10 Years of Freedom

by Natascha Kampusch

  I particularly like handicrafts, because it calms me and I can let my creativity run wild. I have even designed accessories such as jewellery or handbags myself. I had already begun to do so while in captivity. With crochet yarn that I had requested for Christmas from the kidnapper. I still have a number of those small bags that I crocheted at the time.

  Even as a child handicrafts and painting were my way of withdrawing into my own little world whenever I felt unable to find my place in the world outside. In the dungeon, I needed pictures, pictures from my world even from my old world that I could use to counter my present reality. I coloured the tongue-and-groove boards that covered the walls of my dungeon in the beginning, before they were replaced by drywall panels, with crayons. I drew a door handle on the door, just like the one in my mother’s apartment. And next to it a small dresser that stood in the hallway. When I lay on my bed and closed my eyes, I would imagine that the door would open at any moment. My mother would come in and put her keys on the dresser. I drew my family tree, the silver Mercedes on the wooden boards, horses in a meadow with flowers. An illusion, nothing more. But when I stared intensely enough at the images, I had the feeling that I could almost smell the flowers.

  Even today pictures are very important to me. I paint with acrylic, tempera or oil paints, and I enjoy photography. After one of my first interviews I was given a small digital camera that I used to capture this new colourful world. I was fascinated by details and other trivialities that many perhaps do not find worthy of being photographed. Things that people take for granted in their everyday lives, for example two glasses on the table bathed in a ray of sunlight. In the meantime the camera has become a tool for me to create distance. To filter the many impressions raining down on me, or focus them on one point or moment, to transform something into an object and not to become an object myself.

  *

  In my first interview with Christoph Feurstein he asked me what my very first wish was that I had fulfilled after my escape. That was the only question that threw me for a loop a little bit. I glanced over to my team of advisors and ask them, “Can anyone remember?” After a few moments I answered, “The main wish that I fulfilled for myself in the last several days is naturally freedom. (…) mmm, yes, and I went to get some ice cream in disguise. On Währingerstrasse in an ice cream parlour.” Wearing a scarf on my head and sunglasses.

  Going for ice cream. How often had I imagined doing just that during my captivity. A spoonful of ice cream, first cold and firm, slowly melting, until the taste of hazelnut or vanilla or strawberry filled your entire mouth. That was also a game with illusions. Using advertising brochures that I thumbed through, I would embark on similar adventures of taste. I would look for an appetizer, a main course and a dessert. For hours on end. Despite how unable I was to fill my empty stomach with those pictures, going for ice cream in freedom made up for it somewhat.

  I was thankful for now having the opportunity to eat ice cream whenever I wanted to. But no matter how many scoops of ice cream I ate, it would always taste different from the ice cream that you enjoy while sitting with friends in an ice cream parlour laughing, complaining about an annoying teacher or gushing about your latest crush. In the beginning whenever I would see a happy clique of young people somewhere, I felt a stab of envy. I wondered if I would be able to enjoy something similar someday. How did you define friendship in the first place? I still had to find that out for myself. My last memories of friendship were from my childhood, although I was more an outsider and not the class clown at the centre of attention. I was only the centre of attention when my father came to school during recess with a box full of fresh jelly donuts from the bakery. Teachers often found me somewhat unpleasant, because I was very direct and spoke up when I sensed an injustice or an untruth somewhere. I simply wanted to be authentic, but I simply did not notice that I was hurting other people’s feelings. There were many situations where I was admonished or punished by adults for that very reason, which I could not understand at all. “Just look at what you’ve done again!” I got the impression that it is apparently easier sometimes to maintain a lie or to sugarcoat something than to face up to the truth. As if you had to sprinkle cinnamon on it in order to make it more palatable.

  With my openness, there were phases after my escape where I kept putting my foot in my mouth. Depending on his or her degree of socialization, everybody from a certain age onward is no longer very malleable, and certain basic character traits have long been established. Before my kidnapping I already had a personality, history that was longer than the time I had spent in captivity. Children see the world with open eyes. They know more than grown-ups give them credit for, because they use their intuition for many things that grown-ups try to comprehend with their minds.

  In captivity it helped that a portion of my personality had already been so well-established that I could uphold a value system that I felt was right for me. In many areas I was in opposition to the kidnapper. Not on principle, as is sometimes the case in puberty when teenagers try to distance themselves from their parents, although their views are perhaps not all that worthy of rebellion. People mount the barricades in order to carve out their place in the world, to liberate themselves from actual or supposed constraints. People try things out, push the envelope and feel free while doing it.

  I stood in opposition to the kidnapper simply due to the fact that everything about what he had done was wrong. When he said “blue”, I thought to myself “red”. When he got worked up over a political event, about all the incompetents who in the good old days, under Adolf, would have gone nowhere fast, when law and order prevailed, I would think to myself “anarchy!” And when he held forth about his conservative stance on women – she should be industrious, wait for him at home with dinner, not contradict, always be nice and neat – and when he would say to me, “I am your king. You must serve me,” I would try to carry out my chores as slowly or as sloppily as possible, even if I was punished for it. These attempts to distance myself from him were other victories than the ones that others my age achieved when they defied their parents’ wishes.

