Girl in the Cellar

by Allan Hall

  On my relationship: He was not my master. I was just as strong as him, but he would, symbolically speaking, sometimes be my support and sometimes be the person who kicked me. But with me he had picked the wrong person, and we both knew that.

  He did the kidnapping alone and prepared everything in advance. After that we furnished the room together, and it was not 1.6 metres high. I also did not cry after I made my escape. It was no reason to cry.

  In my eyes, his death was not necessary. It would not be the end of the world if he had simply been given a prison sentence. He has been a big part of my life, and as a result I do feel I am in a sort of mourning for him. It is true that my youth was different to the youth of others, but in principle I don’t feel I missed anything. On the contrary, there are certain things I avoided, having nothing to do with smoking or drinking to start off with, and I didn’t meet the wrong friends.

  Message to the media: The one thing I would appeal for from the press is a stop to the insulting reports, the misinterpretations of reality, the commentaries that claim to know better and the lack of respect for me.

  At the moment I feel very well in the place where I’m staying, although perhaps I feel a little bit too much controlled. I am the one who has decided only to have telephone contact with my family. I’m also the one who will decide when I want to have contact with journalists.

  On my escape: It happened as I was cleaning the car in the garden and saw that he had walked away during the vacuum cleaning. That was my chance, I dropped the vacuum cleaner and left it running.

  I also want to stress that I never called him master, although he demanded it. I think that’s what he wanted, to be addressed like that, but he never meant it really.

  I have a lawyer who discusses the law with me. The youth lawyer Monica Pintertis has my trust, together with Dr Friedrich and Dr Berger, with whom I feel I can speak. The investigations team were very good to me, and I greet them warmly, although they were a bit too curious, but that is after all their job.

  Intimate questions: Everybody wants to ask intimate questions, but these have nothing to do with anybody else. It may be that one day I speak to my therapist about it and maybe not. At the end of the day my private life is mine alone.

  To the man who was the friend of her kidnapper she said:

  Herr H should not feel guilty, it was Wolfgang’s own decision to throw himself in front of a train. I also feel sympathy for the mother of Wolfgang. I can put myself in her position and I feel for her and have understanding. I and we both are thinking of him. I want to thank all the people who’ve taken part in my fate. But please let me have some peace in the immediate future. I hope that Dr Friedrich will be able to use this letter to make that clear. There are many people caring for me now. Please let me have time until I feel I can talk for myself.

  The Herr H referred to in the last paragraph is Ernst Holzapfel, the man she met briefly in captivity and who took the last phone call from Priklopil before his suicide.

  Natascha’s letter did not damp down the flames of curiosity. Rather it made them burn even more brightly. This clear affection for Priklopil, later to be expressed in print and her famous TV interview, coupled with her conviction that she didn’t miss much in life, began slowly to halt the course of the lumbering supertanker of public opinion and would, in a short space of time, turn it 180 degrees against her.

  On the night of Wednesday 6 September, two weeks after she had freed herself, and showing her innate love of, and capacity for, control, Natascha Kampusch coordinated a triple media strike of TV, newspapers and magazines in an effort to keep a grip on what she saw as her own story, which was to be told in her own way.

  Each of the three lucky winners in the behind-the-scenes bidding war for the first interview had signed contracts, all of them scrutinised and the list finalised by Natascha herself in marathon sessions with her lawyers, in which they agreed to pay syndication fees to a foundation of her choice. The interviews with the Kronen Zeitung newspaper, the Austrian News Magazine and the ORF TV special all came out within two hours of each other, as she specified.

  Austria’s News Magazine hit the streets first. The magazine sold out within hours as readers scrambled to read the details of the girl in the cellar. It gave a clearer portrait of the ‘victim’ who despised the very term. Speaking to its editor-in-chief, Alfred Wurm, Kampusch said:

  Dr Friedrich is quite OK. He is very intelligent and always knows what I mean. My lawyers and my media adviser are also supporting me the best they can. I have by now accepted them all and they have probably accepted me. All of them are pretty cool. At least most of the time.

  There was a small confrontation between my lawyer Dr Lansky and Professor Friedrich. One wanted me to leave Vienna General Hospital (AKH) and the other wanted me to remain there for a while. Eventually I had to intervene and make sure that this difference of opinion was sorted out.

  I knew that in terms of therapy the quarrel was not doing any good. Dr Lansky would like to have me outside, while Dr Friedrich would prefer me inside. At the moment I am inside, and enjoy my friendship with Dr Friedrich.

  I have a female therapist but I don’t want to reveal her name. She is terrified by media of any kind. With her I can—and this is the whole truth—always lie on the couch. A real cliché: a therapist and a patient on the couch.

  When asked how she felt about her new life, she replied:

  Well, apart from the fact that I immediately caught a cold and have the sniffles, I’m living pretty normally. I found my way back to normal life very quickly. It’s astonishing, how quickly it happened. I now live together with other people—and I don’t have difficulties with that.

