The movie itself contains none of Eichinger’s ideas or the fragments of his script. The new director, Sherry Hormann, made it very clear to me at our first meeting that she intended to make her own film. That is certainly legitimate, but I did not realize just how far she would go until I saw the finished product at the advance screening. The film contained scenes that I had talked about only in the context of my police interviews. And scenes that even went beyond those. Hormann had neither integrated or embedded them in order to make them comprehensible in any way. She did not tell a story, it was not an intimate play, and the characters underwent zero development. Nothing was subtle; everything was obvious and wooden.
At the first press conference to discuss the film project I had said that the many sympathetic letters I had received over the last two years had encouraged me to make a movie version of my story. And that I was happy that an extraordinary opportunity had arisen with Bernd Eichinger and Constantin Film in taking a very sensitive and deft approach to bringing my story to the screen.
Nothing of that came out in the end. I was disappointed and felt that my trust had been abused. My story had escaped my grasp once more. So many scenes had been rendered so heavy-handedly that I wondered exactly what effect the movie meant to achieve. Is it always necessary to use a sledgehammer for people to get the point? In doing so, in a way you deny people the capability of thinking and feeling for themselves and forming their own opinion.
The way I had dealt with my story in interviews or even in my book actually should have been evidence that discretion was important to me. I would never say, “Everybody look at how skinny I am and how much he humiliated me. That doesn’t bother me in the least.” Of course parts of the film reflected my reality. Of course I had been starved down to skin and bones, was most often scantily clothed and had been forced to be humiliated by him in various ways, including physical assault. But that was one facet of my eight and half years. And the film focused solely on that. The film doesn‘t make you understand the demons that drove Priklopil. You can’t understand the relationship that grew out of our situation. The life that I was forced to live in that house and in that dungeon was not explained in the least. That was exactly the point, and not to show a rape scene for minutes on end. At the time one film critic wrote very accurately, “The viewer is forced to become a voyeur against his will. The rape scenes evoke discomfort.”16
What pained me in particular was that there was no development to be seen. At least a number of reviewers faulted the film for that: “Hormann demonstrated little ability to convey much of anything of the energy to survive that Natascha Kampusch drew on to gradually free herself from the hole in the cellar and to widen her margin of manoeuvre with her tormentor.”17 Another wrote, Hormann does not play on our emotions. She does not delve into psychology. And she avoids creating the necessary backdrop that would explain the actions perpetrated by Priklopil.”18
The film exposed me and was built on images and scenes that stemmed from fantasies and not from the reality as I had lived it. The director announced in an interview that these kinds of details had of course become well known based on my police interview records, that the issue of sexuality presented itself “unavoidably” and that the scenes were “of course not filmed in a sensationalistic manner, but the way they were”. However, the script author’s position was revealing: “Images are layered over perception – perhaps even Ms. Kampusch’s internal perception itself. We naturally thought it our duty to do justice to her. […] We of course invented some scenes the way we understood them.”19
Here again, the truth is apparently not sordid enough and requires further embellishment. And why, pray tell, should other people’s fantasies be layered over my own images? Because they are incorrect? But ok, I sold the film rights, which meant that the film crew had the freedom to make its own movie.
*
When the film was finally shown to an audience at its premiere, I snuck out of the theatre after just a few minutes. I had participated in the premier because it was an imperative out of courtesy to bring this project, which had begun with Eichinger, properly to an end, even though I did not feel comfortable with the finished product. At the time I refrained from expressing open criticism. That would have seemed unfair to me. After all, the actors had delivered a good and convincing performance within the framework that was available to them.
Sitting with so many people in a movie theatre while the images moved across the screen in front of me was more difficult for me than watching the film on my own. I felt a strange distance between myself and the film, between myself and the people sitting there, but also a closeness at the same time that I found difficult to handle.
This was primarily due to the fact that the film set was very authentic. A replica of the dungeon had been built at the Bavaria Filmstudios. They had found on site locations that were very similar in size and furnishing for a number of scenes upstairs in the house or in my mother’s apartment. I visited the set once or twice and also met the actors. It was disconcerting to be there with them. These were my spaces, and yet they weren’t. It was like encountering myself, my mother and my kidnapper, and in a way it wasn’t. Everything was very tangible and very abstract.
Amelia Pidgeon, who played young Natascha, really did look quite a bit like me. The first time we met she gave me a stuffed squirrel and said, “if I were ever kidnapped, I would like to know how to survive it. And that’s why I want to play this role.”
There was one incident with Thure Lindhardt, who played Wolfgang Priklopil, where I almost felt sorry for him. Between the trailers, where the actors went to rest or to freshen up, there were a number of folding tables and benches with hot dogs and other snacks and drinks. The afternoon that I was there someone had brought in a giant cake from a bakery. Thure cut the cake and was just about to pass around pieces of cake on plates. But before he was able to even put his fork in the cake, a voice from one of the trailers bellowed, “You want an even stricter diet plan?!” Even though he already was so thin. However, that would have been a truly authentic scene much in the way it might have happened during my captivity.
