by Allan Hall
Now 24, Elena says she hopes her correspondence with Natascha ‘helps her come to terms with the enormity of what happened to her’. Those close to her say it does. While that goes on, the psychiatric team are looking for her to bond with a special female friend. ‘It is important, since Natascha’s only attachment figure for the past eight years was her tormentor, that she now has a positive feminine attachment figure,’ says her former chief psychiatrist Max Friedrich.
Before the Natascha Kampusch case it could be argued that Austria was identified with Mozart, cowbells, The Sound of Music and Joerg Haider. Icons that, Haider aside, the tourist authorities were not unhappy with. Now it is Natascha who has become the indelible face of an entire country, the girl who put a nation of eight million on a map in a way it never thought possible.
She is even the subject of newspaper surveys. The Salzburger Nachrichten reported that 90 per cent of Austrians were ‘very excited’ about her first TV interview, while 50 per cent of readers could not fathom why she chose to live neither with her mother nor her father. Over 80 per cent of Austrians are convinced that the kidnapping victim is receiving the best possible medicinal and psychological care, for which 75 per cent said the state should pay. However, 68 per cent believe that Natascha will never be able to lead a ‘normal life’. Interestingly, over half—62 per cent—don’t believe that Wolfgang Priklopil planned and executed the crime alone.
The ‘Natascha Bandwagon’, as some newspapers have called this phenomenon, has had other repercussions. After she escaped and details of her existence were revealed there was a massive rise across the country, at least for a few days, in the number of parents accompanying their children to school. There was also a huge surge in mobile phone sales for children, their fretting parents wanting to be able to contact them at will. This in turn triggered a second debate about ‘cotton wool kids’ and how it was important, after all, to allow them independence at an early age for character-building purposes.
There was even a new illness—Natascha Kampusch Syndrome. Medical experts coined the term to explain the anxiety thousands of parents began feeling about their own children after hearing Natascha’s shocking tale. It involves spectacular and often violent outbursts, particularly by fathers who see demons everywhere and accuse neighbours and friends of being ‘kiddy fiddlers’. The most extreme case involved a father who set his neighbour on fire because he believed he had kidnapped his daughter.
Vienna psychotherapist Kurt Kletzer, interviewed for earlier chapters in this book, said:
‘The Natascha case was shocking enough, but that it happened here in Austria on their doorstep has left many people traumatised and extremely worried about their own children. The so-called Kampusch Syndrome is a natural development of that. These parents took it for granted that their children would be safe in broad daylight on their way to school, and now they have questioned that belief, which has manifested itself in some cases in an over-protective attitude to their children.’
In some areas, panicked parents bullied police into organising patrols to stand guard outside schools, and kids’ late arrival home led to police stations being flooded with calls from their terrified parents. In the arson case, a 55-year-old man in the Austrian town of Gmunden became convinced that his neighbour had kidnapped his teenage daughter. He tied the 62-year-old up and, when he refused to hand over the girl, doused him in petrol and set him on fire.
Police later found that the 17-year-old had gone on a holiday with a boyfriend from the Dominican Republic, who took her to his homeland, and she had not told her parents. She apparently turned up just an hour after the attack. The injured man was taken to the serious burns unit at Wels hospital before being moved to the nearby Linz hospital. He has 50 per cent burns and, at the time of writing is being kept in an artificial coma, with his condition described as critical.
As well as Natascha well-wishers and hate-mailers, the police also had to deal with a new crime phenomenon: Kampusch con men. Numerous websites were set up by crooks claiming to be the official ‘Natascha Kampusch Fund’ or ‘Natascha Kampusch Foundation’, complete with bank accounts and addresses to which cash should be sent. Several villains were laughing all the way to the bank before detectives shut the cyber crime scam down.
But it is Natascha herself who stands to make more money than she could ever hope to spend if the Hollywood machine strikes a deal with her. Media reports say she has been offered over a million pounds for the first movie deal.
Ned Norchack, an independent film critic, said: ‘People have already had their fill of gore and blood in Hollywood horror movies. But they want to see something else in a horror film, a new dimension of fear. Natascha’s story has everything and, what’s more, it’s real, which makes it twice as frightening. It happened to her—it could happen to anyone in the audience.’ Rising Hollywood horror director Eli Roth, who has won respect with films such as the recent Hostel, is rumoured to be among those in the frame to direct the movie. The legal team are scrutinising all offers.
So life is exciting, rich and new for Natascha. Can it ever, though, be normal? Dirk Depover, father of one of Marc Dutroux’s victims, who co-founded the Child Focus charity in Belgium, seeking to protect small children from the likes of this world’s Priklopils, says that can only be achieved through anonymity—and that is certainly an alien path for Natascha Kampusch.
As portraits of Natascha go, the one offered up by Kronen Zeitung’s Marga Swoboda, encapsulates the strengths and strangeness of this most extraordinary of young women, highlighting her need to control along with her quest for a normality which seems elusive. It was composed as Frau Swoboda interviewed her.
