10 Years of Freedom

by Natascha Kampusch

  On 7 September 2006 I wrote in my diary:

  Everybody was satisfied, with me and with the interview as well. I couldn’t really tell how I’m doing myself. I wanted to find out and I requested permission to leave. Dr. M. let me go through what looked like a cable duct to the back door of the hospital. All of a sudden I was confronted with kerbs, pavement stones, ramps and pedestrian crossings. Moreover, people were coming toward me on the sidewalk. Some whispered to each other or turned around. I tried to concentrate on taking every single step.

  I tried to buy a straw hat on Alserstrasse, but nobody was there. In another shop I discovered a knitted hat as well as a pink purse. The saleslady watched me with her mouth hanging open. But it wasn’t until a customer walked in that I was recognized and the knowledge of my identity was shared in a whisper. I left that shop very quickly. When I went to get ice cream with Dr. Berger just a few days after my escape, nobody recognized me. I wonder what exactly things will be like in the future.

  Everybody was concerned about my future. If the doctors had had their way, I would have remained in the hospital. If the attorneys had had their way, I was to hang out with other young people as much as possible in order to recapture my lost youth somewhat. An initial evening outing to Vienna’s “bar scene” with a couple of young employees from my attorneys’ firm simply ended up in heightening tensions among “my advisors”. The doorman did not want to let me into the hospital due to the late hour, citing a potential violation of hospital rules. And the next day, I received a scolding.

  I was in the hospital voluntarily, not because I posed a danger to myself or others. I had been examined, and there was no reason for me to extend my stay. I wanted to live in my own home, and not in a sterile room with hospital furniture. My wish was not met with unmitigated support. If I left now, I needn’t think that I could come back, I was told. That meant the next pillar of my team had crumbled. When I packed my bag, many of the comments were truly not very well-intentioned, “Oh, leaving so soon? I suppose you’re all better already?”

  A nurses‘ residence at Rosenhügel in Vienna’s 13th district was offered up as an interim solution. A small, 19 square-metre flat on the 11th floor. When I moved in at the end of September, not even five weeks after I escaped, I had to sign a paper promising not to jump out of the window. Other methods of committing suicide went unconsidered.

  I borrowed some furniture, including two tables. Even after such a short time, letters and printouts of emails ended up being stacked on one of those tables. I would like to take this opportunity to thank from the bottom of my heart all of those who offered me courage back then. It gave me a great deal of strength to see that people felt empathy with me and understanding for my situation. Often it was parents who wrote me encouraging words describing their kind-hearted feelings, telling me how much my story had moved them and how happy they were they and their children had never met with a similar fate. Older people, who had experienced terrible things, not only during the war, and saw themselves reflected in my story to some degree; they knew what it felt like to have survived. I also received autobiographical accounts, written mainly by women who had experienced traumatic events in their childhoods or adolescence and some of whom were still in therapy. Many saw parallels between their fate and mine and wanted to offer me support, or perhaps hoped to receive support from me.

  In addition to all of these positive or even moving letters, just as many letters were sent to me with very strange contents. The least of these were requests for autographs; the letters ran the entire gamut, ranging from offers of marriage to acting jobs and even invitations. Some wanted to go on a trip with me or send me on holiday. Others wanted to move into the kidnapper’s house with me or offered me work in their homes. If I were to work diligently in the family business for a monthly board of € 57, we were certain to come to an agreement, they wrote. Mothers wrote on behalf of their sons, trying to highlight their positive characteristics as a future partner. A number of them wanted to adopt me, while others told me straight out which future role I was to play in life, pointing out that I had already learned how to be a slave. I received obscene photos and moral admonishments delivered for free to my house, including several Bibles and other types of uplifting literature.

  In the very beginning I was inundated with chocolate, flowers and small gifts. Over the years I have received various talismans and other good luck charms, as well as homemade jewellery made with “energetic stones” by people who said they wanted to offer me mental support. Little girls have sent me poems and drawings, and utter strangers sent me € 20, which I was supposed to use to make a wish come true. Artists have sent me their art work, mostly portraits of me, often stylized as angels or ethereal beings. However, there have also been stalkers who have repeatedly sent inappropriate letters, pictures and objects. Two of them, who were particularly persistent, were even ordered by the courts later on to maintain their distance from me and my family.

  Again and again I receive letters from people requesting a new stove or Christmas presents for their children. Ominous aid organizations have asked for donations, while new age associations have asked me to share my “aura” with them in order to give “lost souls” strength. Yet others have seen me as the spawn of the devil, intending to destroy me so that I would be unable to use my destructive powers here on Earth any longer. They have quite openly blamed me for the death of the kidnapper, saying that he was my first victim. A strange reversal of our roles, which was not only promoted by such “crazies”, but was later to become a part of my everyday life. I was being pilloried and had to justify my version of events. I was doubted, and even accused of lying. This was mostly when the newspapers once again reported on the “Kampusch case” or after I had given an interview.

