10 Years of Freedom

by Natascha Kampusch

  Later, when I started puberty, the kidnapper began to deprive me of food in a targeted way in order to weaken me, physically and mentally. I starved, at times for days on end, while every bite was strictly regulated. He would fish the hard-boiled eggs and sausage pieces out of the sausage salad that his mother sometimes made upstairs, and that I was given a portion of from time to time, so that only a couple of onions and tomatoes would be left swimming in the dressing.

  After my parents divorced, I used food in an attempt to compensate for a lack of closeness and love. In the dungeon, food was the tool the kidnapper used to make me submit, to break me and to bind me to him. After the worst periods of food deprivation, I would be ecstatic when the kidnapper gave me a piece of cake. He was taking notice of me, I had apparently not made any mistakes, and I received affection by way of food.

  In my family food had always played a significant role. We never went on an outing without stopping to eat somewhere, and no family celebration was complete without a richly set table with dumplings and a roast, with cake for dessert. While my father got larger, my mother was able to eat an enormous amount of food without gaining as much as a single gram. When I began to gain weight so rapidly, she fluctuated between control and ignorance, saying, “Stop stuffing everything in your mouth.” Most of the time, however, she was too busy to rap me on the knuckles, while I sat in a room adjacent to her shop, doing my homework and continually munching on chocolate and other sweets.

  However, the kidnapper was a man with a pronounced phobia of food, who forced his anorexic tendencies on me. When I was 16 I weighed only 38 kilos despite being 1.57 metres tall. Eating did not entail any kind of pleasure or joie de vivre for him, rather a bothersome duty or something that was tied to achievement. Only those who worked hard would earn a heel of bread. Even when I wanted a glass of water – just because I was thirsty – it would end in a fight.

  Only after inflicting severe abuse on me would he be comparatively generous. A couple of gummy bears, a piece of chocolate, a couple of cookies, a glass of milk. As if he wanted to ease his guilty conscience. Later when I knew that I could exercise some power of my own, it was one of my strategies to refuse to touch the treats. I wanted him to choke on his guilty conscience.

  It was an attempt to pay him back somewhat and on a different level for the torture that he subjected me to on a daily basis. At no time did I forget that my entire survival depended on the kidnapper. I was as dependent on him as only small children are on their parents. I was used to following orders given by adults, even if I didn’t understand the point of them. I understood the give-and-take between receiving attention and being ignored, and I had learned to be grateful even for small gestures. Children can adapt to the harshest circumstances. They are dependent and needy and will always try to see their way to viewing the positive side in even the cruellest person they have a close relationship with, as stunted as that positive side may be.

  A lot of ink has been spilled on this subject after my escape. Many times people disregarded the fact that I simply had no other choice if I wanted to survive. Rather they claimed that I purportedly had had a romantic relationship with the kidnapper.

  I do not know what the kidnapper saw in me. It was inevitable that the two of us had a connection, but it was certainly not a connection that was born out of love. Affection is not a feeling that coercion and enforced captivity can foster.

  If anybody loved me, it was my parents, and in fact they still do today. It must’ve been like a slap in the face for them to be pilloried in the media and to read that I had a stronger connection to my torturer than to them. That I had stayed with him voluntarily to avoid having to return to my family that had been torn apart.

  To all of those who believe that I would like to say that my family gave me many abilities that helped me survive my captivity. My mother taught me discipline and a certain ability to push emotions aside. My father taught me to imagine other worlds, alternative realities and to escape to them. Even if it was all just in my head. My grandmother gave me an emotional stockpile of comfort and warmth that I was able to think back to when I could no longer bear the cold and dark of my dungeon.

  *

  My parents did not deserve the treatment that they received both after my kidnapping and after my escape. I was a child of divorce like millions of others. My parents worked for a living, something that is more or less the norm nowadays. I was picked up and pampered one minute, and ignored and seen as a disruption the next, or treated as an unwilling pawn in their ongoing feud to denigrate each other and to build themselves up. Papa loves you more, because… Papa couldn’t possibly love you as much as I do, because… This is an everyday occurrence for children whose parents have nothing more to say to each other, or are only able to engage in mutual recrimination.

  You do not have to have grown up on the outskirts of Vienna, in one of these suburbs with no centre and no character, to have experienced what I did. Tower-like buildings housing council flats, designed on an architect‘s drawing board and plunked down on once lush expanses of green, interrupted every so often by shopping malls with brightly coloured light-up billboards. When the housing estate was built in the 1970s, the city planners likely patted each other on the back at how successful their residential vision-turned-reality appeared at first glance. A total of 2,400 generously apportioned, light-filled flats with balconies for over 7,000 people, who would pay good money for them, between park-like courtyards. When I was growing up there, there was very little left over from the estate’s one-time glory. Rennbahnweg was seen as a socially depressed area with high unemployment. The atmosphere among the many residents was apathetic to openly aggressive. Many young people took drugs, and adults drank alcohol to numb their frustrations.

