10 Years of Freedom

by Natascha Kampusch

  For the rest of the interview we increasingly switched roles. And questions asked by me soon led to a back-and-forth, where the topic was not just on how I was processing my personal history, but rather the fundamental questions of life that we all wrestle with. For me at the time Barcelona stirred up quite a bit once again, but also put a great deal back in its proper place. I wanted to gain control of my life and do something with it.

  *

  What began as a definite idea was announced several months later as a “media coup”. After a couple of initial exploratory meetings and a number of camera tests, the decision was made to give me my own talk show on the channel Puls 4 in 2008. The channel had been taken over by the media group SevenOne in 2007. Its programming platform was to be completely redesigned, and new ideas developed. The plan was to produce six episodes of a 45 minute format, each with one guest who was to answer in-depth questions, without any sensationalistic, tell-all ulterior motives and without violating the privacy of my interview partner.

  In the run-up there was a long discussion about how to conduct an interview and techniques for asking questions, which included Peter Huemer and Georg Danzer’s son.12 This turned into an hours-long conversation, at the end of which both gentlemen encouraged me to give it a try. A pilot phase lasting several months was to launch the project, where my first interviews with interesting people were recorded. I was to receive elocution lessons and learn how to remain calm and relaxed in the very unique studio atmosphere.

  The reactions from my friends and family were divided. The fact that I was already suffering from my fame, that it was such an enormous burden on me, was an argument against doing the talk show, as they saw it. It was my hope that it would be different, that I could be the focus of media attention for something other than my kidnapping, rather due to my own work. My intention was never to become famous; it just so happened that I was famous due to my circumstances. What would be so wrong about using my fame to do something meaningful, to provide myself with a foundation that I could build on? Naturally, this legitimate, but perhaps somewhat naïve view of things backfired on me.

  After the channel had announced the format, many media outlets were already expressing initial scepticism, which did not go unnoticed by the channel’s editorial department. We postponed the launch of the talk show, although the first couple interviews had already been recorded. Finally, the first interview was broadcast on 1 June 2008, reaching the highest market share to date. It was a success, certainly due to the curiosity of a number of television viewers, who wanted to see how I fared.

  In the responses to my interview with Austrian former Formula One driver Niki Lauda, who I had expressly wanted to talk to, my on-the-job performance was really just a side note. There was no “really well done” or “could have been much better”; no, the press issued a collective groan: “Now she feels she has to invade the television with her story as well. Can’t you just stay home and cry her eyes out, like any normal person would?” However, the reactions I received by e-mail were completely different. I received messages from well-wishers from as far away as Italy, who were happy that I had embarked on new adventures in efforts to restart my life.

  The fact that the Austrian press still insisted on harping on my merely “mediocre” market share compared to the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF) – my talk show had been up against the thriller Collateral with Tom Cruise – put a damper on the project not just for me, but also for the channel. Following Niki Lauda, we broadcast the interviews with Stefan Ruzowitzky and Veronika Ferres. Ruzowitzky had just won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film with his movie The Counterfeiters (Die Fälscher ). I interviewed German actress Veronika Ferres at the hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich on the margins of an event for her Power Child Foundation. She had just published a picture book about “stranger danger”. The book was aimed at helping parents talk to their children about how to handle difficult situations. Specifically, the focus was on preventive measures, such as “don’t talk to strangers”, “don’t take sweets from anyone” and “don’t get in the car with anyone you don’t know”.

  When I was a child the police had handed out pamphlets on this subject depicting the proper thing to do in such a situation and describing the evil intentions of such strangers. It was a bit strange to hear the pointers that were certainly essentially correct, but had not saved me from being kidnapped myself. Maybe the fact that the topic was too close to home was one of the reasons that the broadcast was not one of my top shows among the recorded pilots. Perhaps it was also because a cleaning lady kept running in front of the camera by accident and had to be edited out in a number of places. It was similar with Niki Lauda, where the air-conditioning unit was so loud and the lighting had to be constantly readjusted, because we felt like we were being barbecued alive and were practically glued to our stools for all of our sweating. It was just fine, and our ratings were, as I’ve already said, not bad at all.

  In November 2008 we discussed a new direction for the format. The aim was to make it a bit more tabloid-esque, with more clip inserts, less static, more action. It was too bad, but perhaps the right decision even for me. A great deal of derision was expressed by a number of publications, which was to be expected. It was clear they couldn’t handle it. Sometimes I think that if I had become famous as a result of “wardrobe malfunctions” that ended up displaying my nipples or bizarre performances on the Internet or in TV shows like I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!, It is likely that fewer people would have been so indignant at giving me my own talk show. Perhaps they would have smiled resignedly, saying, “Oh well, another one of those starlets who thinks she’s a star”. I’ve never viewed myself that way. I’ve met celebrities at many events I was invited to who made it very clear to me that I was not one of them: “What are you doing here? You have achieved absolutely nothing. We have to bend over backwards to attract the spotlight, and you can do it without even trying.”