When all of the fuss is over, will she be allowed to just be herself, unrecognised? She wasn’t allowed to be tired for a long time. Eight years of bare nerves when she had to stay alert, even in her sleep. One can’t just shut off imprisonment. Eight years alone in a cellar, and now alone in the whole world.
Sometimes there is a bit of ordinary daily routine. The lawyer brings files. Frau Kampusch doesn’t like chaos. So many changes in a few days, so much life all at once. Her father is coming to visit. She wants to see the cats. Back on the day when she left home without saying goodbye to her mother, she stopped to pet the cats.
Natascha installed an education centre in the few square metres of the cellar. That will keep scientists, particularly pedagogues, busy for many years to come. There is still much to learn from Natascha’s self-education.
Stubbornness and a vast determination to set boundaries: these are the characteristics of Natascha Kampush that have fascinated the world since the escape. Only an extraordinary child could manage this without bending or breaking.
It hurts to think that the entire world is under the impression that Natascha Kampush is strong and smart and capable. I hope she can also be a human being who doesn’t have to hide her wounds and weaknesses. Finally just able to live.
But matters fiscal and legal are taking precedence over education. She is determined, for instance, to have the house at Heinestrasse, where she grew up, to ensure that ‘people won’t make a museum out of it where ashtrays and coffee cups are sold’.
She said that she might let Priklopil’s mother live there. At the time of writing she hadn’t met with her, but hopes to soon.
That Natascha wants to stop the house from falling into the hands of a third party and become a ‘Disneyland of Horror’ is understandable. Less so is the rumour that she might want to hang on to it even if Frau Priklopil wants nothing to do with it.
The girl in the cellar wants her dungeon back. Perhaps, after all that has happened to her, it is the one place where she feels truly safe.
We hope this book has shown, thanks to the plethora of sources we have drawn on and the experts who have helped us, that the relationship between them was highly complex. That was key to her survival. However, we hope we have also made the case for Natascha to reveal, at least to the relevant experts, the full deta
ils of the relationship. She does not deserve to be the target of the sort of nasty hate mail campaign triggered by what is interpreted as her protection of Priklopil’s reputation.
The authors would argue that there is no obligation to protect a monster, no matter how much of a human side she got to see, just because speaking out might hurt his elderly mother’s feelings. For the medical profession alone, a detailed accounting of the mores and desires of her captor would be a massive bonus. Stored on a computer file, logged with police headquarters across Europe, such data might be effective the next time another child-hunter surfaces to make all our worst nightmares true. In fighting monsters it is necessary to know them.
Natascha grew up in that cellar but, as the medical experts themselves have testified, she remains in many ways the ten-year-old girl who went into it. The urge to control the way the media handle her story, which is becoming an obsession, indicates a fear of the same lack of control that she had on the day she was taken.
It is the hope of the world, and certainly of the authors, that Natascha Kampusch achieves everything she wants to in a life where experience has been replaced with a yawning chasm. The hope of everyone is that Natascha fills that chasm with love and friendship.
There is no disputing her intelligence, her kindliness—she doesn’t want to own a pet because she thinks all creatures should have a freedom denied to her during her formative years—her quick-wittedness, capacity to think of others and innate decency. Natascha Kampusch could have emerged from that cellar and that house as something less than human: instead, she came out as something almost superhuman, able to think of the feelings of her captor’s mother at the same time as her gaoler’s treatment continues to scorch her soul. That the world, its lunatics and leeches aside, was moved in these climactic times of famine, war, terrorism and death to write to her offering succour is testament to the enormous emotional power her ordeal, and her triumph over it, generated.
The Kampusch story is different from other endeavours of escape, of good triumphing over evil, for two reasons. First, there is the enormous length of time she was held by Priklopil, longer than the male adult captives were held by Islamic militants in Beirut during the 1980s—the only contemporary hostage drama that in terms of media coverage is comparable to Natascha’s imprisonment. Secondly, she was a little girl who grew up in captivity. This overwhelming sense of innocence lost in that cellar and that house both numbs the world and stimulates it into an act of collective sorrow—that it ever happened—and joy—that it ended as it did.
If at times we have questioned Natascha’s version of what happened inside No. 60 Heinestrasse, we have never questioned her courage or fortitude in surviving it. Lesser souls would have been broken, mentally and physically, by what happened to her.
Natascha’s enduring legacy to the world will be to make monsters beware of what they wish for. She is testament to the durability of the human spirit—its capacity never to surrender, but to triumph over seemingly insurmountable odds.
She made a pact with herself when she was twelve that she would free herself. Now she must hold fast to that pledge as true freedom, with its attendant daily anxieties, stresses, chores and worries—amplified for her because of the past—presents this extraordinary woman with her next formidable challenge.
Searchable Terms
Note: Entries in this index, carried over verbatim from the print edition of this title, are unlikely to correspond to the pagination of any given e-book reader. However, entries in this index, and other terms, may be easily located by using the search feature of your e-book reader.
‘NK’ indicates Natascha Kampusch;
‘WP’ indicates Wolfgang Priklopil.
