Cleveland kidnap survivors recall decade of hellish imprisonment

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They leaned on each other.

Two of the three Cleveland women who were kidnapped and held as sex slaves helped each other “stay positive” to survive life with their twisted captor, they told People magazine.

Gina DeJesus, 25, and Amanda Berry, 29, — who escaped Ariel Castro’s clutches in 2013 after a decade of being chained, raped and tortured — are telling their survival story in a new double memoir published in part in the mag’s latest issue.

“You had to stay positive, because if you didn’t, there was no reason to survive it,” Berry told the magazine.

The memoir, “Hope: A Memoir of Survival in Cleveland,” is a first-person account of life in the house of horrors, including the time Castro forced them to play a game of Russian roulette.

“One day, he comes into the living room with a gun. ‘Let’s play a game,’ he says. He shows us that it’s loaded with one bullet,” DeJesus writes.

“He explains the game: If I am willing to take the risk, he will put the gun to my head and pull the trigger. If I live, he’ll give me a chance to put the gun to his head. ‘OK,’ I tell him.”

“He puts the gun to my temple and pulls the trigger. I hear a click ... I put it right to his head and pull the trigger. Click,” she recalls.

To her disbelief, he simply stood up and walked away.

In Berry’s excerpts, she recalls her frightening first days in captivity — and how it made Castro happy to see her mother weeping on the news.

“When I’ve been here four days, he turns on the news. I see my mom. I’m crying but happy I’m on the news. That means people are looking for me,” Berry writes

‘“Your mom looks really upset’ he says. He has an odd look on his face and then I realize: He’s proud,” she writes.

The women grew close after Berry gave birth to Castro’s child, Jocelyn, and they teamed up to raise and protect her, the women said. The baby’s birth also triggered confusing emotions — after years of being brainwashed by Castro, who committed suicide in jail in September 2013.

“I desperately want Jocelyn to have a normal life.,” Berry writes.

“On the days that he helps me do that, I actually feel some affection for him. I’m so confused. How how can he be good one minute and so cruel the next?”

Berry also detailed a stunning premonition made by Castro a year before he was caught.

She remembers him saying, ‘When this is over, I wonder what they’ll call me in the newspapers. Maybe the ‘Cleveland kidnapper.’ Or maybe ‘the Monster.’”

The book will be released on April 27.

The third victim, Michelle Knight, 34, published her own book last year.

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