  The first few weeks and months of my freedom was like a balancing act, trying to figure out how to deal with all of these messages. The spectrum of emotions the messages expressed sometimes made me afraid. I had thought I had left possessiveness and psychotic fantasies behind me forever. I could hardly believe the comparatively large number of people who apparently desire to live like that every day. How many of them there were who identified with the kidnapper, who had managed to do something that they had likely always dreamed of.

  These issues came up again and again in my talks with my psychologist. The danger of being re-traumatized, the fear of going out on the street and running into people there for whom just looking at me triggered an entire chain of perverse fantasies. In my dungeon I believed that only upstanding, interested and civilized people lived in the world outside, who respected every individual person and meant well by them. Naturally I really knew better, but compared to the kidnapper, the world seemed that way in my memories. Once I had escaped, I had the strangest experiences even in normal, everyday situations, such as in public transport or out shopping. It was a challenge to go out in public on a daily basis. But this was exactly the challenge I wanted to face. For a long time I accepted no compromise, and I wanted to move about freely just like everybody else. I actually managed to keep it up for around six years, then I slid into a phase where I hardly wanted to leave my house. I was constantly tense and under fire from the media, and it was often torture just taking one step outside my door. I couldn’t take it anymore that some people stared at me so strangely. That teenagers laughed at me, that still others gave me reproachful or fearful looks.

  All of that, but also coupled with some who did know how to keep their proper distance, by offering me spontaneous and well-intentioned hugs, making me nervous and embarrassing me. I didn’t want to be noticed, I only wanted to be normal. But I have a sign on my forehead that says “victim of violence”. Sometimes I am afraid that I can never be free to make the acquaintance of anyone again who does not have a preconceived opinion of me. When I’m older, maybe there will be people who no longer know my story, and for whom I am just one of many.

  It was a mixture of defianc
e and masochism that I subjected myself to it for so long. Furthermore, I had been a spectator of life out there for long enough, and I no longer wanted to lock myself up. It was really bad when all of the investigations were opened up time and again, accompanied by the ghastliest speculations. Then some people would spit on the ground in front of me or hiss at me as I walked by, telling me that I should be ashamed of myself, that I was such a trollop, but that was no wonder considering my family.

  I like to spend my time in a shop where you can buy stones and other materials for jewellery making, because making jewellery has meanwhile become a hobby of mine. One time I was there, standing at the cashier’s desk, when a middle-aged woman accosted me, asking why I “had not stayed down there in my hole in the ground with a millstone around my neck instead of trying to dupe the world with my web of lies.”

  Most of the time I can manage to keep such behaviour at arm’s length, when I remind myself that it’s not really aimed at me personally, but at me as a slate for their own projections. Often erroneous interpretations or misunderstandings lead people to think poorly of me. However, sometimes it’s simple cold-heartedness and hate. I don’t always have to recognize and understand the underlying attitude, but I have to deal with it.

  I wonder if the people who criticize me are themselves as thoughtful and irreproachable as they require me to be? As a result of my case in and of itself, in coming to terms with the crime, with my captivity and with how people and the media have treated me, I have seen and experienced things that remain hidden from others as a rule. Often people only see the supposedly beautiful surface and too often forget that underneath there is an interwoven network of uncontrollable urges and inconsistencies. This is where the human drive to put others down seems to belong. To put them in their place. My place is apparently not where I thought it was. In a certain way, I was not allowed to be free after all.

  3

  Getting Reacquainted

  under Intense Public Scrutiny

  My Parents, the Media and Me

  He told me, “You are not really here you know. You were buried somewhere long ago. And your mother killed you, and now they’re all behind bars. Your father, your mother and your entire family, because they were all involved in your murder conspiracy.”

  It shocked me that out there similar ideas were circulating and my parents were under general suspicion.

  The press hotly debated the question of why I did not move back in with my parents after my long years of captivity. My parents had long ceased to be a couple, and each of them had since built their own lives. My father had a new partner, and my mother had her cats and her grandchildren, even though the media constantly suggested that she had other interests. She had still maintained my old room, where nothing had been changed except for the colour of the walls. When I was kidnapped, the room was pink, and was now painted in a fresh green colour. All of my posters and pictures were still hanging on the wall, and the bed was still made up with my favourite sheets from before. Moreover, all of my stuffed animals were still sitting next to the pillow. All of the things that were important to me as a child were still stored in the grey display case: a silver Mercedes model car that my father had given me once, a garishly coloured Barbie horse that whinnied when you pressed its saddle. A mama bear with her cubs and the nature books by Ruth Thomson that I used to practice reading in the afternoons after coming home from grade school.

  Many different kinds of insects were buzzing and humming, worrying and swarming around the flowers. Among the insects was Tinchenbienchen. Tinchenbienchen lived in a hollow log together with thousands of other bees that were just as busy as she was. Tinchenbienchen was a little bit snooty and liked to leave the hive alone early in the morning. Once when the little bee came back, everybody had gone. Tinchenbienchen felt very lonely and started to look for the others. And there, next to an enormous blackberry bush was the entire beehive. “Finally,” cheered Tinchenbienchen, “There they are!”