  I have managed to find my way around quickly. That was not difficult, not least because I can identify with much of what I see and experience here. There are suicidal and anorexic patients here. And I get along well with all of them, because I can empathise with them.

  When asked why she found it easy to empathise with anorexia patients, she said: ‘Because anorexia patients must force themselves to eat. And I myself only weighed very little during the time of my captivity.’ And of freedom over captivity she declared: ‘I love freedom very much. I am overcome by the thought of freedom. That should tell you everything.

  ‘What are my future plans? Probably all sorts of things. Someone with my past will in any case plan for the most immediate things: I want to be vaccinated for all sorts of things, first and foremost against the flu. As you can see, I have completely come down with a cold, and this would not have happened had I been vaccinated against it. So, this is only an example for my future.’

  Quizzed on a possible future profession, she said: ‘I am still completely open about things. I could imagine doing a bit of everything from psychology to journalism and law. I also always wanted to become an actress, because I have always been interested in art.’

  She stated firmly that her relationship with Priklopil was, for the most part, off limits, once again piquing the public’s interest about what went on at No. 60 Heinestrasse.

  ‘You should not talk to me so much about Herr Priklopil, because he is not here to defend himself. It doesn’t get us anywhere to go into depth now about such things. Poor Frau Priklopil surely does not want the public to read things about her son in the newspaper that are nobody’s concern, except perhaps the police’s.’

  Speaking of her escape, Fraulein Kampusch said it was planned in her mind long ago.

  Yes, it was. By the age of twelve, or around that age, I started dreaming about breaking out of my prison when I reached fifteen, or at a stage when I would be strong enough to do it. I was always thinking about the point when that time would come.

  But I could not risk anything, least of all an escape attempt. He suffered badly from paranoia and was chronically mistrustful. A failed escape attempt would have meant that I would never be able to leave my dungeon. I had to gradually win his confidence.

  It was totally spontaneous.
I ran out of the garage door and I got all dizzy. For the first time I felt how weak I really was. But it still worked out. All in all, my escape was successful on that day, considering the soul, the body. And I had no heart problems. I ran out when I saw him on the telephone. I ran into one garden in a panic and started talking to people, but it was in vain, as no one had a mobile telephone on them. They just shrugged their shoulders and carried on their way. So I climbed over the fences of different gardens in a panic, like in an action film.

  Imagine it like this: pant, pant, pant and then I saw an open window. Someone was in the kitchen and I spoke to this woman and told her to call the police.

  It would have been better if the woman had let me make the call myself, so I could ask for the right police department. It was not exactly good that the police let me walk in front of a photographer, even with a blanket over my head.

  When asked if that was part of her plan, she said: ‘No, it was not planned. But I had thought about it. There is a difference between something that one plans, and something that one has a vague idea about, so to speak. It was different to planning. There are computer programmes for simulation. I foresaw the future, but I did not plan it.’

  When the interviewer suggested that she must have had a lot of faith in herself, she said: ‘Yes, certainly. It was also very frustrating for me to find out that people were looking for me with a digger in the Schotterteich [a gravel-pit pond near Vienna]. They were looking for my corpse. And I was distraught because I had the feeling that even though I was still alive, I was being written off already. It was hopeless. I was convinced that nobody would ever look for me again and that I would never be found.

  ‘At the beginning I still believed that the police or someone else would find me, that someone had seen the perpetrator and connected him to my disappearance. Or that some leads would surface, or that some accomplices would say something.’

  When asked whether there were accomplices, she said: ‘That is not known for sure yet, but I believe there were none. As far as I know there were no accomplices.’

  Moving on to answer a question about how she dealt with her solitude, she said:

  I had no loneliness. I had hope and believed in a future. I must say something in that regard about my mother. Many are now criticising her for not being with me. And me for not being with her. But she has visited me. It has nothing to do with heartlessness—we understand each other in this way, too. We don’t need to live together to know that we belong together.

  I thought about my family during the whole time. For them the situation was even worse than for me. They believed I was dead. But I knew they were alive and fading away because of worries about me. At this time I was happy to be able to use my childhood memories as a way to freedom.

  People are doing my mother an injustice now, when they are say bad things about her. I love her and she loves me.

  I continuously looked for logistical approaches to a solution. First the escape, and then whatever was to come next. Was I simply to run into the streets of Strasshof, screaming, going to the neighbours? I even had this idea that I would become world famous after the escape, and I thought of what I was supposed to do to avoid having the media at my heels straight away, so that I could have some time to enjoy the moments of my freedom for a while.

  Natascha said that Priklopil, by killing himself, ‘didn’t just make me and Herr H, who drove him to the station, indirectly into murderers, but also the train driver. Because I knew that he would kill himself, I knew of his death in advance. In the seconds of my escape I knew without a shadow of a doubt that he would kill himself. I told the police that, but by the time they found his car he had already thrown himself in front of the train.’

  Natascha said she found out ‘the next day with the police. The officers wanted to keep that from me.’

