10 Years of Freedom

by Natascha Kampusch

  I found my encounters with Nitiya, as well as with other people on my trip, extremely enriching. Because on one hand we approached each other very openly, but on the other hand we kept our distance in order to show respect. Not always discussing the full horror of one’s experiences is sometimes done out of protection. Not protecting oneself, but protecting others. In the past I have had experiences that confused me at first and left me puzzled. On one hand enormous interest, sympathy even, and on the other hand the constant pressure to reveal additional details. This never wanting to stop, this inability to let it be, as if to say, there must be even more to be uncovered. And at the same time this pushing it back into the private realm – that‘s where it belongs, if at all – whenever I have spoken openly about my trauma. Whenever somebody told me, “I didn’t want to know that,” I felt rejected. It was painful, but I have learned in the meantime that this is a protective mechanism, a fear of being overwhelmed, of an inability to cope.

  For me both of these scenarios are very difficult to deal with, but I have gotten better at it. The compartmentalization as well as the reduction of this one phase of my life are both mechanisms that I cannot understand. I only have this one life. I only have this one image of myself – even though I am able to view it from a different angle thanks to my additional life experience. On the outside my life can certainly be broken down into various phases. Into a before, a during, and an after. Nevertheless those phases cannot be separated from each other. Because everything impacts everything else, and for me one is inconceivable without the other.

  It is not necessary to examine such extreme experiences as mine or those that I encountered in Sri Lanka, under the microscope. We all know that horrific things happen on this planet, everywhere, every day, every second. Enormous catastrophes or terrible events that happen to only one person shake us. For a moment we are shocked, express compassion or donate money. But often we only register such events if they cross a certain line, in terms of their scope or our ability to imagine them. And that’s where we start to measure, to compare, to put suffering in context.

  I don‘t know if it is a matter of faith, but the sisters and priests in the two homes I visited simply accepted their charges the way they were. They did not make acceptance and empathy contingent on the severity of their experiences, but simply on the fact that a person was standing in front of them who needed help and protection.

  I felt a connection with the children and young adults that I met in Sri Lanka, as if we were bound together by a magical link. Despite the terrible circumstances my story has had a positive ending. And the stories of these children have also had a positive ending. They now have clean beds to sleep in and sanitary facilities with water they are even able to drink. They are provided with medical and psychological care, they are receiving an education, an opportunity to restart their lives. While the images of their old lives will never fully disappear, they will fade over time. They can experience moments of happiness and receive support from people who have a clear conscience. When we said goodbye, Nitiya showed me her room. In the drawer of her small dresser there was a picture of Don Bosco.

  9

  On a Continuous Loop

  “Natascha-Gate”

  Today ten years after my escape I have no tolerance for the fact that there are many people who believe that they must make a name for themselves at my expense, by reinterpreting and twisting the facts as it suits them, thereby victimizing my family and myself a second time. Making us a victim of their inability to accept the crime as such, just as it was.

  In the above-mentioned interview on my trip to Sri Lanka I was asked whether I was happy:

  You‘re always asking questions. What is happiness? Happiness is ephemeral. There are perhaps brief moments where you are at peace with the world. Here in Sri Lanka I have been fortunate to experience a large number of these kinds of moments over the last several days. I am blossoming here like a cactus that suddenly sprouts small pink blooms. Like a beautiful, large orchid.

  What is different in Vienna?

  In Vienna I am often attacked. I have to be on alert all the time. An invisible set of rules surrounds me and constrains me, oppressing me at the same time. Here in Sri Lanka I feel safer. I think that after this experience I will be able to breathe much easier in Vienna. It’s as if an enormous burden has been taken from me.20

  I felt as if I were headed in the right direction and had found meaning for myself. I had hardly returned to Vienna when a number of people began to gripe that there were enough children in Austria who are suffering, and on top of all that I certainly could have invested even more money. Elsewhere I have already mentioned that very few people appreciate it when others attempt to poke around in their financial dealings. Apparently many people seem to suffer from the misconception that I am doing quite well in terms of my personal wealth. Far be it from me to feel the need to justify myself or anything, but maybe knowing this will silence a number of critics. I have never spent a single cent of the donations I have received on myself. I have supported projects with disabled children in Austria, earmarked € 25,000 in immediate assistance for the Fritzl family and called on the Austrian people to donate to the victims of this horrific crime. A number of media outlets and blogs never attribute honest compassion to me. No, they accused me of “patronizing behaviour”. An additional € 25,000 has been earmarked for the hospital in Sri Lanka, where I matched that amount from my own pocket.

