‘What are you doing in my garden? What do you want here?’ a voice snapped at me through the windowpane. She eyed me mistrustfully.
‘Please call the police for me! Quick!’ I repeated breathlessly. ‘I’m the victim of an abduction. My name is Natascha Kampusch … Please ask for the Vienna police. Tell them it’s about an abduction case. They should come here in an unmarked car. I am Natascha Kampusch.’
‘Why did you come to me of all people?’
I started. But then I saw that she hesitated for a moment.
‘Wait by the hedge. And don’t walk on my lawn!’
I nodded mutely as she turned away and disappeared from sight. For the first time in seven years I had spoken my name. I was back.
I stood by the hedgerow and waited. Seconds passed. My heart beat in my throat. I knew that Wolfgang Priklopil would be looking for me and was in a panic that he would go completely berserk. After a while I saw two police cars with blue flashing lights over the fences of the allotment gardens. Either the woman had not passed on my request for an unmarked car or the police had disregarded it. Two young police officers got out and entered the small garden.
‘Stay where you are and put your hands in the air!’ one of them barked at me.
This was not the way I had imagined my first encounter with my newfound freedom. With my hands raised like a criminal, standing beside the hedge, I told the police who I was.
‘My name is Natascha Kampusch. You must have heard about my case. I was abducted in 1998.’
‘Kampusch?’ replied one of the two officers.
I heard the kidnapper’s voice: Nobody will miss you. They are all glad that you’re gone.
‘Date of birth? Registered domicile?’
‘Seventeenth of February 1988, domiciled in Rennbahnweg 27, stairway 38, floor 7, door 18.’
‘Abducted when and by whom?’
‘In 1998. I have been held captive in the house at Heinestrasse 60. The kidnapper’s name is Wolfgang Priklopil.’
There couldn’t have been any greater contrast between the sober ascertaining of fact and the mixture of euphoria and panic that was literally coursing through me.
The voice of the officer, who was radioing to confirm my claims, penetrated my ears only with difficulty. The tension was nearly tearing me apart inside. I had run only a couple of hundred metres; the kidnapper’s house was only a hop, skip and a jump away. I tried to breathe in and out evenly to get a grip on my fear. I didn’t doubt for a second that it would be a piece of cake for him to eliminate these two young police officers. I stood by the hedge as if frozen and strained to hear. Twittering birds, a car in the distance. But it seemed like the calm before the storm. Shots would be fired presently. I tensed my muscles. I had taken the leap. And had finally landed on the other side. I was prepared to fight for my newfound freedom.
SPECIAL REPORT
Case: Natascha Kampusch – Woman claiming to be missing person.
Police attempting to ascertain identity.
Vienna (APA) – The case of Natascha Kampusch, now missing for over eight years, has taken a surprising turn. A young woman is claiming to be the girl who went missing on 2 March 1998 in Vienna. The Austrian Federal Criminal Police Office has begun an investigation into ascertaining the identity of the woman. ‘We do not know whether she is in fact the missing Natascha Kampusch or just disorientated,’ Erich Zwettler from the Federal Criminal Police Office told the Austria Press Agency. The woman was at the police station in Deutsch-Wagram in Lower Austria.
23 August 2006
I wasn’t a disorientated young woman. It was painful to me that something like that would even be considered. But for the police, who had to compare the missing person photographs from back then, which showed a small, pudgy primary school child, to the emaciated young woman who now stood before them, that was probably a distinct possibility.
Before we went to the car, I asked for a blanket. I didn’t want the kidnapper to see me, because I thought he was still in the vicinity, or that somebody was making a video of the scene. There was no blanket, but the police officers shielded me from view.
Once in the car, I ducked down low in the seat. When the police officer started the engine and the car began to move, a wave of relief washed over me. I had done it. I had escaped.