  In captivity I could only see everything in relation to myself. Aside from the kidnapper, there was no one else. He was the only one I had to adapt to, the only one I had to accommodate. Over time I learned to read his behaviour. I knew that not only was I dependent on him, but to a certain degree he was dependent on me as well. In his split personality, for example, he could not bear it if I remain silent or punished him with my contempt. While renovating once I handed him the wrong tool. From one second to the next the look in his eyes turned insane. Everything about him was pure rage. I had never seen him like that before. He grabbed a sack of cement and threw it at me full force, making me lose my balance for a moment. Everything hurt, and tears sprang to my eyes. But I would not allow him that triumph I remained standing as stiff as a board, only staring at him. “Come on. Stop it now. I’m sorry. It wasn’t really that bad.” He came over to me, shook my shoulders, pinched my side and used his fingers to push the corners of my mouth upward. “Come on, laugh a bit. I’m sorry. Please go back to normal again. What can I do to make you normal again?”

  It wasn’t until an eternity had passed that I moved and said, “I want ice cream and gummy bears.” Childish pragmatism and the attempt to downplay the seriousness of the attack with my demand. At times Priklopil would have given an obstinate three-year-old a run for his money. First break the toy and then despair that it is broken. But of course it makes a difference whether a three-year-old child is kicking you and yelling at you and is angry at you and destroys everything, or whether it is a strong, 1.72 metre tall man.

  *

  In my letter to the “world public” as previously mentioned, I wrote that the kidnapper carried me in his arms and trampled me underfoot. A half a year after my escape an article was published in the newspaper referring to me as the “queen from the cellar dungeon”. It described me a
s a strange creature, an extremely empathetic woman, but also one with regal airs and graces. “Her apparently limitless empathy is understandable: She truly knows how much a person can suffer. But her regal bearing is also easily explained: after all, during her captivity she was the centre of all attention. An enormous effort was made exclusively for her in order to assure her captivity. And her fortune was that she knew that in that construct she was the dominant one, and not the man who thought that he had snatched a toy off the street. She was unable to expand her limited knowledge of social behaviour, as she was only able to learn absolute domination, albeit ex negativo. And it was this domination that kept her from being paraded about later on.”11

  Even though I would definitely not attribute a “regal attitude” to myself, one thing was certainly correct: everything the kidnapper did was focused on me. The beatings as well as the gummy bears. I was able to read his responses – as long as they were not completely irrational and did not come from out of the blue – whether he saw my behaviour as right or wrong.

  After my escape I had difficulty at first switching off this mechanism. I observed people, trying to interpret their facial expressions and to figure out how they were meant in relation to myself. If a waiter at a restaurant was unfriendly, I first looked to myself to figure out why, never thinking that he perhaps had simply gotten up on the wrong side of the bed that day, or simply was generally a grouchy person. I didn’t dare go shopping alone, because I was sure that everybody could tell how lost I felt. People simply staring off into space in my direction in the Vienna metro made me feel like Big Brother was watching me.

  I had to learn that it was not always about me and to take things more in stride. And just when I was making considerable headway in navigating public spaces more confidently and light-heartedly, the setbacks came. With supposedly new revelations, the reopening of the case, with corresponding comments in the media. There was no other choice than to understand that the reactions rebounding on me were, in fact, all about me. Nobody else was there to absorb the blows.

  *

  Regaining my confidence was a process that took a long time. Whenever I met somebody for the first time, it was very rarely in a very neutral, unbiased way. At a party, other people were able to talk about their lives completely normally, a little story here, a brief anecdote there. At first I thought I was lacking in something that I was unable to contribute anything, aside from my very particular life story. I had no shared memories with girlfriends, no holidays with my parents. I only had memories that were connected to the kidnapper. The responses to my stories always shifted from one extreme to the other: “Please stop it right now. I don’t want to hear anything like that.” Even if I was just talking about a harmless scene in a drugstore, and I casually mentioned, “Oh, I had that mint toothpaste too. I didn’t like it at all.” Or my unique life story was all we talked about, and nothing else.

  I am happy that I have been able to construct a new story somewhat in the last ten years. I have made some friends who do not only see me as the kidnapper’s creation or the product of my years in captivity, but rather tried to accept me with all of my contradictions. They tried to see me as a whole person. Some of them are already somewhat older and can look back on their own personal stories replete with ups and downs. Maybe that’s why they are able to be so easy going with me. Mostly at first, I got the feeling from people my own age that there was an enormous gulf separating us. I missed out on an entire phase of my life that can simply never be recovered. I have honestly tried to go out into the world, surround myself with young people and have fun, also because many people advised me to. I have been to clubs because I like music and I like to dance, but I have to admit that I don’t get much out of it. Add to that the smoke, and the stuffy air, and the confined space. It’s hard to be relaxed and carefree at the touch of a button. And that has been ultimately impossible ever since I have become a person of public interest in the wake of my kidnapping.

