The 11 Most Gut-Wrenching Quotes from the Cleveland Kidnapping Victims’ Interview

“I’ve been kidnapped and been missing for 10 years. I’m here. I’m free now,” Amanda Berry told the 911 operator.

It was May 6, 2013. Amanda, now 29, had spent the last decade chained, starved, and tortured by Ariel Castro—all just four miles away from her home. Ariel had kidnapped her, as well as Gina DeJesus, now 25, and Michelle Knight, between 2002 and 2004.

Now, almost two years after their escape, Amanda and Gina are sharing their story—the kidnapping, the abuse, the birth of Amanda and Ariel’s daughter, Jocelyn, and their life after the nightmare—with the world. Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland was released yesterday, and tonight, Amanda and Gina joined ABC’s Robin Roberts in an exclusive interview to discuss the unimaginable. Below, the hour’s most memorable words.

“It was really hard, going to sleep at night, you know. If you wanted to toss on to your back, you couldn’t do that—you would have to take the whole chain and move it to the front of your stomach so that you’re not laying on the big lock on your back.” —Amanda

“He tried to act nice, but he’s like, ‘Well, maybe you need to go take a shower,’ and I had to take a shower with him. He thought that, ‘Well, I gave her that, I deserve this.’” —Amanda

“I thought about putting rat poison in his beans. And then spraying, like, Pine-Sol in his eyes. But he was always a step ahead of what I was doing.” —Gina

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“After a while, you just get used to it. Like you, like, just numb yourself to it. You, like, put your mind somewhere else so that you’re not there. You know, you’re not in that room with him.” —Amanda 

“There was plenty of times when I just never knew, if, why is he keeping me here. Is it, you know, one day when he’s done with me, you know, he kill me and get rid of me?” —Amanda

“I think that [not being with my mother when she passed] was the hardest part of being in there. She was always fighting, and she was never going to give up on me. And for her to get sick, and I couldn’t be there with her. I couldn’t help her when she was sick. … So he came in the room, and I was just really sad and I started talking to him. He’s like, ‘Everything’s going to be okay, everything’s going to turn out all right.’ And so I asked him for a hug, and we hugged. There was [a part of me that was like, ‘What in the world?’], but then there was another part of me like, ‘I needed that.’ I needed, like, a human, caring touch.” —Amanda 

“[Jocelyn] is his kid, you know. How do I feel about that? And she resembled him a lot, and I would look at her, and I just felt like, she’s mine. She’s mine.” —Amanda

“We [Jocelyn and I] would pretend to leave our house. All of us in the same room, of course. I would tell her, ‘Okay, we’re at a street now, so you got to stop, then you look both ways for cars, and then we can go across the street.’ ‘Okay, we’re at school now.’ So then I’d sit her at her little desk and tell her, ‘You have a good day at school now, mommy will be back later for you.’” —Amanda

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“You never know until you’re in that situation, what you’re going to do, how you’re going to react.” —Amanda

“I think you have to forgive in order to move on with your life.” —Gina

“One day, I was going to get home, and they [my family] were going to read this [thank-you letter]. ‘Thank you for not giving up on me. It is because of your help that you’re reading this because that means I’m home.’” —Amanda