10 Years of Freedom

by Natascha Kampusch

  *

  I did not register any of this during my captivity. But all of this formed the backdrop for our first encounters after my escape.

  In the car on the way to Vienna to the Criminal Police Office my mother bombarded the police officers with questions, such as “Does she have scars anywhere? Is she hurt? Will I even recognize her?”

  We had no problems recognizing each other. But it took a while for us to realize how difficult it would be to truly bridge the gap that had been torn open over the last several years. We had no time and no peace and quiet to slowly get reacquainted. Even my reunion with my mother was splashed across the media, for example that I had said to her, “I know you didn’t want all of this to turn out that way.” For so many conspiracy theorists this was to be used as belated evidence that she had been working together with my kidnapper. However, I was only referring to our last morning together, when we parted ways still angry. Nobody can know just how much that scene weighed on my mother. That sentence fragment that she always tacked on to her comments when we were fighting – who knows when we’ll see each other again – must have sounded like a dark prophecy.

  She had missed her daughter for so long and would of course have loved to take me home with her more than anything else so that we could start up again where we had left off. The framed photographs that she sat in front of for hours with my grandmother and where she lit a candle on my birthday every year had been photographs of little Natascha. Now a different person was suddenly standing in front of her. It must be similar to when you return after many years and suddenly find only gigantic resort hotels where your idyllic beloved beach had once been.

  We had not undergone the classic evolution like other mothers and daughters during puberty. No rituals, no pushing the relationship to another level. No behaviours that had evolved as well. Both of us only had our image of the other. Just like I was still the “little girl” for both of my sisters. My grandmother was the only one whose life was unaffected by this gap. Because the older generation had always adopted a different attitude and she had taken on a very special role in my life anyway.

  In the first few weeks after my escape I was unsure as to how close direct contact with my family should be. I have already mentioned that the doctors had their own opinion on this. I needed distance from everything, and at the same time I did not want to offend anyone. Who, if not they, had never given up on me, even if the kidnapper had always told me differently. And still I was overwhelmed, having to adjust to a number of persons at once, all with different needs and interests, after having interacted with only one close person in my life for several years.

  On 16 September 2006 I wrote in my diary:

  Family meeting!

  It‘s about what my future is to be like. I have increasingly noticed that I am understandably still a stranger to my mother. There is this part of me that she has not yet accepted. She is vacillating back and forth helplessly between a lack of emotional detachment to the little girl I used to be, who she would like to put her arms around, and the daughter I am now. Essentially my feelings are the same. Only the other way around.

  I think that describes the situation we were in at the time rather well. We could not simply turn back the clock and pretend as if nothing had happened. While they hoped to cuddle and pamper me, I did not want to have freed myself from one dependency only to be subsumed by the next. I needed time until I was able to allow myself to be close to somebody again. Moreover, even as a child I had painted a very vivid picture in my mind of what it would be like to live my own life once I had reached the age of adulthood. This dream should be all the more understandable, considering that I had just now put years of absolute dominance by another behind me.

  The fact that I preferred – for whatever reason – not to immediately move back into my old bedroom, but rather to move from the hospital to a nurses’ residence and then to my own apartment were viewed very critically. The media made an issue out of whether we talked on the phone (yes, regularly even), how often we saw each other (how often do you see your parents?) and in what environment. Whether my father was present or not, and if not, why. Most articles adopted the stance that he was the only one who had gone stubbornly in search of the whole truth and continued to do so after my escape, which is why he was being punished with rejection by me and the rest of my family. The wedge between my parents, which had been fashioned even during my captivity, was now being driven down a bit deeper.

  As the object of public scrutiny, we attempted to rebuild our lives as a family that had no longer existed even prior to my kidnapping. The answer to the question of whether I see my father, my mother, or my relatives and nieces and nephews every other day, every two weeks or every two years has nothing to do with my captivity.

  Expectations were raised not only of me, but also of my parents, about how they were to act and how not. They too were forced to live up to an image – and failed to do so both in their own way. They had been people with their own personalities before the kidnapping; they had a prior history. You couldn’t simply whitewash everything in an attempt to make everything okay again. And the corresponding conclusions were drawn from the fact that exactly this kind of outcome was not going to happen.

  After my escape my father was treated by the press as an even greater laughingstock than in the years before. For example there was a cartoon depicting him as Scrooge McDuck jumping around between stacks of money and gold coins, telling me, “Great! You had only to be locked up in the cellar for eight and half years, and now we’re laughing all the way to the bank!”

  And when my mother wrote a book one year after my escape telling her story of the desperate years during my captivity, people wrote in letters and on the Internet: “Which one of you was worse off?” or “It’s really dumb for your mother to whip off a book and beat you to the punch. Can’t you forbid her at all from writing her book so you can still cash in all the way on your story? After all, that’s what you’re all about, isn’t it?”

