In “3,096 Days,’’ penned with the help of two authors, Kampusch describes Priklopil as a paranoid, unpredictable, and cleanliness-obsessed man who systematically tormented her physically and verbally.
“In many respects, the kidnapper was a beast and more cruel than can possibly be depicted,’’ Kampusch wrote, according to an English edition to be released Sept. 16 in Britain.
Over the years, he attacked her using not only his hands and feet but also a sack of cement, pruning shears, and a crowbar.
“Sometimes he beat me so long it felt like hours,’’ wrote Kampusch, who is now 22.
Priklopil found other ways to humiliate her.
“In the house I always had to work half-naked,’’ Kampusch wrote. “It was one of the ways to keep me down.’’
He also deprived her of food, telling her she was fat and ugly.
“The kidnapper knew precisely which buttons he had to push to land blows to my self esteem, and he pressed them mercilessly,’’ wrote Kampusch.
Kampusch describes how, as a teenager, she spent nights in Priklopil’s bed with her wrists tied to his. “The man who beat me, locked me in the cellar and starved me, wanted to cuddle,’’ she wrote.
She also recalled the horror of having her hair shaved off because Priklopil considered each strand a danger, to be potentially used by police to trace her.
Kampusch was later allowed to grow out her hair but had to die it “peroxide blond’’ to conform to her captor’s image of the ideal woman: “obedient, hardworking, blond.’’
