Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian teenager who lived through what was perhaps Europe’s worst kidnap ordeal, spoke on Wednesday night for the first time of her ”place of despair” confined to a tiny enclosed pit outside Vienna for more than eight years.
In a 40-minute appearance on Austrian national television Kampusch painted a picture of terror, panic, starvation and fury during a youth controlled by the whims of a man she described as a split-personality paranoiac suffering from a guilty conscience.
Wolfgang Priklopil, a 44-year-old engineer who abducted the then 10-year-old in March 1998 while she was walking to school after a row with her mother, threw himself under a train after she escaped years of torture a fortnight ago. ”I was fully aware that my escape would also be his death sentence because he always threatened me with suicide,” she said.
Kampusch opted to reveal her identity in front of the cameras and in two print interviews in an attempt to ward off photographers vying for the first highly lucrative pictures of the 18-year-old.
She said she was confined to the underground cell for the first six months of her ordeal without being allowed out to wash. It was pitch dark when she was taken to the car repair pit, windowless and six metres square, underneath the garage at Priklopil’s house outside Vienna.
She hurled bottles at the walls and hammered them with her fists in an attempt to attract attention. ”I went hungry very often during my imprisonment,” she said in the TV interview which has already been sold to channels in France, Germany and Scandinavia.
Kampusch also told the glossy Vienna weekly, News, that she felt like a ”poor chicken” cooped up in a hen house during her time as a hostage. ”I asked myself over and over again, why did this have to happen to me out of millions of people, why me? I was convinced that no one would ever look for me again and so I’d never be found.” In her third interview, with Austria’s biggest tabloid, she was said to have dreamed of taking an axe to her tormentor.
She described her escape two weeks ago as a now-or-never moment that suddenly presented itself when Priklopil was talking on his cellphone. But she was terrified of the ”repressions” that might follow from a failed escape bid.
”I couldn’t risk anything … He suffered very strongly from paranoia and was chronically mistrustful. Failure could have meant never getting out of my dungeon again,” she said.
Later in her captivity she was allowed to ”go upstairs” from her custom-built basement ”dungeon” every day to read, and do household chores. ”But I was always sent back down immediately,” she said. The worst times were when Priklopil had guests, his mother visiting, or was out of the house. ”Then I had to spend entire weekends in the dungeon,” she said.
She detailed how she would be taken on shopping trips, always having to walk in front of Priklopil and frantically seeking to make eye contact with passersby or shop assistants.
Describing her escape, Kampusch told News: ”I made a run for it when I saw him on the phone. I ran in a panic into the allotments and started calling to people.
”I was there behind the gate to the allotment and I felt dizzy. I realised for the first time how weak I really was … But it all clicked. On the day of the escape, I was well — physically, mentally and no heart problems.”
Wednesday night’s broadcast drew record viewing figures. The state broadcaster paid nothing for the interview, but holds the rights for marketing worldwide, with the proceeds going into a fund being set up for Kampusch.
Over the past two weeks of blanket coverage of the case in Austria, concerns have been expressed that the victim has shifted from being the hostage of a deranged man to a different form of captivity, under siege from the international media.
Her media adviser, Dieter Ecker, a former political spin doctor, said there had been more than 300 requests for interviews, book contracts or film deals. ”The only one not in touch has been Steven Spielberg,” Ecker told the profil news magazine.
Kampusch said that when she fled, she approached various people pottering in their allotments. ”In vain, because none of them had a mobile phone. They just shrugged their shoulders and carried on … So I climbed over the fences into various allotment patches … and then I saw a window open with someone pottering in the kitchen and I spoke to this woman.”
Kampusch’s parents divorced after her abduction and the Vienna media have dwelt on the alleged hostility between the girl and her mother. But Kampusch spoke warmly of her family and said she wanted to go on a cruise with her mother.
She recalled the ”gut feeling” she had on the morning she was abducted and regretted not crossing the street when she saw Priklopil loitering. ”He grabbed me,” she said. ”I tried to scream, but no noise came out.” – Guardian Unlimited Â