  This was openly visible to everybody. It was easy to point the finger at “them” and tell yourself how lucky were not to live there. How lucky that you were different from those poor, hopeless people with their sad lives with no prospects. It is often overlooked that hopelessness, frustration and interpersonal problems existed just as often behind freshly painted façades, in affluent villas with tidy front yards, where father washes the car on Saturdays, and mother takes care of the home and children because one salary is enough.

  This may sound somewhat cynical, but I experienced things in the house of just such a supposedly perfect family that I never could have imagined. I experienced how it is when the neighbours are content to say that the man in the house next door was always so nice, meticulous and polite, and always so proper. Nobody takes the time anymore to look behind the façade, assuming instead that everything is most likely in order.

  The private life of my family was laid bare for public opprobrium, for the cliché hammer to come swinging down on it. What had happened to me and to them seemed all of a sudden to have been “expected”. In 2009, when the second evaluation commission was formed – with the stated goal of clarifying internal investigation missteps – the negative images painted of my parents and my childhood reached an unprecedented apex. In a newspaper interview, the chairman of the commission disseminated his view that my time in captivity was possibly “undoubtedly better” than what I had “experienced prior to that”. Considering the conditions under which I had grown up, it was not possible to seriously assume that I “just happened” to become a victim.10 It was even possible that everything was interconnected, that there was a link between the kidnapper and my parents. And if those suspicions were not confirmed, well it was also possible, after all, that I had consciously opted for the “alternative lifestyle solution” already mentioned, thankful to have finally escaped from the misery and wretchedness of home.

  *

  When my parents received news that I had resurfaced, they must have been almost delirious with happiness. A period of time extending over eight years was condensed and shrunk into one single moment of reunion. Everything was burdened with too much emotion, hope, j
oy and uncertainty. Nobody knew how to deal with the situation. Added to this were expectations from others, as the press was already on the scene. How are people, who haven‘t seen each other for so long, supposed to behave? When you last saw someone as an elementary school kid, and are now standing across from an adult woman, who, in the intervening years, has experienced – well, what exactly?

  The first meeting with my mother took place in the building formerly housing the Vienna Criminal Police Office. When the police car drove up, journalists tried to block access to the building through the back entrance. They beat on the roof of the car, pressing microphones and cameras against the windows. Just a few days after our first meeting, my mother described how it felt for her to go up into the building like this:

  “I walked into the building there, my heart starting to beat harder and harder, hammering harder and harder, and in the elevator I was already thinking to myself, that’s the door. But it was just the elevator. Then I still had to wait a little while, but it was just crazy. I am so proud of my girl, that she managed to do it. So unbelievably proud and happy.”

  Eight birthdays, eight Christmases and Easters, for eight years I had been waiting for this moment. For eight years I had been longing for a loving word, a touch from my mother. When that moment had finally come, I didn’t know how to handle it. My happiness was so enormous, my feelings were so overwhelming, that it took my breath away. I wanted to do everything right, but I didn’t know how.

  I felt a bit overwhelmed and boxed in by my mother’s hugs and tears, and later on by my father’s. It was almost as if they wanted to squash me in their happiness. I had to relearn how to respond to spontaneous emotions devoid of any purpose or ulterior motive. Over the last several years the only protective “embrace” in a figurative sense had been my room underground. When I was down there alone, had enough to eat, and if I knew that the kidnapper would not come down for perhaps two or three days, because it was the weekend and his mother was upstairs. Those were the times where I could be myself, where I didn’t have to be afraid and where I could feel safe.

  It was during those times that I imagined the moment of our reunion quite often. Preferably somewhere in a distant galaxy or in a remote clearing, or on a boat with all the people who are important to me, but far, far out at sea, out of the reach of others. We would have enough to eat and drink on the boat, and would not come back to shore until we were ready.

  In reality we were surrounded by strangers, by police officers and other people, and we were even strangers to each other, so that it couldn’t be anything but awkward. Every look, gesture, question and answer was duly noted. Everybody expected us to be one happy family again at the touch of a button. And at that moment we were supposed to be this happy family simply due to the fact that a terrible period in our lives was now over. At the same time, we were simply not the kind of happy family you see in romantic Rosamunde Pilcher novels, where one occasion suffices to overcome the distances that have only become greater over the years. Of course it would have made for a wonderful headline: “Koch and Sirny fall into each other’s arms, with their long-lost child in the middle. Will they finally get married now?” They had never been married, which was also a kind of black mark against us, “improper family circumstances”, and the fact alone that we all had different names was repeatedly cause for confusion.