At the police station in Deutsch-Wagram I was received like a lost child. ‘I can hardly believe that you’re here! That you’re alive!’ The officers who had worked on my case crowded around me. Most of them were convinced of who I was; only one or two wanted to wait for a DNA test. They told me how long they had looked for me. That special task forces had been formed and then replaced by others. Their words rushed past me left and right. I was trying to focus, but I hadn’t spoken to anyone for so long that I was overwhelmed. I stood helplessly in the middle of all these people, feeling infinitely weak, and began to shake in my thin dress. A female police officer gave me her jacket.
‘You’re cold. Put this on,’ she said caringly. I immediately took her into my heart.
Looking back, I am amazed that they didn’t take me straight to a quiet place and wait at least a day before interrogating me. After all, I was in a complete state of panic. For eight and a half years I had believed the kidnapper when he told me that people would die if I ran. Now I had done exactly that and nothing of the sort had happened. Nevertheless, I could feel fear breathing down my neck so that I couldn’t feel safe or free at the police station. I had no idea how to cope with the storm of questions and sympathy. I felt completely without protection.
Today I think that they should have let me rest a bit under gentle care. Back then, I didn’t question the hubbub. Without stopping for breath, without a second of respite, I was taken to an adjacent room after they had noted down my personal information. The friendly female police officer who had given me her jacket was entrusted with questioning me.
‘Sit down and tell me about it calmly,’ she said.
I glanced around the room uncertainly. A room with innumerable police files and slightly stale air, which exuded busy efficiency. The first room in which I spent any amount of time after my imprisonment. I had prepared myself for this moment for so long, but the whole situation still seemed surreal.
The first thing the police officer asked me was whether it was okay for her to use the informal du with me. She said that it might be easier, for me as well. But I didn’t want that. I didn’t want to be ‘Natascha’, who could be treated like a child and pushed around. I had escaped, I was grown-up, and I was going to fight to be treated as such.
The police officer nodded, asked me inconsequential questions and had sandwiches brought in. ‘Eat something. You’re nothing but skin and bones,’ she suggested.
I held the sandwich she had given me and didn’t know what to do. I was so befuddled that the ministrations, the well-meant suggestion, seemed like an order I couldn’t follow. I was too wound up to eat and had gone without food for so long anyway that I knew I would have terrible stomach cramps if I ate an entire sandwich right now. ‘I can’t eat anything,’ I whispered. But the habit of obeying orders kicked in. Like a mouse, I nibbled along the edge of the sandwich. It took some time for my tension to ease enough so I could concentrate on the conversation.
The female officer immediately made me feel I could trust her. While the male officers intimidated me and I regarded them extremely warily, I felt that I could let my guard down a bit with a woman. I hadn’t been close to a woman for such a long time that I stared at her, fascinated. Her dark hair was parted on the side and a lighter-coloured strand softened her look. A heart-shaped gold pendant dangled on her necklace; earrings sparkled at her ears. I felt safe with her.
Then I began to tell her my story. From the beginning. The words literally poured out of me. I felt a weight drop from me with every sentence I spoke about my imprisonment. As if putting it in words in this sober police room, dictating it into a police report, could take the awfulness away from the horror.
I told her how much I was looking forward to an adult life where I would make the decisions; that I wanted my own flat, a job, later my own family. Eventually I almost had the feeling that I had made a friend. At the end of my questioning the officer gave me her watch. It made me feel that I was actually the mistress of my own time once again. No longer dictated to by another, no longer dependent on the timer switch that decreed when it was to be light and when it was to be dark.
‘Please don’t give any interviews,’ I asked her as we said goodbye. ‘But if you do talk to the media, please say something nice about me.’
She laughed. ‘I promise that I won’t give any interviews – who’s going to ask me anything anyway!’
The young police officer to whom I had entrusted my life only kept her word for a few hours. By the next day she could no longer withstand the pressure from the media and went on television, revealing details of my questioning. Later she apologized to me for it. She was terribly sorry, but like everyone else, she was completely overwhelmed by the situation.
Her fellow police officers in Deutsch-Wagram also approached the situation with remarkable naivety. Nobody was prepared for the media circus that broke out when news of my escape leaked. After my initial questioning I followed the plan that I had been drawing up for months, but the police had no strategy ready.