  I most certainly had my problems with the book being published because, for example, my mother had written about things in her book that I had told her in confidence. For example, that I had said goodbye to the kidnapper at his coffin. I had once told him, “One day I will dance on your grave.” Of course I did not do this, but I did feel a kind of satisfaction, a kind of victory in terms of “I survived this entire nightmare and you did not.”

  I did not want my visits to the morgue to be made public. Because it is difficult for those on the outside to put something like that in the right perspective. Because it’s easier to write about the “strangely alienating grief” the victim is feeling for the kidnapper then about the complexity of the situation in which I had only one person I was close to for many, many years. On whom my survival depended, and with whom I had to find a way to come to terms. You can’t just simply banish someone that you have spent eight and half years of your life with from your memory – no matter what the circumstances. I spent nearly as much of my life together with him as I had before the kidnapping with my family.

  I tried to briefly outline our life together and my reaction to his death in my “letter to the world public”, writing, “He carried me in his arms and trampled me underfoot. He was a part of my life. That is why I mourn for him in a way.” By escaping I not only freed myself from my torturer, but also from a person who I had by necessity been close to.

  Today I can understand a bit more easily that this was quite difficult to accept. Because the unyielding categories of good and evil would have to be reconsidered and the lines between them blurred. The kidnapper would have to be taken down from the height of monstrosity and inhumanity. He would have to regain a portion of his humanness. I have tried to do this over the years by seeing him as a person, with a very dark side, but also with a very light side. In so doing I have been able to remain human myself. I was able to, I had to forgive him for what he did to me, otherw
ise hate and anger would have eaten me up inside.

  The public was unable to refrain from judging that attitude, and therefore my behaviour. It was seen instead as yet another piece of evidence that it couldn’t have been as bad as all that. That I had perhaps even stayed with him willingly, because after all had there not been possibilities for escape earlier on?

  All of that was continually reheated. After the presentation of the book I was asked what I thought about the fact that my mother was cashing in on “my story”. I said at the time, “If she wants to tell her story to the public, then she should be allowed to do that. I would do things differently, but everybody has his or her own conscience and must consider what is ethically and morally acceptable and/or appropriate.” It may have seemed harsh at first, and certainly my disappointment that a number of episodes from our new life together had been revealed played a part. Episodes that, in my view, did not belong in the public realm. Misunderstandings that prove how difficult we found it to understand each other’s thoughts and actions. The story about the clothing, for example: she could not understand why I would want to keep some of the “rags” from my dungeon. Why I wouldn’t throw them away or even better burn them, as if I could erase all of my horrible memories. During my captivity I found a great deal of comfort in certain items. I did not have very much to be happy about, and I had learned to recognize the greatness even in small things. The few T-shirts and socks that I had gave me warmth back then, and meant something positive to me.

  And even if I viewed a number of things with a critical eye – so much had been building up in my mother for so many years and had to be released. And it was her decision to do it the way she did. The risk that entailed was something both of us had to cope with in equal measure.

  Portions of her book became the focus of further articles and blogs aimed at defamation and exposure. The press speculated as to whether my father would take legal action against the book, because he was not depicted very favourably. There were rumours about a final split between my parents and me, as well as about a tearful reconciliation. Black or white, there do not seem to be very many shades of nuance in between.

  In the first three years after my escape we regularly met at a farm near the village of Mariazell to celebrate life together. We needed time to get to know each other again, to become more natural with each other, also in dealing with how we were being portrayed.

  In the meantime we have found a very good level for our relationship. I bake and sew with my mother regularly. We often go shopping together or out to eat, or do something with my sisters and their children. The waters have calmed between my father and me as well.

  We likely would have been able to bridge the distance between us faster if there had been less scorched earth remaining after the commentators, bloggers, analysts and caricaturists had set aside their pens or their keyboards.

  4

  “Just Go out Dancing!”

  My Struggle for Normalcy

  Everybody was telling me now that I had to go out to a club, to meet young people, as if that would be the solution to all my problems. Of course that wouldn’t work, because it was a bit like “playing teenager”. Hitchhiking through the countryside with a blade of grass between my teeth and doing other things that young people do.

  After my short intermezzo in the nurses’ residence I moved to my mother’s flat temporarily until I could find a flat of my own. I did not have a great many ideas about what I wanted, and I had very few requirements. I wanted it to be full of light, have as few walls as possible, a great deal of glass, under no circumstances in the basement, but rather somewhere high above the ground, a room with a view so to speak.