  When asked if she regretted his death, she replied: ‘Of course. I prepared him for my escape for months. And I promised him that he could live all right in gaol because it’s really not so bad there. Only now do I know that you would get 10 years maximum for such a crime. Before I was of the opinion that he would get 20.’

  Prepared him. The little girl captive ‘prepared’ her gaoler—the man who stole her from a street—for the fact that she would, one day, leave him. It resonates like the domestic rows of a thousand unhappy, unfulfilled relationships: ‘If you don’t watch out, one day I’ll be off…’ Did he treat it like a tiff and brush it off, believing that she was his for ever? Or was he secretly glad that the woman-child-monster (in his view) who no longer performed as his fantasy dictated was preparing her way out.

  Natascha Kampusch chooses her words carefully: there is ambiguity and total clarity dotted around her statements, depending on what is being discussed. But there is nothing ambivalent or obscure in this statement: She told him the day was coming when she would be free. And he would be dead.

  After being told that the justice ministry wants to change the laws so that Priklopil would have been given 20 years, she said that was good.

  ‘I certainly could not have accepted 10 years. Anyway I prophesised he would get 20 years and I consoled him with the fact that nowadays 60-year-olds are still in really good shape.’

  She added that for her, the suicide was ‘simply a loss. No one should kill themselves. He could have given me so much more information, and also the police officers. Now they need to reconstruct very complicated circumstances totally without him. But we don’t want to talk much more about Herr Priklopil.’

  She admitted that she had asked for, and was receiving, up-to-date police reports about the case, and also the grim reading material of Priklopil’s post-mortem report.

  She was asked about loneliness and said: ‘Yes, of course I missed having a social life. I had a need for people, for animals. I was sad because I didn’t have either. But I didn’t have the feeling of loneliness because I had more time to keep myself busy. I knew how to use my time well, with reading and work. I helped him build his house.

  ‘I was locked up. I never understood why I was locked up without having done anything wrong. Normally they only lock up criminals.’

  When asked if she believed in God, she replied: ‘Well, that is very ambivalent. Yes, a little bit. I did pray. But later on I stopped. Apart from that the offender prayed. I think even Fidel Castro prays.’

  She went on to describe the cats that she missed so much during her incarceration. ‘And I also missed my grandparents. I also felt that I would never see either them or my much-loved cats again. My grandma on my father’s side and my grandpa on my mother’s side died in the meantime. And also other relatives, my great-aunts.’ Then she spoke about her parents:

  My relationship with my parents is very good. Yes, I love my parents. Someone got the idea that there is a row going on. There isn’t. Apart from that I have so much to do at the moment, which means I really have no time to dedicate to my parents. After all this we will have endless time.

  I’m not doing so well right now. My eyes burn, I’m coughing all the time and I find all that to be inappropriate during an interview. I hope that during the TV interview I don’t keel over.

  You asked before about my future plans. I would like to catch up on my studies. The Matura [A-level equivalent] and maybe a degree. I have no idea in what, though. Something that is quick and easy. Actually everything interests me, and I would have to live for ever to study it all. Right now I’m reading about media law. But I’m also interested in complementary subjects, the—what did he call it?—‘orchid subjects’. [This is a German term for certain arts subjects that are regarded as rare, beautiful, expensive and, most of all, useless for career purposes.]

  I have told my mother that we should go on a cruise trip. I don’t know where to, but it would make me happy. I have also told her that we should take the train to Berlin once, simply because I think that would be something like teleportation. You get on the train here and then you suddenly come out in Berlin. It really is a
ll about the journey.

  In response to a reporter who suggested that the whole of Austria is already ‘at her feet’ she replied: ‘True. But I also want to see London, or New York, but those security measures are getting on my nerves. However, I know that big trips are not possible yet. I would get bad diseases.’

  She wants to meet her old friends, plan a project for brutalised women in Mexico, feed the hungry in Africa—‘I know from my own experience what hunger is’—and live in an apartment. If it hadn’t been for the appalling backdrop of No. 60 Heinestrasse, she could have been reading from the script of a Miss World beauty contestant.

  Professor Berger, in an interview with the authors, spoke of the controlling aspect to Natascha’s character, but said it belied a weakness within that she still has to come to terms with. ‘On one hand she is immensely strong and very much in control of what is happening around her, but on the other she is quite weak and very vulnerable.’ He went on:

  Fraulein Kampusch is very mature and has detailed plans about her future, and in the next weeks she will start working on her exams in order to quickly complete her secondary education and then be able to qualify for university. We have spoken to the school authorities, and they said they will make exceptions in her case and are willing to do everything to help her go though the process as quickly as possible.

  She is interested in appearing in the media and she is also considering a media-related career. But she is well aware of the things she can and the things she cannot do. For example, she asked for someone to manage her finances.

  She will choose a company that will act as her, and possibly her family’s, media representative, and then she will probably appear in international media. That is her decision. It is a bit unusual for a kidnapping victim to be keen on appearing in the media after her ordeal, but you have to understand that the media were her only contact with the outside world.