  I still vividly remember one evening when I went to a club called “Wiener Passage” with a number of young employees from my attorneys’ law offices. We danced and talked, and when I wanted to leave after a while, one of the young men hugged me and gave me a goodbye kiss on my cheek. It just so happened that a party photographer was on hand at the club who snapped a picture at just the right moment.

  I was irritated, but basically it was a harmless affair. We knew each other. What did it matter? However, the next morning I got a call from a well-known daily newspaper. The person on the other end of the line said that she had pictures with “compromising” images in front of her on the desk. I didn’t entirely understand what she was getting at and said that I didn’t recall having been in a compromising situation in the past several days. She explained a bit further, only to reassure me immediately that she would do everything in her power to make sure that the pictures were not published. I only needed to agree to an exclusive interview. I did not want to allow myself to be blackmailed, so I rejected her offer. It seems that the editorial desk got cold feet. In the meantime my attorneys had succeeded in obtaining temporary injunctions. The pictures were not published in that newspaper, but surfaced a couple days later in another gossip rag: “Her first love is sooo sweet – Natascha Kampusch has a boyfriend.” A “cool youngster” with “Hugh Grant hair”, who let the waistband of his dark blue briefs peek out of the top of his pants.”

  On a side note, that evening also served as a jumping off point for critical think pieces and comments about what someone like me was even doing in the club after eight and half years of captivity. It was reprehensible and evidence of my licentiousness and lack of morals.

  On another occasion I was invited to the after-show party after the final of “Starmania”, Austria’s version of “Pop Idol”. Hundreds of people were at the ORF television studios at Künigelberg. I was having difficulty with all of the confusion and trying to make small talk with people I didn’t know. I was tired and weary from the sensory overload, and sat down at a table for a moment by myself. In front of me was a plate with leftover food and a number of empty bottles and glasses with dregs of alcohol in the bottom. The headline the next day: “Natascha Kampusch – Too Much to Drink? Has her past broken her?”

  I don’t drink alcohol, and I’m not the type to go clubbing or out to bars all night. But even if I were, why should anybody care? During my lost childhood I would have loved to have the choice to go out and enjoy life, no matter where or how. And now when people are telling me to open up, discover the world, I was not allowed to do just that, because it was immoral, or because the press would impute some kind of affair or problem to me.

  The worst part was that people who were supporting me and actually wanted to protect me ended up being pulled into the public spotlight themselves. How could I have seriously made any friends under these circumstances? Even today people who are closest to me do not want to go out into the city with me. Because they have been accosted regularly in restaurants or coffee houses as soon as I had gone to the toilet, and because they have been photographed and stared at. Only being able to meet in one’s own home in order to be left in peace is a limitation that I have found extremely irritating many times.

  In the meantime I have come to enjoy cooking for friends at home, eating together and spending a couple of agreeable hours sitting around the table much more. But it’s different if you do that because that’s what you want, because you have decided that it’s more to your liking then bar-hopping with a large group friends, where it’s difficult to engage in more in-depth conversation. Or whether you have the feeling that you have no choice. I’m happy that in the meantime I have been able to find out for myself what I prefer and what I don’t. It is really just a coincidence that what began as a gradual withdrawal from public spaces is exactly what I needed. For a long time I tried to do what other people were so convinced would help me. I thought that they would be the ones to know, as they had enough l
ife experience after all. They had grown up in freedom, and I hadn’t. It took a while for me to even pinpoint my needs and interests once again. In the meantime I have established what I like and I can set my own boundaries.

  *

  The only thing that I definitely was able to articulate about what I wanted after my escape was that I wanted to complete my education.

  Around the end of 2006, in the beginning of 2007 I began my studies to complete my compulsory schooling. I earmarked three years to achieve my goal. One reason was because I was unable to judge what would be on the exams. I fluctuated between “You can do it” and self-doubt. Aside from a couple years of elementary school, the only foundation that I had was what I had acquired during captivity. Knowledge from encyclopaedias and books. I enjoyed reading texts about altitudes, the length of rivers, their water levels, anything geographical really. I also liked statistics and numbers. I think numbers are beautiful. There’s something honest about them. They cannot be misused the same way words can.

  The kidnapper as well would teach me things from time to time using the old school books he had kept. His motivation was certainly the fact that, as he once said, he “couldn’t stand stupid people”, so it was in his interest for me to develop my mind. However, the same time he used studying with me as a tool to exercise power and dominance. He was particularly gleeful to take a red pencil to my exercises. In my German essays, the subject matter was secondary, with the main focus on correct grammar and spelling. Rules, rules, rules. They had to be followed at all costs. Whenever I made the same mistake several times in different “classroom periods”, he would scold and punish me. “You are too stupid to shit” or “You’re doing that on purpose just to irritate me”. The punishment dependent on his mood. Most of the time he knew exactly how to hurt me most at any given moment. If he saw a book lying open on my bed, he would turn the light off for the rest of the day. If I had casually told him about a cassette with an interesting audio play, he would take the batteries out of my Walkman. And if I asked him for a glass of water before study time, because I was terribly thirsty, I would most certainly have to go without a drink until the next day.