who acquiesced and looked up to him.