Authors: Natascha Kampusch
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 difficulty, even the complete inability, 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-à-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 self-confident 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 2008 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 self-discipline 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 façade 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.