3,096 Days by Natascha Kampusch

situation in which I had felt safe and loved. A bottle of
Franzbranntwein
that I had asked the kidnapper to get for me helped. My grandmother had always rubbed it on her skin. The sharp, fresh odour immediately transported me to her house in Süssenbrunn and gave me a warm sense of security. When my brain was no longer enough, my nose took over, helping me not to lose my connection to myself – and my mind.
    Over time I tried to become accustomed to the kidnapper. I intuitively adapted myself to him, the way you adapt to the incomprehensible customs of people in a foreign country.
    Today I think the fact that I was still a child may have helped me. As an adult, I don’t think I would have been able to get through, even partially intact, this extreme form of being told exactly whatto do and the psychological torture I was subjected to as a prisoner in the cellar. From the very beginning of their lives children are programmed to perceive the adults closest to them as unquestioned authorities, who provide orientation and set the standards for what is right and what is wrong. Children are told what to wear and when to go to bed. They are to eat what is put on the table, and anything undesirable is suppressed. Parents are always denying their children something they want to have. Even when adults take chocolate away from children, or the few euros they received from a relative for their birthday, that constitutes interference. Children must learn to accept that and trust that their parents are doing the right thing. Otherwise the discrepancy between their own desires and the discouraging behaviour of their loved ones will break them.
    I was used to following instructions from adults, even when it went against the grain. If it had been up to me, I never would have gone to afterschool care. Particularly to one which dictated to children when they were allowed to take care of their most basic bodily functions, i.e. when they could eat, sleep or go to the toilet. And I would not have gone to my mother’s shop every day after afterschool care, where I attempted to stave off boredom by eating ice cream and pickles.
    Even robbing children of their freedom, at least temporarily, was to me nothing outside the realm of the conceivable, although I had never experienced it myself. Back then in some families it was still common to punish unruly children by locking them in a dark cellar. And old women on the tram scolded mothers of misbehaving children by saying, ‘Well, if it was mine, I would lock it up.’
    Children can adapt even to the most adverse circumstances. In the parents who beat them, they still see the part that loves them, and in a mouldy shack they see their home. My new home was a dungeon, my attachment figure, the kidnapper. My whole worldhad veered off course, and he was the only person in this nightmare which had become my world. I was completely dependent on him, as only infants and toddlers are on their parents. Every gesture of affection, every bite of food, light, air – my entire physical and psychological survival depended on the one man who had locked me in his basement dungeon. And in claiming that my parents failed to respond to his demands for ransom, he made me emotionally dependent on him as well.
    If I wanted to survive in this new world, I had to cooperate with him. For somebody who has never been in such an extreme situation of oppression, this may be difficult to comprehend. But today I am proud of the fact that I was able to take this step towards the person who had robbed me of everything. Because that step saved my life, even though I had to dedicate more and more energy to maintaining this ‘positive approach’ to the kidnapper. He successively transformed himself into a slave driver and dictator. But I never departed from my image of him.
    Still, his outward show of playing benefactor by trying to make my life in the dungeon as pleasant as possible remained intact. In fact, a kind of daily routine