  After my first interview a journalist wrote, “It is also very clever, just on a side note, that she is making money off of her story. Anyone having to come to terms with such a horrific tale should, like her, not have to be concerned about money. And if the world is so intensely interested in her fate, then it should be willing to pay money for it.”21

  To those for whom this is once again grist for their mill I would like to say: I genuinely feel sorry for those who think that I am doing so unbelievably well, that they would change places with me in a heartbeat. They really should make an honest effort to put themselves in my shoes for once. They should try to spend a day or even a week in such a confined space. They should take a look at my life today, hounded by conspiracy theorists trying to make themselves look important and unable to let go. Again and again called before court or to speak into a microphone in order to testify to the whole story again and take a position on the most absurd accusations. In the meantime it seemed to me as if all of Austria was full of people, all the way up to the highest levels, who, figuratively speaking, were out and about with microwave ovens and gas stoves looking to reheat my story again and again. Yes, I would really like to see these people spend an entire day in my shoes.

  *

  How did one press expert put it so concisely in August 2006: “In four weeks the story will have run its course journalistically speaking and will be out of the media.” To this very day the story is still stuck in the media. It is not easy even for me to keep track of all of the developments, all the twists and turns that my story has taken.22 For me, the issue actually ended with my escape and the death of the kidnapper. A clear case that should be open and shut, which had run its course legally speaking around two months after my escape when the investigation was closed.

  However, like during my captivity, the police and the public prosecutors have been pressured to continue their investigation. Because, it was said, there was a pornography ring involving the highest circles of power, because I was being blackmailed with incriminating evidence and for that reason was attempting to impede the full clarification of the case, etc. Statements from the public prosecutors that there was no basis for these speculations fell on deaf ears; the conspiracies continued to run wild.

  Parallel to this there were indications that errors in the investigation could have been made, that there had possibly been a cover up, supposedly so as not to endanger the upcoming general elections by making such a scandal public. The Ministry of the Interior responded an
d set up an evaluation commission in February 2008. One month later a parliamentary fact-finding committee was formed in order to shed light on the internal processes.

  I was of the opinion that if there could actually have been errors, and as a consequence cover ups, then that should be comprehensively cleared up so that the competent authorities could draw their conclusions. The thought that it might have been possible to find me much sooner was painful, but it serves no purpose to cling to hypotheticals, like “could’ve, should’ve, would’ve”. That kind of thinking will only eat you up.

  As events wore on, my underlying positive attitude began to show significant cracks, and my trust in the system was significantly shaken. When I said as much, as I have often done openly, in a statement, it was not particularly well received. I was forced to publicly apologize – this was not only difficult to understand looking back, if you consider everything that had happened: Excerpts from police interviews provided to the commission and the fact-finding committee suddenly appeared completely out of context and in an abridged version in the press. Although the members of the commission and the committee had signed agreements to maintain confidentiality. The passages that were published had nothing to do with the actual task at hand (namely clarifying possible internal failures), but became an opportunity to discredit me, and later my family as well.

  I was accused of participating in a cover up in order to prevent the unearthing of a much larger crime. For my parents this must have seemed like a nightmarish déjà vu. Everything had resurfaced. The accusations of abuse, the possible connections to the kidnapper, or rather an entire group of kidnappers, the “environment” that I likely came from and had given me such terrible childhood experiences, as asserted by Ludwig Adamovich, the head of the evaluation commission. There was no tangible evidence, but it was something you had to “just sense. However, the fact that Mr. Priklopil was out and about one fine day with his delivery van and had looked to see if some girl was walking along that he could make use of is something I find absurd.”23 When highly respected people like him – himself the former president of the Austrian Constitutional Court – spread such ideas (and those weren’t the only ones), everyone feels safe in saying, “Well, if that’s the way he sees it, there must be something more there.”

  Both Adamovich as well as commission member Johann Rzeszut, former president of the Supreme Court, were both in agreement that there was possibly a little bit more to it than the official version of my story. In a published letter to the Austrian daily Österreich Rzeszut wrote that it was completely unrealistic that an individual criminal would concoct a plan to kidnap a child using a car all by himself. And if I should ever decide one day to “go public and expose the full truth in the media” I would be in danger for my life, as possible masterminds “may just decide that they are forced to take action and put an end to things.” He said that for years he feared nothing more than “a newspaper article stating that ‘Natascha Kampusch was found dead’”. From the perspective of the victim “a host of possible motivations for the conscious decision to provide false information was conceivable: an ever closer relationship with the kidnapper over a long period, ongoing pressure brought to bear by a criminal not yet identified by police, cover-up of the involvement of persons close to her, etc.”24

  If his concern for my life was so great, the immediate question is why I was to learn of this apparently acutely dangerous situation from the media. That was certainly not in the interest of my safety, but apparently served the needs of a number of committee members for recognition and affirmation.25

  The responses that I was subject to from public were reflected in the status of each of the “new investigations”. From October 2008 to January 2010 the case was reopened once again. The final findings, from my point of view clear from the very beginning, were that Priklopil had acted alone. There was no connection to any masterminds, not to mention my parents.