Adolfo, Franco 13
Ahlers, Christoph Joseph 178–9
AKH see Vienna General Hospital
Aktenzeichen XY Ungeloest (‘Cases XY Unsolved’) (television programme) 147
Alsergrund district, Vienna 131
Alt Wien kindgarten, Leopoldauerplatz 77, Vienna 8–11, 85, 130, 179, 235
Arendt, Hannah 51
attachment 42, 96, 105, 186, 255
Auschwitz concentration camp, Poland 185
Austrian Home Office 144
Austrian police 129–61
Frau Sirny reports NK missing 85, 130–31
Frau Sirny’s Woman interview 91–3
deeply flawed hunt for NK 129, 130, 161
high-profiled search 129–30
white van witness 132, 133, 134, 139
Interpol informed 133
WP questioned 133–5, 139
fruitless leads 137, 157
search upgraded 137
search downsized 87, 137
hoax ransom bid 138–9
Poechhacker’s complaint 144–5
strategy changed to detailed, smaller swoops 147
VICLAS computer system 148–9, 161
and the paranormal 149–51, 154–5
lack of profiling 152–3
statement after one year 153
and paedophiles 153–4
NK case becomes a ‘cold case’ 156
Edelbacher’s comments 160–61
NK is taken to local police station 22–3, 195–7, 204–5
ensuing massive police operation 197
police chase WP 198–200
NK blames for not preventing WP’s suicide 209
police interrogation of Natascha nearing an end 252
Austrian Press Agency (APA) 130
Bartsch, Erika 16, 17–18
Bartsch, Hannes 13
Bartsch, Martin 15–16
Bartsch family 16
Baumarkt DIY store 167
Beirut: Islamic militants’ male adult captives (1980s) 262
Bejerot, Nils 105
Beranek, Christine 86
Berger, Professor Ernst 184, 187, 210–211, 216, 227–9
co-ordinates NK’s socio-psychiatric team 118
on NK’s attitude to the media 118–19
on NK’s torture 119
on NK’s relationship with WP 119, 208
criticism of the police 160
and WP’s suicide 209
on NK’s future plans 227–8
and the WP house 228–9
warns of possible delayed effects on NK 252–3
Berlin 227
Beuchert, Herbert 129–30
bin Laden, Osama 214
Bischofberger, Conny 240–41
BKA see Bundeskriminalamt
Black, Roy 13
Bobek, Susanne 240–41
Boehm, Gabriele 89
Borderline Personality Disorder 96
Brainin, Elisabeth 56
Brioschiweg Volksschule, Vienna 8, 10, 57, 72, 75, 76–7, 85, 89, 90–91, 130
Broneder, Susanne 90
Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) (Federal Criminal Police Office of Austria) 92, 156
Burgenland, Austria 23, 156
Charité clinic, Berlin 178
Chicken Grill takeaway, Strasshof 165
Child Focus charity, Belgium 258
Child Protection Centre, Vienna 185
Christine’s Schnellimbiss bar, Vienna 64–6, 144, 147, 150–51, 161, 176
CID (criminal investigation squad) 156
Cindy (NK’s cat; renamed Natascha/Tashy) 6, 12–13, 24–5, 234
Cobion 155–6
concentration camp inmates 184–6
Criminal Direction 1, Vienna police force 138
Criminal Intelligence Service:
Department of Investigations and Organised and General Crime 159
Criminal Investigation Office 159
Criminal Police Department 145
Croatia 148
Czech police 137
Danube River 137
Danube Service 137
Dardenne, Sabine 179
Depover, Dirk 258
Deutsch-Wagram, near Vienna 204
Donauplex shopping mall, Vienna 199
Donauinsel 137
> Donaustadt, Vienna 1–3, 130, 132
Donauzentrum shopping centre, Vienna 133, 200, 201
police station 22–3, 131, 132
Doni, Rosi 39–40
Drkosch, Hedi 59, 61
Drkosch, Peter 59–60, 61
Dutroux, Marc 42, 179, 258
Ecker, Dietmar 211
Ecker Partners 211
Edelbacher, Max 22–4, 144–5, 149, 160–61
Ehler, Eric 36
Ehler, Heinrich 35–6
Ehler, Hermine 36
Eichmann, Adolf ix, 51
Fallenbüchl, Hermann 61–2
Farthofer, Mayor Herbert 51, 249
FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) 131
Quantico, Virginia labs 152
Federal Criminal Office 169
Feurstein, Christoph 229
forensic science 157
Fourniret, Michel 94, 159
Fowles, John: The Collector 42, 125–6, 181
Frankl, Dr Viktor E. 185
Man’s Search for Meaning 185
Freiberger, Stefan 60
Freud, Anna 119
Freud, Sigmund 34, 131
Freudenberger, Superintendent Sabine 125, 131, 204–5
Friedrich, Professor Max
and the alleged pornographic photographs 19, 21, 22, 207
responsible for NK’s care 19, 21, 23, 207, 210–211, 216, 217
on NK’s isolation torture 109
and NK’s visit to the morgue 209
NK on 218, 219
warns of possible delayed effects on NK 252–3