‘Please do not inform the press,’ I repeated over and over.
They just laughed, ‘The press isn’t going to come here.’
But they were badly mistaken. By the time I was due to be taken to police headquarters in Vienna that afternoon, the building was already surrounded. Fortunately I had enough presence of mind to ask them to place a blanket over my head before I left the police station. But even under the blanket I could make out the storm of flash photography. ‘Natascha! Natascha!’ I heard on all sides. Assisted by two police officers, I stumbled, as best as I could, towards the car. The picture of my white, bruised legs under the blue blanket, which revealed only a strip of my orange dress, went round the world.
On my way to Vienna I found out that the search for Wolfgang Priklopil was in full swing. The police had called at the house but found no one. ‘A manhunt is under way,’ one of the officers told me. ‘We don’t have him yet, but every able-bodied officer is working on it. There is nowhere the kidnapper can run, certainly not abroad. We will catch him.’ From that moment on I waited for the news that Wolfgang Priklopil had killed himself.
I had set off a bomb. The fuse was lit and there was no way to put it out again. I had chosen life. Only death remained for the kidnapper.
I recognized my mother immediately when she walked into police headquarters in Vienna. A total of 3,096 days had gone by since that morning I had left the flat on Rennbahnweg without saying goodbye. Eight and a half years, during which it had torn my heart apart that I had never been able to apologize. My entire youth without my family. Eight Christmases, my birthdays from the eleventh to the eighteenth, innumerable evenings when I would have liked to have had a word from her, a touch. Now she stood before me, almost unchanged, like a dream that has suddenly become reality. She sobbed loudly and laughed and cried at the same time as she ran towards me and hugged me. ‘My child! My child! You’re here again! I always knew that you’d come back again!’ I breathed in her scent deeply. ‘You’re here again,’ whispered my mother, over and over. ‘Natascha – you’re here again.’
We hugged, holding each other tightly for a long time. I was so unused to such close physical contact that so much closeness made my head spin.
Both my sisters had walked into police headquarters right behind her. They too burst into tears when we hugged. My father came a bit later. He rushed up to me, stared disbelievingly and first looked for the scar I had from an injury suffered as a child. Then he embraced me, lifted me up and sobbed, ‘Natascha! It’s really you!’ The big and strong Ludwig Koch was crying like a baby, and I cried too.
‘I love you,’ I whispered when he had to leave again too soon – just like the many times he had dropped me off at home after a weekend together.
It is strange how after such a long separation all we wanted to ask were trivial questions. ‘Are my cats still alive?’ ‘Are you still together with your boyfriend?’ ‘How young you look!’ ‘How grown-up you are!’ As if it was a conversation with a stranger to whom – out of politeness or because you don’t have anything else to talk about – you don’t want to get too close. As if we had to slowly get to know each other again. For me, in particular, it was an unbelievably difficult situation. I had got through the last few years only by withdrawing into myself. I couldn’t simply flip the switch and, despite the physical closeness, I still felt as if there was a wall between me and my family. As if from under a bell jar, I watched them laugh and cry while my tears dried. I had lived in a nightmare too long; my psychological prison was still there and stood between me and my family. In my perception they all looked exactly the same as eight years ago, while I had gone from being a school-aged child to an adult woman. I felt as if we were prisoners in different time bubbles that had briefly touched and were now drifting apart at top speed. I had no idea how they had spent the last few years, what had happened in their world. But I knew that for everything I had experienced there were no words – and that I couldn’t let the emotions causing my inner turmoil show. I had locked them away for so long that I couldn’t tear open the door to my own emotional dungeon that easily.
The world I had returned to was no longer the world I had left. And I was no longer the same. Nothing would be as before – never. That became clear to me when I asked my mother, ‘How is Grandmother?’
My mother looked at the floor awkwardly. ‘She passed away two years ago. I’m very sorry.’