  In a way we had stayed the same, with all of our positive and negative characteristics, the personal histories my parents carried with them, and with the new history that I had experienced and that cast everything in a dark shadow. A history whose dimensions my parents, the police officers surrounding us, and even I could not acknowledge at that moment. What had separated them over the last several years remained and could not be overcome. How could it have been any different, except at that one enormous moment when we first saw other again?

  Too much had happened, particularly between the two of them. Anyone thinking back to the newspaper articles that were published during my abduction will still remember. My father had sought out the journalists who characterized my mother first as an “evil abusive mother” and later as a “potential murderess”. He had called for investigations whenever detectives had announced that they now knew where I, or my bodily remains, were to be found, and even allowed himself to be filmed by a television crew, participating in a crime scene investigation with said detectives and a pond, which in the end was in fact drained. Of course without the desired result, but it achieved the desired ratings. Finally, my mother succeeded in taking legal action against just such baseless accusations.

  My father was a willing victim of the media. Early on he adopted the role of the lonely and abandoned husband, who was continuing his investigation on his own, had had thousands of posters printed and hung up, while the rest of the family was apparently uninterested. Later in an interview I once said that he was very immature. Today I would no longer judge him so harshly, but rather characterize him as acting out of a certain naïveté, emphasizing that he was not always entirely fortunate in his choice of interview partners and in the wording of his statements. After my escape my attorneys received a rather sheepish telephone call from him on several occasions admitting, “I’ve really messed things up…Could you help me out?” He had told the media something in good faith, which was supposed to help me, as he saw it. But it resulted in headlines, such as “Koch casts doubt on daughter’s statements and calls for further investigations. The entire truth must be finally uncovered”.

  During my captivity as well he certainly stumbled into many a mess, because he had always held tight to the conviction that I was still alive and that everything had to be done to find me after all. In his distress and hurt he had also given into the temptation to set himself up in opposition to my mother and to join the chorus singing that she was responsible for all of this.

  My mother on the other hand had spoken to other media outlets who simply saw my father as an “idiot” with his fixation on ominous investigators and on her as the mastermind. He was painted as a chain-smoking drinker who never amounted to anything and was now looking to train the spotlight on himself as a result of what had happened to his daughter. The counterpunch usually came quite swiftly, often accusing my mother that she had made herself suspicious by not living up to the weeping, mourning stereotype. However, her life had been completely turned on its head, and nothing was as it used to be. No more proper family celebrations, no more Christmases the way they used to be, because one person was missing. My mother withdrew into her private world, losing herself in her work so as not to be reminded constantly of her loss. In the first several years she simply did not want to have anybody around. I am unable to express in words what the suspicions about her must have made her feel.

  Perhaps I can put it this way: In an interview I once said something that I meant for my own situation at the time, but what could just as easily have applied to hers. “At times I felt a bit like prey. Whenever it leaves its protective nest, it does not set out to become another animal’s meal that day. It only becomes prey when it is hunted and torn apart by the pack of hunters. Only then does it become the victim, an object. And when the prey is injured during the hunt, it does not suddenly stop in midflight to lick its wounds. It only does so once it is once again in the safety of its burrow.”

  I made that statement at the time when I was being criticized for my supposed strength and the fact that I was never filmed or photographed crying. Is this what a traumatized victim looks like? Is this what a traumatized mother looks like?

  My father dealt with his grief differently. He had no problem wearing his feelings on his sleeve. My mother, who kept a tight lid on her feelings, could not, or did not want to. Who can really play judge and jury about the right way to deal with such a loss? About who had suffered more or even had something to hide because they refused to break down before the eyes of the world.

  With their very different ways of coping with my ki
dnapping, both of them provided amateur psychologists with plenty of fodder. In the end nobody can stand in judgment on what they really thought and felt during that time. On the extent to which they were in shock, and how that shock is still impacting their lives. Of course their suffering was different from what I went through. Still, we had to deal with the loss on both sides. My parents had to deal with the loss of their young daughter, without knowing whether or not she was still alive. And I had to deal with the loss of my freedom, in conjunction with the very high probability that I would never see my parents again, not to mention my elderly grandparents who at the time were already over seventy. One of the first questions that I asked my mother when I saw her again was whether my grandparents were still living. I was saddened when I found out that my favourite grandma, with whom I had always had a very special relationship, had already died two years prior to my escape.

  My entire family is still suffering to this day from what happened. Even though they are once again living their lives and everything has returned to normal in a way. Each and every one of us – even my nieces and nephews – have suffered egregious harm. Of course I do not mean harm in the form of a serious personality disorder, but there is a sadness in them that won’t go away. Their sadness is rooted in my kidnapping. This shadow continues to hang over all of us, which is largely due to the fact that the story keeps getting churned up again and again.