Hope: A Memoir of Survival

by Amanda Berry

A lot of parents in my neighborhood do hourly work like my mom, and then their kids drop out of school and join them in the same jobs, getting by but not going far.

I’m terrified and I know he is lying.

He walks me back down to the basement, sits me against the pole, and locks the chains tight around my stomach. I cry and cry, but he only turns up the volume on the TV, shuts off the light, and walks back upstairs without a word. It’s so dark. Then I remember: It’s my birthday.

I was having a bad day and made a bad decision. Now I will probably die because of it.

I hate wearing his ugly, baggy clothes. I even have to wear his underwear—big, nasty briefs. It’s like I’m wearing a prison uniform. The only thing I have left of my own is the bra I was wearing when I got here. I used to hate my work uniform, but now I’d give anything to have it back.

It’s Sunday. I’ve been gone six days. And so far, he’s raped me at least twenty-five times. It’s been four or five times every day.

He controls when I eat, what I see, what I hear. But he cannot control what I think, so I am going to take my mind somewhere else when he climbs on me.

When he is doing horrible things to my body, I look at my mom’s face. I imagine her laughing. I picture her smoking her cigarettes and gabbing on the phone, or cooking in the kitchen. I look into her eyes and lose myself in her. And my mom and I get through it.

Didn’t anybody see me getting into his van? Maybe a neighbor on Seymour saw me come in here? Someone has to rescue me.

The only light comes from the screen of the little black-and-white TV, the one I had in the basement. It’s maybe twelve inches and has rabbit-ears antenna. I have it on a little chair at the foot of the bed and watch Maury and other shows my mom likes. It’s comforting to think that we might be seeing the same shows at the same time.

I never went to church much, but I know there is a God and I know he must have a different plan for me than this.

I move over to the very edge of the bed, as far away from him as I can get. But he cuddles up behind me and reaches around and takes my hand. It’s like he thinks we’re a couple. I lie still until he falls asleep, then I slip my hand out of his. He has ruined my life and my body. I’m filthy. My toilet is a trash can. I’m hungry and cold and chained up. And he wants to hold my hand.

I just start to feel the water wash him off me when he steps into the shower. I think about killing myself. But if I do, he wins. I have to keep it together until I can figure out how to escape. To keep from sliding into complete sadness I try to focus on anything good. I felt hot water today. I heard Eminem on the radio. I found a penny in the pocket of his old sweatpants and decide it’s my lucky penny. I have pictures of my mom and dad, and they remind me that I need to stay strong so I can see them again. But it’s hard. These chains are so tight that even with the socks wrapped around them they cut into my stomach. It’s impossible to sleep, because I keep rolling over onto the padlock. But even worse than the physical pain is the mental torture of never knowing what’s next.

I’m learning that they have TV shows that teach everything—cooking, dance, languages. I saw one that teaches meditation, how to relax, how to rid your mind of what’s bothering you. I am going to look for that one. I have to get better at making my mind fly away from this place. I close my eyes. “Please, Lord, make this end. Please let me go home to my family. Please keep them safe and bring me home soon,” I say over and over. I turn to my photo of Mom, kiss it, and tell her good night. Tomorrow is May 1. A new month. This is how I’m going to think about time: Every day that passes means I’m a day closer to this being over, a day closer to being home. Hope is my only option.

I decide to write in my diary every time he attacks me. I won’t use the word “rape” in case he ever reads it. But I need a record of what he is doing to me. I want him someday, somehow, to be held responsible for every single time he steals a piece of me. I can’t let him get away with this. It was three times today—morning, lunchtime, and when he came home from work—so in the corner of my diary page, I mark 3x. He’ll never know what it means. I’ll never forget.

I have to believe somebody saw me get in the van with him. Help me, somebody, please. 4x.

He keeps coming in here. It never stops. 4x.