  During this period I was forced again and again to look backwards into my past. I was unable to have any kind of future if the past was stuck to the soles of my feet like a clump of manure. Not because I wouldn’t have been able to cope with it, but because I was once again pushed into that pile of manure. By people who believed to have found a forum to achieve maximum attention.

  So as not to be misunderstood: I would have been the first to welcome genuinely new approaches. I would have never done anything to impede any further clarification of the case, if there had been anything to clear up. From the first to my last police interview I constantly reiterated, mantra-like, what I knew. And that dovetailed exactly with what various evaluation commissions and fact-finding committees have “unearthed” in the meantime.

  In 2009 I was required to appear in court in Graz several times within the framework of new investigations. The questioning took place behind closed doors; but in front of the courthouse curious onlookers and camera teams were jockeying for position. One of the reporters was so keen that he fell into a flowerpot. Over the next several days I was smuggled into the building through the cellar. Two public prosecutors grilled me, once for an entire eight hours, asking me questions again and again about particular sequences of events. Why I did not run away earlier, whether statement X came from such and such person, when I was questioned where and by whom, and what I said during those questionings. It was fatiguing and very trying for me both physically and mentally. Although the window was open, the air was incredibly stuffy. Very quickly my head began to hurt and I had difficulty concentrating.

  Later my statements were compared to the official police reports of my initial interviews. They were no deviations, meaning that I had stuck to my statements, stuck to the truth. Nevertheless it seemed as if all of a sudden nearly everything concerning my person and my story was branded a lie by certain circles. In January 2010 for example, the Austrian news magazine Profil reported that I had escaped twice during my captivity, but had returned to my captor twice “voluntarily”. The magazine quoted an investigator from the commission saying, “The intention is to uphold the image of eight years in chains. But that’s not how it was.”26 I was outraged and saw the report as a low point in the reporting on my past. It was not to be the last.

  The entire years-long “Kampusch case” was essentially a farcical waste of tax revenue and resources. The 600-page final report issued by the Innsbruck public prosecutor’s office alone, which had spent ten months focusing on the internal processes of the Vienna public prosecutor’s office, can essentially be reduced to one sentence: Nobody hastily zeroed in on Priklopil as the sole kidnapper; there is simply no indication that he was not acting alone. This was in November 2011. But, there’s a saying in German that what is not permitted to be true, cannot be true. And so it goes, again and again.

  *

  In my hometown of Vienna, which is both a big city and a village, being a “public person” means nothing more than having to answer questions publicly. The Viennese are well-informed and make no secret of that fact. During the phase of the legal, and also political, tug-of-war, during the phase of the media overheating over “Natascha-Gate”, every step I took was like running the gauntlet. Whenever I took public transportation, various camps emerged depending on their curiosity, empathy or hate levels. Some approached me with their sympathy – Will it never end? What are they doing to you? - While others said that they had already known all along, while still others asked me obscene questions of what it was like to have been “always at his beck and call” and what kind of contraception we used.

  Groups of teenage boys were particularly intrusive. Whenever I refused to respond to their comments, they would begin to yell insults or bellow obscene jokes. “Where does the biggest bush grow? In the cellar, in the cellar!” Or: “All the kids play with Playmobil, but Natascha plays with Priklopil.”

  Psychologists say that people always use humour to process the incomprehensible. The blacker and more macabre the joke is, the more it me
ets its purpose of putting difficult to comprehend horrors into words and coping with it in the face of our helplessness. Once I had managed to escape from my abductor, it only took a few days for the first Kampusch jokes to make their rounds in Austria. In principle I have no problem with that. I’m actually a very fun-loving person. I like to laugh, and I am certainly more than able to laugh at myself. But standing in a crowded tram, gripping the handrail tightly or wanting to disappear into my seat, while everybody around me is bellowing and roaring is humiliating. In situations like that I have often dashed off the tram at the next station, the howls echoing behind me, and people staring scornful daggers at my back. It’s something else entirely if you are sitting with friends and after a couple glasses of wine you trot out your best jokes, as opposed to seeking to expose a person in public who has become the victim of a crime through no fault of their own.

  If these instances of atrocious behaviour were only committed by teenagers, I could say “Forget about it. It’s just a stupid phase. All they want is to assert their independence and get attention while protected by a group of people.” But the atrocious behaviour that adults have displayed toward me has been incomparably worse. They always occurred when the media had once again reported on supposedly new revelations, a new scandal in the “Kampusch case”.