  This “without even trying” is something I have never sought. I simply had a naïve idea that I could build a bridge to something that I had always dreamt of as a child. I wanted to be self-employed and earn my own money. Perhaps as an actress, writing books, or doing something with the media or arts. If I didn’t have my background as a kidnapping victim and had grown up completely “normally”, nobody would complain or judge me that way for what I’m doing. It would be about my work pure and simple, and how good or bad it was. No value judgments, just an objective assessment.

  On one hand I‘m accused of commercializing myself with my story. When I look at the options I have been presented with over the last several years, at what doors were open to me, it must be said that there were very few of them. And in the end all of them certainly came back full circle to the “Kampusch case”. A number of doors have been closed in my face for that very reason. Whenever I have “reduced” myself to my story on my own in my attempt to “reclaim my story, tell it from my perspective”, it was very quickly used against me. Now she’s parading her story across 284 pages of her book and is simply trying to make some quick cash with her self-pity tour. “And what about us. We pay taxes and scrape by, while she’s sitting on her fat behind counting money. I don’t think that she was really locked up, because it wouldn’t be at all possible for someone to survive that.”13

  6

  3,096 Days

  My Book Is Made into a Film

  I would have liked to see more of how I survived. I wasn’t that kind of victim. Moreover, there was no character development for either of the two main figures. But still, the film once again stirred a great deal up for me.

  When Bernd Eichinger heard on the news in August 2006 that in Austria a girl, who had disappeared so long ago and spent so many years in captivity, had reappeared, he felt electrified. He ordered his office to collect every scrap of information on the case. You never know if it might become material for making a film.

  Already
shortly after my escape, Constantin Film issued a pro forma offer in order to secure the film rights. At the time nobody was thinking about anything like that, least of all me. I had enough to do with finding my footing in my new life. I did not find out that the offer had been made in the first place and that my attorneys were continually asked about it until I reached an agreement with Eichinger and Constantin Film early in the summer of 2010. The filming was to begin in 2011, and the movie was to be shown in cinemas one year later.

  I was familiar with Eichinger’s film productions, such as We Children from Bahnhof Zoo, The Name of the Rose, The House of the Spirits, Downfall or The Baader Meinhof Complex. All of them were very impressive and spectacularly produced films where a great deal of action took place. My story was different. There were no fast scene changes. Essentially there were only two scene settings (the dungeon and the house) and – aside from stories from my childhood – only two actors. Myself and the kidnapper. The story was about power and its abuse, about the relationship between criminal and victim. And about a rather subtle development, namely how unequal power relationships gradually come into balance, how I developed strategies to assure my survival. Strategies that finally helped me escape and survive the kidnapper. Understated material full of psychology, despite all of the drama that was inherent in my kidnapping case. It was more an intimate play, a tough tug-of-war, not a loud, action-packed film.

  I was sceptical as to whether my story was the right material for him, or at least how I wanted it to be produced on screen. I had not been asked. Why would they? My advisors assured me that everything would be just fine. That Eichinger wanted to take the material on, was a genius, particularly as he wanted to write the script and direct the film himself. The material was predestined to be an Oscar winner, they said.

  I wasn‘t even sure if I really wanted my story to be made into a movie. The work on my book that was supposed to form the foundation for the manuscript wasn’t even finished yet.

  All those months had sapped a great deal of my strength in confronting the whole story again. My childhood, my years of captivity and the period just after my escape. At times I felt that I had run up against the limits of what I could take. More than once I woke up startled after having fallen asleep on the couch, glancing around in panic because I thought I was back in the dungeon.

  At the same time I wanted to tell my story to close the gaps, so that a great deal could no longer be kept a secret. I wanted to reclaim my past somewhat; after all there was no way I could run away from it. I wanted to regain control over the narrative of my experiences, which had taken on a life of its own in the meantime, undergoing constant reinterpretation and evaluation. For me, this book was also a kind of protective cover. When I was asked about the same things again and again, I could now point to the fact that I had written everything down between the two covers of my book, and that there was nothing more to say.

  As difficult as it was, the work on my book helped me process my past. And it really helped people understand me a bit better, so that I did not have to always explain so much. No longer could others read a great deal into the period of my captivity, because the media now had to grapple with my view of things.

  At the book presentation in Vienna in September 2010 I said that I hoped I could finally shed the “burdensome weight” of my past and finally begin to live my new life. While I was being hooked up with microphones in an adjacent room, a bookshop employee told me that there were around 700 people there spread out over two levels, and that the reading and the following Q&A would be shown on video screens. Television and radio teams had come from France and Germany, in addition to a number of journalists from the print media.

  Those attending my reading had already patiently waited in line for hours between metal barricades and been subjected to bag checks. That morning the newspaper reported that over thirty security guards, several detectives and around sixty employees would be on hand to provide for my security and to ensure that the event would go off smoothly. Obvious fears of targeted disruption were more than just conjecture. On the Internet “Kampusch haters” had called for supporters to take appropriate action.