3x. I realize that he thinks if he feeds me, or gives me anything at all that I want, even a sheet of paper, he’s entitled to do whatever he wants with me. In his warped mind, he’s providing for me, so my body belongs to him.

My dinner is a Snickers and a Twix. 3x.

I just brushed my teeth for the first time in three days. 4x. In my diary, I draw my heart with a dagger through it.

My mom says she is keeping everything in my room exactly how I left it, and as I read that the tears are rolling down my face. It turns him on to see how much it hurts me to read the article.

4x.

5x.

The FBI had never heard of Michelle Knight, and they didn’t know that she was also being held in the same house. Nine months earlier, Castro had abducted her from the exact same Family Dollar lot where the FBI van was now parked.

I haven’t eaten in two days. I guess he just forgot about me yesterday. I’m feeling weak.

I’m not sure why he won’t spend much money on food for me, but he will buy me cigarettes and weed. Getting high dulls the pain of being here. If it weren’t for the weed, I would have killed myself by now. Maybe he knows that, and that’s why he gets it for me. Before I was in here, pretty much everyone I knew smoked weed. It was just what teenagers in my neighborhood did. I liked to sit in my room, listen to music, and smoke a bowl once in a while. Now I’m smoking a lot and it takes me to a different place for a little while. But he doesn’t give me anything for free. 1x.

Life is giving me a test. I have to pass. God wouldn’t give me anything I can’t handle. I can do this.

Why do so many men hurt women?

1x.

He’s like a prison guard who loves taunting, punishing, and taking away privileges. I make loud groaning noises to annoy him until he finally gets up and turns on the fan. He smacks my arm hard. “Don’t be a baby!” he yells at me. He is on me again. I don’t want him to see me crying because I hate giving him the satisfaction of knowing he hurts me. But I can’t help it, and my tears spill.

I saw Ricki Lake’s show about sexual assault victims putting their lives back together. I hope when I get out of here that I am not scared of every man for the rest of my life. But I’m afraid I will be. I don’t want to be paranoid. I want my life back the way it was.

Can I bounce back from this? I’m fighting back thoughts of killing myself.

I have to believe that one day I will walk out that door, free, and it’s going to be like coming back from the dead.

1x.

I can’t believe he came that close to having another prisoner. And I can’t believe there is a girl out there who came to this house and had sex with him willingly. Girl, you don’t know how lucky you are. You have no idea how close you were to being chained to a wall.

He wakes me up again. It’s whatever he wants, whenever he wants it. Even after four months, it’s still three or four times a day.

My strategy has become: Don’t fight. Don’t make him mad. Do whatever I have to do to stay alive and get home. But now he is making me lie on my stomach while he does that really nasty thing again. It hurts so bad. How would he like it if somebody stuck something into him that way? It’s horrible and he won’t stop. I can’t help it, so I scream, “Let me go home or kill me!” He stops, sits me up, and looks at me funny. “Do you want to die?” he finally asks. “No, but I don’t want to be here!” It’s hard to get the words out through the tears. “If I was dead, at least I could see my family from heaven.” He just looks at me for a while and then quietly says, “Okay.” He steps out into the hallway and returns with an old vacuum cleaner, like one from the ’70s. He takes the cord and wraps it around my neck, and then starts tightening it. I feel it squeezing my throat, tighter and tighter. I feel suddenly calm. I close my eyes. I am ready to die. I pray silently: Please, God, save me. I love you, Mom. I love you, Beth. I love my girls. I love you all so much. I feel a release. No more pain. Then the cord suddenly goes loose, and he throws it on the floor. “I’m not here to kill you!” he shouts. “I don’t want to kill you! This is just about my sexual problem!” He storms out of the room. No matter what he says, I know he could kill me at any minute. His anger comes out of nowhere, like lightning. I never know what’s going to set him off.

As I rub my throat and sit there thinking, I realize I have a mission, like the soldiers. This man enjoys hurting women, and I want people to know it. I don’t want h...

