'Why Me Again?'
Almost every train driver learns over the years to differentiate among the various sounds of death. The higher the impact, says Kniest, the louder the bang. Drivers learn to distinguish a fox from a dog, a hare from a rabbit, and a dove from a buzzard. A person lying on the rails sounds different from a person who is standing up waiting for death. "If they act the fool and stand up," says Kniest, "it's a pretty loud bang."
The second "event" turned Kniest into something of an expert. Instead of just conducting the train from point A to point B, he began reading the tracks and recognizing the opportunities that people wanting to commit suicide might see.
Before long, Kniest knew where people would cross the tracks illegally and where there are switch shacks someone could hide behind. He knew how a train's braking distance was affected by frost on the tracks. Passenger transport, says Kniest, is more dangerous than freight transport. Undeveloped land is more dangerous than residential areas. Men are more likely to commit suicide on the tracks than women, and young people are more common than old people. The danger is particularly high when a psychiatric hospital is close by. Kniest learned that the headlights on the locomotive are no help when it comes to detecting an obstacle. They are so weak that train drivers call them "tea lights."
Stephan Kniest had his third accident at the end of 2006. "It was the dark season again," says Kniest, adding that he had had a "queasy feeling" as fall arrived that year.
He no longer knows whether the victim was lying down or standing up. He has suppressed the sound of the impact. Kniest doesn't want to know anything about the victims; not knowing protects him. A face, a name or, worse, a victim's personal story would make it even more complicated for him.
In the taxi home, he found himself wondering: "Why me again?" Stephan Kniest was now above the statistical average. And he was just 24 years old.
'Extremely Sharp Focus'
He now knows that a timetable is nothing more than an optimistic assumption. Something can always get in the way. A person who seeks death on the tracks disrupts the order of the railway. The freedom of the person committing suicide to create chaos, wherever and whenever he or she wants, means a lack of freedom for the train driver.
Kniest didn't get professional help this time either.
By this time, he had already experienced three traumatic events, incidents that the brain is unable to process. They are always present, especially the details, the sounds, the smells. "I remember everything," says Kniest. "Everything is in extremely sharp focus."
"A trauma often renders people speechless," says Bruno Kall, a senior physician at the Buchenholm Clinic in Malente, located in northern Germany. Two decades ago, the clinic began specializing in the treatment of traumatized train drivers. The victims are literally speechless with horror.
A person who seeks death on the tracks doesn't just destroy their own life, they also disrupt the life of someone else. They turn train drivers into a perpetrator, someone who is forced to kill. They transform train drivers into murderers who are not guilty of their actions.
The Buchenholm Clinic is situated under tall trees on Dieksee Lake. The dining room offers a panoramic view of the water and it is a good place to find peace. What prompted the clinic to specialize in the trauma of train drivers? The clinic is a subsidiary of the Deutsche Bahn health insurance fund. In 1996, by which time Kall had already begun working as a doctor in Malente, a train driver being treated at the clinic began complaining of diffuse heart pain. Doctors performed an ultrasound but were unable to find anything causing the symptoms. At some point, the patient said that he had driven his locomotive into a group of workers. This led the doctors to conclude that the cause of his heart problems was not physical.
Proof of Existence
Kniest has suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, at least since the third suicide. PTSD has been recognized as an affliction since 1980 and in Kall's experience, approximately 15 percent of train drivers who have run over a person develop the condition. That puts train drivers in the same risk category as firefighters, paramedics or police officers. "The less influence you have over a traumatic experience, the more difficult it is to process," Kall says.
Stephan Kniest tries to process the trauma he has experienced by taking pictures of cargo vessels. The ship photos become more important with each "event." He stands by the sea in Rotterdam as often as he can. He takes photos, up to 1,500 a day, and when he returns home, he looks through the new batch, editing, labeling and archiving them. As though he were trying to combat the pictures in his head with the pictures he takes.
Kniest makes two backups of every image that is sharply in focus. His biggest fear is that an error or a technical glitch could erase everything. The photos that he has taken thus far use up nine terabytes of memory on his hard drives, but he can still remember almost every ship, the weather, the day, the light, the circumstances. The photos are proof that each individual day existed, that progress was made, that there is an order and a sequence to life.
For eight years everything went well, at least that's how it felt to Kniest. He had some near misses, but no disasters.
But even during that period, friends began to notice a change. He became increasingly withdrawn and rarely went out. When they had made plans, to go to a party, for example, he often found an excuse to avoid coming along.
"I dodged a lot of questions," says Kniest, adding that he stuck largely to himself "to avoid stupid questions." Stupid questions were the ones he was unable to answer.
Then came Jan. 23, 2015, a Friday. This time, it was a man who had chosen to end his life with the help of Kniest's train.
'Looking at Me'
It was his fourth "event," and it was completely different from the others. Kniest could tell that the man had dark skin, and he wasn't lying on the tracks. It was impossible for Kniest to mistake him for a bag of garbage. Instead, the man was walking on the tracks. Toward the oncoming train.
