Free 3,096 Days by Natascha Kampusch Page B

out paper and a pen and began to write to them. I spent many hours carefully wording that letter – and even found a way to tell them where I was. I knew that I was being held somewhere in Strasshof, where my sister’s parents-in-law lived. I hoped that the mention of her family would be enough to put my parents – and the police – on the right trail.
    To prove that I had written the letter myself, I enclosed a photograph from my pencil case, of me ice-skating the previous winter, wrapped up in thick overalls, a smile on my face and my cheeks red. It seemed a snapshot from a world very far away, a world filled with the loud laughing of children, pop music from rattling loudspeakers and vast swathes of cold, fresh air. A world where, after spending an afternoon on the ice, you could go home, take a hot bath and watch TV while drinking hot chocolate. I stared at the photograph for minutes on end, memorizing every detail so as never to forget the feeling I associated with that outing. I probably knew that I would have to preserve every single happy memory in order to recall them in the darkest moments. Then I placed the photograph with the letter and made an envelope from another sheet of paper.
    With a mixture of naivety and confidence, I waited for the kidnapper.
    When he came, I made an effort to be calm and friendly. ‘You have to send this letter to my parents so that they know that I’m alive!’ He opened the envelope, read what I had written, and refused. I begged and pleaded with him not to leave my parents in the dark much longer. I appealed to the conscience I presumed him to have. ‘You mustn’t turn into such a bad person,’ I told him.What he had done was wrong, but making my parents suffer was much worse. I kept searching for new reasons why and wherefore, and assured him that nothing could happen to him as a result of the letter. He had read it himself and could see that I had not betrayed him … The kidnapper said ‘no’ for a long time – then suddenly gave in. He assured me that he would post the letter to my parents.
    It was completely naive of me, but I so wanted to believe him. I lay down on my sunlounger and imagined how my parents would open the letter, how they would find the hidden clues and rescue me. Patience, I just had to have a little patience, and then this nightmare would be over.
    The next day, my fantasy came crashing down like a house of cards. The kidnapper came into my dungeon with an injured finger, claiming that ‘someone’ had torn the letter from him in a dispute, injuring him as he fought to get it back. He hinted that it had been the people who supposedly had ordered my abduction and who didn’t want me to contact my parents. The fictitious ‘bad guys’ from the pornography ring became threateningly real. At the same time, the kidnapper donned the role of protector. After all, he had wanted to grant my request and had made such a great effort that he had been hurt in the process.
    Today I know that he had never intended to post that letter and had probably burned it, just like all the other objects that he had taken from me. Back then I wanted to believe him.
    In the first few weeks the kidnapper did everything to avoid destroying his image as my purported protector. He even fulfilled my greatest wish: a computer. It was an old Commodore C64 with very little memory capacity. But it came with a few floppy disks with games I could use to distract myself. My favourite was an ‘eating’ game. You moved a small man through an underground labyrinth in order to avoid monsters and ‘eat up’ bonus points. Itwas a somewhat more sophisticated version of Pac-Man. I spent hours and hours scoring points. When the kidnapper was in the dungeon, we sometimes played together on a split screen. Back then he often let me, the small child, win. Today I see the analogy to my own situation in the cellar, where monsters were able to penetrate at any time, monsters that you had to run