I’ve set my mind to getting to the next day. I go days without speaking.

Because the room is always dark, the light is no different at three in the morning than it is at three in the afternoon. He gave me cards and I play solitaire. I finished all the crossword puzzles in my book. I’ve colored every page of a coloring book he gave me. He brings me the newspaper sometimes and magazines that he must get for free because they are so boring and I’ve never heard of them. Being alone is bad, but it is far worse when he comes in, and it always ends with me crying.

Today he wants to talk and is acting like he hasn’t done anything wrong, like we are friends. I don’t say a word to hi...

“You’re so pretty,” he says as he starts pawing me again. “Stand this way, stand that way, put your arms around me, you’re so beautiful,” blah, blah, blah. He has a whole little routine he makes me recite, about how much I love it, how much I want him. If I don’t say it, he’s rougher. It’s been almost nine months since he kidnapped me. He’s always touching me like he owns me. He talks about the different parts of my body and says they’re his, that they belong to him. He says we are “together.” How can he think that if he has to lock me up to keep me here? “You can’t just take my whole life away,” I tell him. “What life?” he says, laughing. “Working at Burger King? That’s not a life.” “What do you know about me? Nothing! You have no right to take my life away!” He keeps touching me, and I feel like cutting off his hands, or something else. I hope I don’t catch any diseases from him. I’m desperate to see a doctor when I get out of here. He’s raped me nine times in the past three days, but I’ve decided I’m not going to mark X’s in my diary anymore. I want him to be held accountable someday, but when I look back at these X’s, I remember every time all over again. It’s more than I can bear right now.

Torsney, who had been an FBI agent for more than twenty years, specialized in finding people. In 2011 he would make news around the world for his pivotal role in locating and arresting James “Whitey” Bulger, the infamous Boston mobster who had been a fugitive for sixteen years. Torsney was a wiry, old-school agent who enjoyed strapping on his body armor and kicking in bad guys’ doors. Patient and methodical, he made ten peanut butter sandwiches every Sunday, putting two in his car for Monday and freezing the rest, removing two each morning the rest of the week so he didn’t have to leave a stakeout to eat.

I sit and wait, jittery, for the next horrible thing to happen. I hate how he strokes my hair, how he wants me to sit on the couch with him and watch TV. It’s like he thinks we are friends. I’m terrified of him.

One day a producer from America’s Most Wanted called and said that John Walsh, the show’s host, wanted to give Amanda’s case national exposure. A crew came to film in Cleveland, and Beth took the lead in the interviews: “We love you, Mandy. We want you home. We’re always going to be looking for you. We’ll never give up.”

Beth knew the odds were not good that Amanda would be found alive, but her instincts were telling her something different. “My heart doesn’t feel empty like it would if she was gone,” she told her mother after the camera crew left. “I feel like she’s close.”

It makes me lonelier to see my family on TV, but it’s also a gift. At least one day a year, on the anniversary of my kidnapping, I know they will appear on the news, and I’ll be able to see if they look healthy, what they are wearing, if they’ve changed their hair, how my nieces are growing up. April 21 is My Day.

It’s my eighteenth birthday, and he comes into my room like he’s Santa Claus or something. “Happy birthday! Can I get you a cake?” He doesn’t seem to understand how much I hate him. Who chains someone up and then offers to get them a birthday cake?

“No,” I tell him in a dead, cold voice. “I don’t want anything.” But really, there’s a lot I do want for my birthday. I want to be able to take back my stupid mistake of getting into his van. I want to take back every mean thing I ever said to my mom. I want to be a normal eighteen-year-old, having fun and saving up to go to college. I want my own room back and my clean, pressed clothes. I want to wash and cut my hair. I want to take a shower, twice a day, like I used to. I want to talk on the phone, walk outside, go shopping. I so, so, so want a Dr Pepper. I don’t want to need counseling for the rest of my life.

I don’t want to always be scared of everyone I ever meet. I w...