I swallowed and immediately tucked the sad news behind the thick armour I had built up during my imprisonment. My grandmother. Bits of memories swirled through my head. The scent of Franzbranntwein and Christmas tree candles. Her apron, the feeling of closeness and the knowledge that thinking of her had got me through so many nights in my dungeon.
Now that my parents had done their duty by identifying me, they were escorted out. My own duty was to make myself available to the police apparatus. I still had not yet had a moment of peace.
The police organized a psychologist to offer me support over the next few days. I was asked again and again how they could get the kidnapper to give himself up. I had no answer. I was certain that he would kill himself, but I had no idea how or where. In Strasshof, I overheard, the house was examined for explosives. Late in the afternoon officers discovered my dungeon. While I was sitting in the station, specialists in white suits rummaged through the room that had been my prison and my refuge for eight years. Just a few hours ago I had woken up there.
That evening I was taken to a hotel in the province of Burgenland in an unmarked police car. After the Vienna police had been unsuccessful in locating me, a special task force in Burgenland had taken over my case. I was now given over to their supervision. Night had already fallen long ago when we arrived at the hotel. Accompanied by the police psychologist, the officers led me into a room with a double bed and a bathroom. The entire floor had been cleared and was guarded by armed police officers. They were afraid that the kidnapper, who was still at large, would attempt revenge.
I spent my first night of freedom with a police psychologist who talked incessantly and whose words rippled over me in a constant stream. Again I was cut off from the outside world – for my own protection, the police assured me.
They were probably right, but in that room I nearly went off the rails myself. I felt locked up and wanted only one thing: to listen to the radio. To find out what had happened to Wolfgang Priklopil. ‘Believe me, that isn’t good for you,’ the police psychologist shook me off again and again. Inside, I was in a spin, but I heeded her instructions. Late that night I took a bath. I sank into the water and tried to relax. I could count on two hands how often I had been allowed to take a bath in
all the years of my imprisonment. Now I could run my own bath and put in as much bubble bath as I wanted. But I couldn’t enjoy it. Somewhere out there was the man who had been the only person in my life for eight and a half years, looking for a way to kill himself.
I heard the news the next day in the police car that took me back to Vienna.
‘Is there any news of the kidnapper?’ was my first question as I climbed into the car.
‘Yes,’ said the officer cautiously. ‘The kidnapper is no longer alive. He committed suicide, throwing himself in front of a train at 8:59 p.m. near Vienna’s northern railway station.’
I lifted my head and looked out of the window. Outside, Burgenland’s flat, summery landscape glided past me on the motorway. A flock of birds rose up out of a field. The sun stood low on the sky, bathing the late summer meadows in warm light. I took a deep breath and stretched out my arms. A feeling of warmth and safety coursed through my body, moving outwards from my stomach to the tips of my toes and fingers. My head felt light. Wolfgang Priklopil was no more. It was over.
I was free.
Epilogue
I spent the first few days of my new life in freedom at Vienna’s General Hospital in the Psychiatric Ward for Children and Adolescents. It was a long and wary return to normal life – and also a taste of what awaited me. I received the best care but, placed in the closed ward, I was not allowed to leave. Cut off from the outside world I had just escaped to, I talked in the common room to anorexic young girls and children who self-harmed. Outside, on the other side of the protective walls, a media feeding frenzy raged. Photographers climbed trees to get the first picture of me. Reporters tried to sneak into the hospital disguised as nurses. My parents were bombarded by interview requests. My case was the first, say media experts, in which the otherwise restrained Austrian and German media let it all hang out. Pictures of my dungeon appeared in the newspapers. The concrete door stood wide open. My precious few possessions – my diaries and the few items of clothing – had been uncaringly thrown around by the men in white protective suits. Yellow markers with numbers could be clearly seen on my desk and my bed. I was forced to watch as my tiny private world, locked away for so long, was splashed across the front pages. Everything I had managed to hide even from the kidnapper had now been dragged out into the public eye, which cobbled together its own version of the truth.
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