  In her excitement she wasn’t looking where she was going. She almost got caught up in a nearly invisible spider’s web.09

  This was exactly the passage I read aloud for a feature story done by the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) one year after my escape. I didn’t plan it. I simply grabbed a book that was at hand, sat down on the floor, opened it and began to read. When I saw the broadcast later on, it seemed like a parable for my past, and in a way the passage was fitting for my present situation as well.

  *

  While I was held captive it upset me to imagine what my parents must have felt after my disappearance. My mother most of all especially considering the quarrel we had just before I had left. “You must never part ways angry. You never know if you will see each other again!” That is one of the sayings that she taught me growing up. Just like, “An Indian knows no pain.” I used her strength, which seemed unattainable to me as a child, because I believed I would never live up to her expectations, to buck myself up all those years in the dungeon when I felt emotionally downtrodden. As well as the knowledge that both of them loved me, even if they had not always expressed it the way I had hoped. That may be due to the fact that their generation never learned to display their emotions. A generation that itself grew up with significant hardship at a time when the focus was not on self-attainment, but rather on not acknowledging your personal needs.

  In my family I was the baby of the family, born after my mother had gotten unexpectedly pregnant once more at the age of 38. My two half-sisters from her first marriage had already reached the age of adulthood. My mother certainly had not planned to get pregnant again, and I was seen more as a burden in a phase of my mother’s life where she thought that everything would be getting easier again. She had had my two older sisters when she was very young and had raised them nearly all by herself, keeping her head above water with several jobs just to put food on the table. In addition to working as a seamstress, she later took over a small shop with an adjacent café together with my father. The year I was born a corner grocery store was added. My father delivered baked goods in his delivery van, and my mother took care of the rest. They didn’t have much time for a small child.

  Nevertheless, as the baby I was the centre of attention for a long time. My older sisters treated me like a little Miss Sunshine, pushing me around in the buggy and presenting me proudly to their friends. My father would romp through the flat with me when he wasn’t working or out partying with friends. He liked to go out very much and often, and he was not somebody who was good at handling money, which made my mother furious. While she worked her fingers to the bone, he frittered their money away, piling up debts so high that his parents’ bakery finally had to be seized.

  For me, the bakery with its small shop, which hardly appeared to have changed over the decades, was the epitome of home. And the more my parents fought at home and the farther apart they grew from each other, and by extension from me, the more important my grandmother became. Her house in Süßenbrunn, an old village in the northern suburbs of Vienna, with numerous fruit trees in her garden, was a place where I felt happy. Running around in the garden, popping berries into my mouth, nicking a roll from the bakery, watching my grandmother cook in her flowered apron, I felt that everything was right with the world.

  My own world, back in our council flat at Rennbahnweg, was in the process of unravelling. My parents were fighting more and more often, slamming doors, and the atmosphere was sombre. First they lost each other and the love they felt for one another, and now I was losing my place in a family that was continually drifting apart. I was five when my father moved out. There was nobody left to make me laugh, to toss his princess in the air and to play “giddy-up horsey” on his round belly. I took their separation badly, not understanding what had happened, and I wondered whether I was at least partly to blame. I had very little desire to go out, and I holed myself up in my room. And when I began kindergarten a bit later, I started wetting myself again
. At first it was only at night, later on it was during the day.

  It was the start of a very humiliating phase for me, where I lost every ounce of my self-esteem. My mother responded with hard-heartedness, incomprehension and desperation at my “problem”, accusing me of doing it on purpose when everything else was already so difficult to deal with. It was my own fault if the other kids teased me, if the teachers embarrassed or punished me, she told me. When I complained, she mocked me for being “a delicate little flower”, telling me that I had to toughen up, particularly towards myself. When I cried, she was particularly harsh. Sometimes she would slap me, telling me that at least then I would know why I was crying.

  I felt neglected, worthless, small. I was no longer the fun-loving girl with the friendly smile, but rather a girl with sad eyes who tried to compensate for her despair and feelings of rejection with food. I ate and ate, gobbling up everything I could get my fingers on until my belly ached. At the age of 10 I was around 1.45 metres tall and weighed 45 kilos. What followed was even more ridicule, even more teasing, even more rejection. A vicious cycle that I could no longer escape.

  A number of things that particularly upset me while in captivity arced back to my past. Controlling what I drank, for example. When I couldn’t stop wetting the bed during my kindergarten years, every drop of fluid intake was strictly regulated. I wasn’t allowed anything to drink before going to bed and only allowed to have a drink while out and about if a toilet was within reach. I was always thirsty. Later on, when I was trying to comfort myself with food, I downed sticky-sweet fizzy drinks by the litre. Nothing in moderation.

  Down in the dungeon I sometimes thought I was suffocating because my tongue would stick to the roof of my mouth so thickly. I would go half crazy if I were given only a couple of dry cookies or zwieback to eat that I couldn’t get down without any liquids. The kidnapper’s voice on the intercom, barking at me, “Have you drunk everything up again?” Comments like, “Just look at yourself. You are fat and ugly.” Before, my mother had sometimes said to me mockingly, “All you have to do is put an ugly girl in a pretty dress.” All of that had buried itself deep in my soul, and now my wounds were being torn open again.