3,096 Days (15 page)

In the following weeks and months I found it easier to deal with him when I pictured him as a poor, unloved child. Somewhere in
the many crime stories and made-for-television films that I had watched before, I had picked up that people were evil if they had not been loved by their mothers and had had too little warmth at home. Today I realize that it was a protective mechanism necessary to my survival that I tried to see the kidnapper as a person who was not essentially evil, but had only become so in the course of his life. In no way did this mitigate what he had done, but it helped me to forgive him. By imagining on the one hand that he had perhaps had terrible experiences as an orphan in a home, from which he was still suffering today. And on the other hand by telling myself again and again that he surely also had a positive side. That he gave me the things I asked for, brought me sweets, took care of me. I think that in my complete dependence on him this was the only way for me to maintain the relationship with the kidnapper so necessary for me to survive. Had I met him only with hatred, that hatred would have eaten me up and robbed me of the strength I needed to make it through. Because I could catch at that moment a glimpse of the small, misguided and weak person behind the mask of the kidnapper, I was able to approach him.

Then there came the actual moment when I told him that. I looked at him and said, ‘I forgive you, because everybody makes mistakes sometimes.’ It was a step that may seem strange and sick to some people. After all, his ‘mistake’ had cost me my freedom. But it was the only right thing to do. I had to get along with this person, otherwise I would not survive.

Still, I never trusted him; that was impossible. But I came to terms with him. I ‘consoled’ him for the crime he had committed against me and appealed at the same time to his conscience, so that he would regret what he had done and at least treat me well. He paid me back by fulfilling small requests: a magazine about horses, a pen, a new book. Sometimes he would even say to me, ‘I’ll give you anything you want!’ Then I would answer him, ‘If you’ll give me anything I want, why won’t you let me go? I miss
my parents so much.’ But his answer was always the same, and I knew what it would be: my parents didn’t love me – and he would never let me go.

After a few months in the dungeon, I asked him for the first time to embrace me. I needed the consolation of a touch, the feeling of human warmth. It was difficult. He had great problems with closeness, with touching. I myself on the other hand fell immediately into a blind panic and claustrophobia when he held me too tightly. But after several attempts we managed to find a way – not too close, not too tight, so that I could bear the embrace, and yet tight enough so that I could imagine feeling a loving, caring touch. It was my first physical contact with another human being in many months. For a ten-year-old child, it had been an endlessly long time.

In the autumn of 1998, over half a year since my abduction, I became completely discouraged and saddened. While my schoolmates had embarked on a new phase of their lives after the fourth grade, I was stuck here, crossing off the days on the calendar. Lost time. Lonely time. I missed my parents so much that I rolled myself up into a little ball at night, longing to hear a loving word from them, longing for an embrace. I felt small and weak, and was on the brink of capitulation. My mother had always drawn me a hot bath whenever I felt dejected and discouraged as a small child. She would put colourful bath beads that shone like silk and bubble bath in the water so that I sank under piles of crackling, fragrant clouds of foam. After my bath, she would wrap me in a thick towel, dry me, then lay me in bed and tuck me in. I always associated that with a profound feeling of security. A feeling I had had to do without for so long.

The kidnapper found it difficult to cope with my depression. When he came to the dungeon and found me sitting pathetically on my lounger, he eyed me agitatedly. He never directly addressed my mood, but tried to cheer me up with games, an extra piece of fruit or an additional episode of a television show on video. But my dark mood continued. How could I help it? After all, I was not suffering from a lack of entertainment media, but rather from the fact that I was chained through no fault of my own to the fantasy of the man who had already long ago sentenced me to life in prison.

I longed for the feeling that had always coursed through me after such a hot bath. When the kidnapper visited me in my dungeon during that time, I began to attempt to persuade him. A bath. Couldn’t I take a bath just once? I asked him over and over. I don’t know whether or not I got on his nerves at some point, or whether he decided for himself that perhaps it was really high time for a full bath. In any case, after a few days of asking and begging, he surprised me with the promise that I would be allowed to take a bath. If I was good.

I was allowed to leave the dungeon! I was allowed to go upstairs and bathe!

But what was this ‘upstairs’? What would await me there? I vacillated between happiness, uncertainty and hope. Maybe he would leave me alone and maybe I could seize the opportunity to flee …

It wasn’t until several days had gone by that the kidnapper came to let me out of the dungeon. And he used those days to quell any thoughts of escape in me: ‘If you scream, I will have to hurt you. All of the windows and exits have been secured with explosive devices. If you open a window, you will end up blowing yourself up.’ He impressed upon me that I had to stay away from windows and to make sure that I was not seen from outside. And if I failed to follow his orders down to the last detail, he would kill me on the spot. I did not doubt him for a minute. He had kidnapped me and locked me up. Why should he not also be capable of killing me?

When he finally opened the door to my dungeon one evening and ordered me to follow him, I could only hesitate in taking my first steps. In the diffuse light behind the door to my prison, I recognized a small, somewhat elevated and obliquely designed anteroom with a chest. Behind that was a heavy wooden door through which you entered a second anteroom. There my gaze fell on a massive, round-bodied monster on the narrow side of the
wall on the left. A door made of reinforced concrete. Weighing 150 kilograms. Inserted in a nearly fifty-centimetre thick wall and locked from the outside with an iron-threaded bolt inserted into the masonry.