There is one thing Kniest cannot forget to this day: "He was looking at me."
A train driver must execute three moves to bring a train to a halt as quickly as possible: he must pull the driver's brake lever from the drive position to the emergency position; he must trigger the signal whistle with a pedal; and he must press a button that causes quartz sand to be poured onto the rails in front of the first axle, to provide the wheels with better grip when braking. Despite these three moves, by the time the train comes to a standstill it is almost always too late.
Again, Kniest was placed on sick leave. But this time, he didn't return to work. He was unable to drive a train anymore. The images in his head were simply too powerful.
He couldn't sleep well at night and he hardly ever went outside during the day. His memories would assail him without warning, anywhere and at any time, triggered by trivialities: sirens, braking noises, the rattling of a train, police lights.
In May 2015, he headed to Malente for the first time, for an appointment with Dr. Kall at the Buchenholm Clinic.
Eye contact, says Kall, makes treatment more difficult. "The train driver then believes that he was chosen by the suicide victim."
In Malente, they tried to work through the traumatic event, to bring back the day of the "event," the journey, the accident, the feeling.
Many patients come to Malente, says Kall, and say: "Get rid of it. Like with a Super 8 movie. Can't you just cut out the sequence?" It usually takes a while for a trauma patient to realize that you can't erase experiences. You can discuss the sequence of events, says Kall, in the hope that the patient learns to evaluate them differently. If all goes well, the pictures will eventually fade, but they don't disappear.
The patient must learn that the train driver is not the perpetrator, but the victim. He may have been driving the locomotive, but he didn't kill anyone; the people who committed suicide did so themselves. Anger is good, says Kall, anger at the person who put you in this position. Anger helps the train driver escape from the role of perpetrator.
A Second Stint
Kniest returned home after nine weeks. He felt better, but he still didn't feel good.
When he was unable to sleep at night, he would sit at his desk and look at the ship pictures stored on his computer, spending hours correcting colors, contrasts and tones. As long as he was working on his ship pictures, he didn't have to fight with the pictures in his head.
Before long, he developed tenosynovitis, a repetitive strain injury, in his hand. With his right arm put in a cast as part of the treatment, he ordered a mouse for his left hand.
Since he was unable to work, he risked losing his train driver's license after one year. The closer the deadline approached, the worse he felt. At some point, he began thinking about killing himself. Just take some pills, he thought to himself, and you'll have your peace.
In 2016, he went to Malente for a second stint, this time for 12 weeks.
Kniest learned to recognize his "triggers," the sounds and smells that the brain associates with the "event." It was only in Malente that he realized that he avoids walking in the forest because he cannot bear the smell of autumn leaves. It is the result of his walk back along the tracks on that November day many years ago after his first "event" to reach the dead woman. He learned to be patient and felt relieved when his train driver's license expired. And he learned to go back to the train station and to take the train. He said he felt "like a small child learning to walk."
It wasn't until last spring that he decided to take the driving test again. He wanted to fight, says Kniest, and passed the test on his first try. Initially, he would drive the locomotive for two hours at a time, then four, and finally eight, accompanied by a trainer. It helped that the trainer had also hit somebody with his train. "He knew what I was talking about."
His shifts are much more strenuous today than they used to be, says Kniest. In the first few weeks, he would see someone lurking behind every control box. When he drives at night or in fog, he is soaked in sweat afterwards.
Sometimes when he isn't feeling well, he calls in sick. Then he spends hours sitting at his desk, clicking through his ship photos and going to appointments with the psychologist who tends to him. Kniest is afraid that a fifth "event" could destroy him for good.
On one occasion, he had to take a week off. Later, he learned that during that time, three people took their lives on the route he normally travels.
'A Good Day'
Kniest forces himself not to think about the people who make his life hell because they can't cope with their own lives. He has fought his way back into the train cab, which is a remarkable achievement; he thinks about the machine under his control and about the timetable; and he has learned that happiness can also mean the absence of misfortune.
When the day comes to an end in Rotterdam, after Stephan Kniest and his two friends have been standing on the dike for hours, making jokes, taking pictures or saying nothing, they drive, as the twilight rises from the North Sea, from the Smickel Inn back over to the promontory, where there is a magnificent hilltop view of the port and the Caland canal.
Using his tripod, Kniest photographs two white ferries docked under a remarkably yellow sky. The clouds are illuminated by the light from greenhouses where orchids are grown. "Today was a good day," he says. It was a good sky, there were lots of ships, and there was good light.
That very same evening, at home, he looks through the pictures of the day on his computer. He begins by editing the picture with the yellow sky for 20 minutes. At 11:26 p.m. he uploads the result to Facebook.
A perfect picture, says Kniest. Two huge machines, moored one behind the other, the high yellow sky, everything in focus and correctly exposed.
There is nothing in the photo to disturb the eye, no motion. And there is not a single person to be seen.