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like a mountain, and as a child I often patted it, asking, ‘When’s the baby due?’ My father would just laugh good-naturedly. Piles of meat were always stacked on his plate, and he had to have several large dumplings, which swam in a veritable ocean of sauce. He devoured huge portions and continued to eat even when he was no longer hungry.
    When we went on our family daytrips at the weekend – first together with my mother, later with his new girlfriend – everything centred around food and eating. While other families went hiking in the mountains, biking or visited museums, we headedto culinary destinations. He drove to a new wine tavern or went on trips to country inns located in castles, not for the historical guided tours, but to take part in medieval-style banquets: piles of meat and dumplings that you pushed into your mouths with your hands, mugs of beer to wash them down – this was the kind of daytrip that appealed to my father.
    And I was constantly surrounded by food in the two shops, the one in Süssenbrunn and the one in the Marco-Polo-Siedlung that my mother had taken over after splitting up with my father. When my mother picked me up from afterschool care and took me to the shop, I kept boredom at bay by eating: an ice cream, gummi bears, a piece of chocolate, a pickle. My mother usually gave in – she was too busy to pay close attention to everything I was stuffing into my mouth.
    Now I began to overeat systematically. I would devour an entire packet of Bounty chocolate bars, drink a large bottle of Coke, and then top it off with more chocolate until my stomach was stretched ready to burst. When I was barely able to put anything more in my mouth, I began eating again. The last year before my abduction I gained so much weight that I had gone from being chubby to being a really fat young girl. I exercised even less, and the other kids teased me even more. And I compensated for my loneliness by eating all the more. On my tenth birthday I weighed forty-five kilos.
    My mother would frustrate me further by saying, ‘I like you anyway, no matter what you look like.’ Or: ‘You only have to put an ugly child in a pretty dress.’ When I became offended, she laughed and said, ‘Don’t think I mean you, sweetie. Don’t be so sensitive.’ ‘Sensitive’ – that was the worst. You were not allowed to be sensitive. Today I am often surprised at how positively the word ‘sensitive’ is used. When I was a child, it was an insult for people who were too soft for this world. Back then I wished I could have been allowed to be softer. Later on, the toughnessthat chiefly my mother had imposed on me probably saved my life.
    Surrounded by sweets of all sorts, I spent hours alone in front of the television or in my room with a book in my hand. I wanted to flee from this reality, which held nothing but humiliations in store for me, to other worlds. At home our TV had all of the channels available and nobody really paid any attention to what I was watching. I flipped through the channels aimlessly, watching kids’ programmes, news and crime stories that frightened me, and still I soaked them up like a sponge. In the summer of 1997 one issue dominated the media: in the Salzkammergut, one of Austria’s lake districts predominantly located in Upper Austria, the police discovered a child pornography ring. Horrified, I heard on the TV that seven grown men had lured an unknown number of small boys into a specially equipped room in a house by offering them small amounts of money. There, they molested them and made videos of what they did that were sold all over the world. On 24 January 1998 yet another scandal shook Austria. Videos of the molestation of girls between the ages of five and seven had been sent out through the mail. One video showed a man luring a seven-year-old girl from her neighbourhood into an attic room, where he had severely molested her.
    Even more disturbing to me were the reports of girls who had