7
“Perhaps I Will Destroy
the House One Day with Explosives”
The House in Strasshof
Again and again I see that flowers or votive candles have been placed in front of the fence, with small notes and prayers, some of them even for the kidnapper. There were also telephone calls saying that Wolfgang Priklopil had been a good person and that in truth I had murdered him.
The first time that I was confronted with the “real” place of my captivity again, with the house I was locked up in for so long, was through the television. I had escaped just a few days before when the images of a crime scene inspection flickered across the screen. Men in white suits, a camera team, all trying to squeeze themselves into my small dungeon, touching my things and affixing numbers to them.
You could see the oppressive confinement of the small space. On the right-hand side was the double sink, next to it the toilet with the Donald Duck lid. In the beginning the toilet had a beige lid which had been ruined when I placed a hot pan on it once by mistake. So that the kidnapper wouldn’t immediately notice that I had destroyed something “wilfully”, I papered over the crack in the lid with a sticker of a horse. I don’t remember whether he punished me after he noticed it anyway. I only remember that I was very happy when I received my new, pretty, colourful toilet lid with Donald wearing a diving mask for my birthday.
The Allibert bathroom cabinet with my toothbrush and toothpaste, hand cream, my hairbrush, a nail file made from cardboard with roughed up surfaces and rounded points so that I couldn’t hurt him or me with it. Above the mirrored cabinet there was a shelf containing my red swivelled cassette tape holder, several folders and the book Schülerwissen. Next to that was a small rack for drying laundry.
The second bookshelf and the black hang
ing cabinet that I had decorated with colourful stickers, small arts and crafts, pictures and poems that were important to me. The small desk, above it the shelf with the television and the radio. In the hanging cabinet above my desk were over-the-counter medical supplies, a number of novels, a transparent Plexiglas box with my passport in the bottom, which led to a great deal of speculation. Actually it had originally been in the inner pocket of my red parka, because I had returned from my trip to Hungary with my father the evening just before my kidnapping. With all the bickering about me coming home late my mother had forgotten to take it out of my jacket. A coincidence, nothing more, and not any kind of evidence that I had planned my “disappearance” in any way.
On left hand side against the wall was the bunk bed, a couple of articles of clothing on the metal ladder. Across from the heavy door was a hook with the dress I had worn on the day of my abduction. Over the years, as I grew, I had taken it apart and turned the bottom of the dress into a skirt with an elastic waistband. I always put it on at Christmas because I wanted to wear something nice. It wasn’t until several years ago that I was able to get that dress back from the police, along with a number of other personal items, after repeated requests.
I believe it is the right approach to keep a number of items in the evidence room in the hopes of being able to bring additional clarity to the crime with the help of new technologies. The crime perpetrated against me was essentially solved, at least from my point of view. Traces of two kinds of DNA were found on my personal things and in the dungeon. Mine and the kidnapper’s. Upstairs in the house were also traces of the kidnapper, including traces of his mother, and a few of mine as well. What additional information could my dress have provided? Or poems and drawings? They reflected my state of mind, but nothing more. The few diary entries I wrote proved the abuse that I was subjected to. At the time I did not document all of the insanity extensively and seamlessly because I believed that that would provide the kidnapper with more of a target for attacking me. What if he found my writing and read it?
The few times when I actually did write over a longer period of time it was primarily to keep myself focused on reality. So that my very few positive experiences, which I naturally clung to in my thoughts, would not paper over the cruelties I was subjected to for years. It was an attempt to readjust the dimensions of my life. After all Priklopil had hammered into me over the years that he was only doing what was best for me. He was protecting me, and he was there when nobody else was. I wanted to put it down in black and white that that was untrue. That he was wrong, that he was not my saviour, but my tormentor. The man who had taken my old life from me.
All of these things that were seized at the time were not able to explain anything about the kidnapper’s motives. Nothing about possible masterminds in the background, who have fuelled speculation even to this day, albeit no longer so loudly after all of the evaluation commissions. The notes on the abuses I suffered, which I had painstakingly detailed during several days in August 2005 primarily, because this was a phase of particular violence, could have aggravated a criminal sentence if there had been somebody to condemn for it. But the kidnapper had long since issued his own judgment.
In a way it was hurtful to watch all of those strangers turning the room where I lived upside down. How disrespectfully they handled items that were very important to me, items I spent weeks fighting for. Of course I understood that the house had a separate meaning for the investigators and all of the others who were moving about the house and the dungeon: This was the place that the girl had been locked up in, the place that the kidnapper had created below ground specifically to commit that crime. It was a crime scene that had to be inspected meticulously.