That is what it says in the police files. I can hardly put into words the feelings that surfaced in me when I got a look at that door. I had been encased in concrete. Hermetically sealed. The kidnapper warned me over and over of the explosive devices, the alarm systems, the cables with which he could electrify the entrance to my dungeon. A maximum-security prison for a child. What would become of me if something happened to him? My fear of choking on sausage skin seemed utterly ridiculous when I imagined him falling, breaking his arm and being taken to the hospital. Buried alive. Full stop.

I couldn’t breathe. I had to get out of here. Immediately.

The reinforced concrete door opened up to allow me to view a small passageway. Height: 68.5 centimetres. Width: 48.5 centimetres. If I stood up, the lower edge of the access way was approximately at my knee level. The kidnapper was already waiting on the other side. I saw his legs outlined against the bright background. Then I got down on my knees and crawled forward on all fours. The black walls appeared to have been tarred, and the air was stale and damp. Once I had manoeuvred myself through the passageway, I was standing in an assembly pit for cars. Directly adjacent to the passageway were a dresser and a safe that had been moved aside.

The kidnapper once again told me to follow him. A narrow staircase, with walls of grey concrete tile, the steps high and slippery. Three down, nine up, through a trap door, and I was standing in the garage.

I stood as if paralysed. Two wooden doors. The heavy concrete door. The narrow passageway. In front of it a massive safe that the kidnapper, when I was in the dungeon, pushed in front of the
entrance using a crowbar, screwed into the wall and, in addition, secured electrically. A dresser that concealed the safe and the passageway. Floorboards that covered the trap door leading down to the assembly pit.

I had already known that I would not be able to break open the door to my prison, that every attempt to flee my dungeon was futile. I had suspected that I could beat my hands against the walls and scream as long as I wanted to, nobody would hear me. But at that moment up in the garage, I understood instantaneously that nobody would ever find me either. The entrance to the dungeon was so perfectly camouflaged that the likelihood that the police would discover me when searching the house was frighteningly small.

My shock did not subside until an even stronger sensation imposed itself over my feeling of fear: air that poured into my lungs. I breathed in deeply, again and again, like someone dying of thirst who has reached a life-saving oasis at the very last second and dives into the life-giving water headfirst. After months in the cellar, I had completely forgotten how good it felt to breathe air that wasn’t dry and dusty, blown by a fan into my tiny hole in the cellar. The whirring of the fan, which had wedged itself in my ears as an inescapable noise, waned for a moment; my eyes carefully scanned the unfamiliar contours and my initial tension dissolved.

But it returned immediately when the kidnapper indicated with a gesture that I was not to make a sound. Then he led me through an anteroom and up four stairs into the house. It was dim, as all the blinds had been let down. A kitchen, hallway, living room, foyer. The rooms I entered one after the other seemed unbelievable to me, almost ridiculously large and spacious. Since 2 March I had been kept in surroundings in which the greatest distance measured two metres. I could keep an eye on the small room from any angle and see what awaited me next. Here, the dimensions of the rooms swallowed me up like a large wave. Here,
an unpleasant surprise, or evil, could be lurking behind every door, behind every window. After all, I did not know whether the kidnapper lived alone or how many people had been involved in my abduction – and what they would do with me if they saw me ‘upstairs’. He had spoken of the ‘others’ so often that I expected them to be behind every corner. It also appeared plausible to me that he had a family that was in on it who were only waiting to torment me. For me, any conceivable kind of crime seemed within the realm of the possible.

The kidnapper appeared excited and nervous. On the way to the bathroom, he hissed at me repeatedly, ‘Don’t forget the windows and the alarm system. Do what I tell you. I’ll kill you if you scream.’ After I had seen the access way to my dungeon, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind when he told me that the entire house was armed with explosives.

While I let myself be led to the bathroom with my eyes lowered, as he wished, my thoughts raced. I racked my brains fiercely as to how I could overpower him and escape. I could think of nothing. I was not a coward as a child, but I had always been fearful. He was so much stronger and quicker than I was – if I had tried to run away, he would have been on me in two steps. And opening the doors and windows would obviously have been suicide. I continued to believe in the ominous security measures until after my escape.

However, it was not just the outward constraints, the many insurmountable walls and doors, the physical strength of the kidnapper, which prevented me from attempting escape. The cornerstone of my mental prison, from which I was less and less able to break away over the course of my imprisonment, had already been laid. I was intimidated and fearful. ‘If you cooperate, nothing will happen to you.’ The kidnapper had inculcated that belief into me from the very beginning, threatening me with the worst kinds of punishment, including death, if I resisted him. I
was a child and used to obeying the authority of grown-ups – all the more if disobedience entailed consequences. He was the authority present. Even if the main door had stood wide open at that moment, I don’t know if I would’ve had the courage to run. A house cat, allowed for the first time in her life to go outdoors, will remain, frightened, at the threshold and meow pitifully, because she does not know how to cope with her sudden freedom. And behind me was not the protective house I could return to, but rather a man who was willing to follow through with his crime to the death. I was already so deeply in my imprisonment that my imprisonment was already equally deep inside me.

The kidnapper ran a bubble bath and stayed as I undressed and got in. It bothered me that he wouldn’t even leave me alone in the bathroom. On the other hand, I was already used to him seeing me naked from showering in the dungeon, so I only protested meekly. Once I sank into the warm water and closed my eyes, I was able to blot out everything around me. White peaks of foam piled over my fear, danced through the dark dungeon, washed me out of the house and carried me away with them. Into our bathroom at home, into the arms of my mother, who was waiting with a large, pre-warmed towel, and ready to take me straight to bed.