  All of this was certainly not conducive to calming my nerves. During the reading I stumbled frequently in the beginning; it was a very important, but also very painful section of the book. It was about one day in 2004, where I was supposed to bake a cake according to a recipe from Priklopil’s mother. I had read it through to myself several times so as not to make any mistakes. He stood behind me, commenting on every move I made. “My mother doesn’t break the eggs that way at all.” – “The cake is going to be a disaster anyway. I can see that already.” – “Watch out! You are much too clumsy. The whole counter is covered in flour.” No matter what I did, it was wrong, or provided him with another opportunity to compare my incapability to the infallibility of his mother. After the next hurtful comment I blurted, “If your mother can do everything so much better, why don’t you ask her to bake you a cake?”

  From one second to the next he lost control, swept the bowl with the cake batter from the counter, beat me with his fists and pushed me against the kitchen table. Then he dragged me down into the basement and turned the light off. Over the course of the next day I increasingly lost control over my body and my thoughts. I had cramps and tried to satisfy my persistent hunger by drinking water. To no avail. I couldn’t think about anything other than eating something. And that I had crossed the line, that now he would really let me waste away in misery. I began to hallucinate, lying high up on my bunk bed whimpering and bathed in sweat, imagining myself on a slowly sinking ship. The water climbed higher and higher. It was cold. I felt it lapping at just my arms and legs, then at my chest and then at my neck.

  At some point I heard the kidnapper’s voice, followed by a thumping sound I could not place. “Here you go.” Then silence again. Everything around me tilted. I had long lost any sense of space and time. Below me was nothingness, black nothingness, my hand reaching down into emptiness again and again. It took me an eternity for me to realize where I was and to gather the strength to grope for the ladder and carefully climb down backwards, rung by rung. When I had reached the floor, I crept forward on all fours until my hand bumped against a small plastic bag. I ripped it open greedily, my fingers shaking. I was so clumsy that the contents of the bag fell out, rolling across the floor. In a panic, I groped around until I felt something long and cool. A carrot? I crawled around, searching every corner until I had collected a handful that I took back up to my bed. After I had wolfed down the carrots, one after the other, my stomach rumbled loudly, and was seized in cramps. It wasn’t until two days later that the kidnapper came back, asking, “Are you going to be good now?”

  When I had finished reading the passage, nobody in the audience moved a muscle. I had the feeling that everybody understood at that moment that there are various forms of abuse and of physical and psychological torment. Kidnapping and imprisoning someone already constitute an abuse per se. The kidnapper stole years of my life and any chance of normalcy. The hunger and humiliation I endured outweighed the public speculations. Looking over my entire eight and half years of captivity, that was just another piece of the puzzle.

  After I escaped I sometimes had the feeling that being reduced to this one aspect was another form of abuse. Because it shrank the kidnapper’s perfidious overall strategy down to the satisfaction of one psychological drive, making it sound as if he had perpetrated “only” this one crime against me. But really, there were so many more, whose impact I still feel today.

  *

  The idea of talking about these kinds of individual scenes, which only depict a small portion of the entire story, with a director who was a complete stranger to me, or even an entire film crew, was not an easy one for me. Particularly being opened up again, this time having to go perhaps even deeper than I had already in writing my book, where I was only confronted with the images
in my own head. I was not eager to deal with all of this again. I had opened up so much in my book, while at the same time setting a limit that I hoped would be respected.

  When a documentary about my ordeal was to be filmed as early as 200914, the focus going into the project was always on the possibility that I had not yet told the whole story. A story that the public absolutely had to know in order to understand exactly what had happened in those eight and half years. I believe that people will never be able to understand, because that period in my life goes beyond anyone’s imaginative capacities. The kidnapper, who could have provided information on his motives and behaviour, had avoided making any kind of statement by committing suicide. I bear the entire burden of his incomprehensible deed on my shoulders. In many ways. I live with its consequences, including those that are so absurd that I never could have imagined them. I am asked to explain things I cannot explain. I am asked to justify things that are unjustifiable, to live up to an image that I do not want to live up to. Sometimes it’s like a perversion of something Wolfgang Priklopil said, “You belong to me alone. I have created you.”

  Of course I have become a public person as a result of that person’s actions. But only as a result of his actions. I did not go stand in front of Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral, calling out, “Look here. Here I am. Please let me be famous. I will tell you the whole story, from beginning to end.” What I have told of the story is enough to understand what cannot really be understood. Very seldom have journalists asked for questions on the abuse I suffered, my forced semi-starvation, the mental and physical violence that I was subjected to for eight and half years. In an interview I once said that it seems to me sometimes as if some of the “spectators” were waiting for games like those in ancient Rome. If I were the cynical type, I would ask if the spectacle was somehow not enough. Does there have to be even more? If there were more, how would that change things? Nothing changes in the life of the “spectators”. Those who are confronted with it for just a short period of time – the police officers, the judges, the public. For them it’s just a criminal case. A story that gives you the creeps, that appals you, or whatever.