For me that place meant something more. It wasn’t just the scene of a kidnapping, but necessarily the room I had lived in. Even the dungeon, which for everybody was the epitome of cruelty, did not carry only that meaning for me. In the beginning I nearly went crazy in the darkness, the confinement, the cold. I was afraid that I would suffocate if he turned off my oxygen supply from upstairs. The fan and its scraping noise terrorized me. However, those five square metres were also my refuge. Here I could read something, listen to a cassette tape, do my arts and crafts and have peace and quiet. For me reading was like being part of the world. It was the only world that I had within my grasp for a long time. With the help of books I was able to go on adventure travels without having to leave the dungeon. Treasure Island or Kontiki were my stories of escape. The bunk bed became my look-out tower, a ship’s rigging or a mountain peak. It was a journey I took purely in my head, but it worked.
Whenever I was alone down there, he could only use violence against me indirectly. The dungeon was just as much, or little, a place of hate as the house above it. Essentially, both of them were primarily places that are neutral in a manner of speaking. They are only filled with the energy of the people who inhabit them. They become the theatre for their ideas. In this case, these were the kidnapper’s cruel and inhumane ideas. And my attempts to counter those with something different.
The dungeon had become my space because someone else had designed it for me. So it was up to me to try to conquer it for myself and fill it with my energy.
*
After the police had cleared the house as a crime scene and my attorneys and I had decided to join the court case as co-plaintiffs, I visited the house for the first time again. The inspection of the house in Strasshof together with an expert was scheduled for 10 AM.
It was a “local crime scene inspection” as it is called. Here as well it was apparently not possible to allow for even a bit of protection for the victim. The street was cordoned off, and a sea of journalists were outside, calling out, pushing and shoving and taking pictures. The few meters it took for me to reach the house were torturous. Aside from that, I was very tense, because I didn’t know how the confrontation with my very recent past would go. Whether I would be able to withstand the pressure of my memories.
I looked past the privet hedgerow that reminded me of the vitality of the world outside after two years of my isolation in the dungeon. In December 2000 he allowed me to step out into the garden for just a few minutes for the first time after weeks of “preparation”. “If you scream, I will kill you. If you run, I will kill you. I will kill anybody who either hears or sees you, if you are dumb enough to attract their attention.” For the first time since my kidnapping I felt blades of grass and the soft ground beneath my feet. For the first time I inhaled the almost sharp, fresh air into my lungs, and the odour of mould and loneliness slowly gave way to the tangy scent of the privet hedgerow. I picked a couple of leaves and put them in my pocket. Just a few days later they had already turned brown and wilted. Still, I kept them in a small box.
We crossed the stone pavement driveway and entered the house. A yellow single-family dwelling with a slate roof, a dormer window, two chimneys and a satellite dish on the roof, the muntin windows with white edging, the roll-top shutters down halfway. Glass blocks above the white garage door. A house just like millions of others. Everything orderly; even the grass had not grown too high in the meantime.
Next to the wrought iron garden gate there was a brass doorbell plaque with an intercom system. On the other end of the stone pavement walkway, three steps with a black railing leading up to the main entrance with a semicircular transom window. I had never entered the house from this direction.
Once in the house, I ran wildly through all of the rooms. The bouquet of flowers his mother had brought on her last visit was still on the table in the living room with the dark wall unit, the heavy dark green leather couch and the red brick fireplace. Bananas and tomatoes were lying on a tray in the kitchen. A pile of newspapers were stacked up on the kitchen table in front of the birch forest wallpaper; a number of them had slipped off and were covering the table. He had terrorized me again and again with the orange kitchen scale on the wall, asking whether I was too st
upid to measure decagrams and grams, whether I was capable of anything, and telling me that his mother could measure flour and sugar my “eyeing” the right amount anyway. The edge of the L-shaped kitchen counter that he would always shove me against if something had not gone to his liking when I was cooking or baking.
In the rustic “Jägerstüberl” room with the boar’s hide hanging on the wall that had remained unchanged since the death of Priklopil’s father you could see the traces of the kidnapper’s highflying plans. A corner bathtub, a large heating unit, sinks, all waiting to be installed in the new bathroom. During my captivity I had laboured for months on the upper floor of the house, which contained three rooms. In addition, he wanted to finish the attic, to clad the rudimentary wooden construction with gypsum wallboard and to turn the room into a second living room. We broke through the ceiling between the first floor and the attic and installed an additional set of stairs with marble tiling. He never let handymen into the house not even for this very physical labour or for work that required technical skills, like installing heating units. At the time I was 12 years old when I carried cement bags, stripped doors, hammered holes in walls with a chisel. It was mercilessly physical labour, but after years of the limited environment in the dungeon, it offered a change of scenery and pace that marked the beginning of a new phase where he allowed me more freedom to “make myself useful” around the house.
During my captivity the entire house had seemed so intimidatingly powerful. So enormous and dark. The living room seemed to be even worse after my first visit back when inspecting the crime scene. The quintessence of middle-class, normal. Tasteful, weighty, oppressive and disconcerting in its entire posh-like splendour complete with wood panelling, a wall-length shelving unit and fireplace. The kitchen on the other hand, which for me had always been a place of intense humiliation, seemed almost harmless.
10 Years of Freedom Page 13