  After my conscious decision to eschew my status as a “patient guinea pig”, the team of those people who were now to officially accompany me down my new path had suddenly become much smaller. Those who were still part of the team - my attorneys and a social worker - were now faced with the thankless task of searching for an apartment for an anonymous person. Of course the landlord later found out who was to move in, but we didn’t want to advertise that it was me from the very beginning. The apartment had to be affordable in the long run, because nobody knew if and when I would be able to stand on my own two feet financially, if I would ever be able to have a profession, or what the future held in general. Because I had been kidnapped on my way to school, I received a small annuity. And the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) had, as previously mentioned, set up an account after my interview to receive the money from the international sales of the broadcasting rights and private donations. But I did not want to touch that money for my flat, because I wanted to use it to help others. The original plan of setting up a foundation could not be implemented unfortunately, as we fell short of the amount needed for the initial deposit. All the money was left in the bank until I could find a suitable use for it.

  On the day of my escape my personal “wealth” amounted to € 416. The kidnapper gave me an allowance of 10 Austrian schillings a week, which he later generously rounded up to € 1. At the time I thought it a rather ridiculous, helpless attempt to establish normalcy between an adult and a child, even though nothing was normal and there was no way I could buy any kind of sweets with my money just like other kids. Over the years I saved it in the same plastic box that I kept my passport in.

  Aside from the few items of clothing from the dungeon, I owned nothing. From my toothbrush to cosmetics to a skirt or a coat to wear, I needed to buy everything new. I asked everybody around me what toothpaste they used. In the drugstore I examined all of the packages 1,000 times, reading every word of the list of ingredients. Sometimes it took hours for me to make a decision. Every item of clothing was examined from top to bottom, evaluated according to its quality and usefulness, and then found to be too expensive. I had no sense of how much things cost, and I preferred to put it back on the rack before I made a mistake. As a girl I most often wore what my mother had sewn for me or had purchased in a boutique, because she liked to outfit me with pretty clothes. And later I only had the very few items of clothing the kidnapper had brought me anyway.

  I had absolutely no idea where the best place to buy a winter coat was, and in a few months I was certain to need one. I was completely overwhelmed by the many shops in the pedestrian area with their overflowing display windows. I also did not like trying things on in the dressing room, where it was all too clear in the large mirror and under the harsh lighting how much my captivity had affected me physically. Stepping out from behind the curtain, I was eyed with curiosity by the sales staff. Other shoppers stopped to whisper, “Hey, that’s Natascha Kampusch!” Some people pulled out their mobiles and took pictures of me, wanted an autograph or told one of the many jokes about me making the rounds in a loud and clear voice while walking past, like one comparing me to a used car that had been primarily kept in the garage the whole time. Startled, I jumped back behind the curtain.

  Also because I didn’t want to subject myself to situations like those any longer, I had learned to sew my own clothes in the meantime myself. My mother taught me the basics, how to place a pattern on the material, how much leeway to leave, what kind of stitches to make, etc. We were able to overcome the distance that had arisen due to our long separation best by sewing together or thumbing through sewing magazines. She was the master seamstress, and I was her student. However, there was more friction between us when we were cooking. Here I was still a child to her, for whom she had once made sandwiches for school, or lunch or dinner. I still remembered a “baking demonstration” at the hospital quite well. It was my nephew’s birthday, and I was bound and determined to bake a cake. There was a small staff kitchen in the hospital that I was allowed to use. I asked my mother to gather up the ingredients and bring them to the hospital. I had planned to make the cake crust out of choux pastry and fill it with different kinds of fruit and gelatine. A number of nurses and my mother hovered over me, asking where my
recipe was. After all you have to stick to the exact weight measurements when baking, otherwise it won’t turn out right, they would say. Why aren’t you making a crust out of sponge cake or a regular cake mixture? Where did you learn to bake in the first place?

  I thought to myself, they should just wait and see. As calmly as possible I mixed the water in the milk together with butter and a bit of sugar in a pot that I then placed on the stove. After bringing the mixture to a bubble, I mixed in the flour. One of the nurses said that she had never before seen cake batter cooked on the stove. Before I put it in the oven, I added the eggs, then I began making the filling. I mixed the canned fruit together, warmed it on the stove and added the gelatine. “Come on Natascha. You have to do it this way; otherwise it’ll get all lumpy.” It wasn’t until I told her to please wait, that I knew what I was doing, that she held her tongue. But her sceptical looks continued. When the choux pastry dough was finished, I let it cool for just a few minutes before adding the thickened fruit mixture.

  There were certainly room for improvement in my visual presentation, but it was my first cake baked in freedom, and that is why it tasted particularly good not just to me, but also to the birthday boy. Even my mother, who is always particularly critical, had words of praise. It seemed that I had indeed absorbed considerable know-how from my family’s history as bakers, she said.

  Ever since then I have baked numerous cakes, and aside from one unsuccessful experiment with the natural sweetener Stevia, there have never been any complaints. I am sometimes teased by my friends for my domestic abilities. When I spend days baking cookies at Christmas, they say, “You’re just like my grandma.” And just like “grandma” I know a lot of home remedies for removing stains or for dying cloth using natural ingredients. That may seem a bit out of step with the times, but that’s how I feel myself from time to time. Neither young nor old, I am somehow caught between ages.