by Allan Hall
Frau Sirny claimed that for over eight years she prayed every day that her daughter would be returned to her, and that she knew in her heart that she was alive:
I always said that one day she would come back. Maybe she would be a different Natascha, but she would come back. Her disappearance ruled my life ever since she was taken from me at the age of ten.
Every day I prayed that she was OK and told her to hang on in there and hoped that one day she would come home. Each year I would celebrate her birthday by baking her favourite chocolate cake. It was never eaten, but somehow remembering the little things about her and what she liked helped me to get through.
Frau Sirny says she tried everything to find her daughter, including hiring clairvoyants, some of whom assured her she was still alive. Her father Ludwig, too, forfeited all life’s trivialities and pursuits after she was taken. He cursed himself for not having tried harder when he split with her mother to gain custody of Natascha. Like her mother, he was reduced to scouring the streets of the ancient capital in a desperate search for her.
Frau Sirny said, ‘In the first few weeks I trawled the streets of Vienna looking for her. I would sit in parks all day in the hope that she would turn up. Then I started to travel to other Austrian towns and cities and hang out in places where there were lots of children, especially kids who had run away from home or were skipping school, but there was no sign of her.’
When the police told her there was little else they could do and were scaling down the investigation into Natascha’s disappearance, Brigitta Sirny sought help from psychics.
‘I didn’t know what else to do, and so I went to a clairvoyant to ask if she could help me. She told me that Natascha was alive. She said that she was being held north of Vienna in a cellar in a house, but the police refused to act on the information, saying the psychic was probably just a hoax.’
Also painful, even in the aftermath of reunion, was the knowledge that she had driven to Strasshof one day for work and had actually travelled right past the house. ‘I can’t believe I even drove past it one day when I had a presentation in Strasshof,’ she said, her head bowed, her eyes filling up with tears.
Even as the days, months and years passed, she said it never got any easier for her:
What really got on my nerves was everyone giving me bits of advice, especially when they said things like ‘Life goes on’. For me it was like being in a time warp. Life around me went on, but in my head it stopped on the day Natascha vanished.
At times I even wished they would find Natascha’s body. At least then I could have strived towards some kind of closure and had a grave where I could mourn my beautiful daughter. But instead I continued as if she would walk through the door at any minute. I saved any letters she got and kept her things as she had left them. In my bathroom I made room for her Barbie shampoo and her Pocahontas soap. One day I discovered that Natascha’s clothes had been eaten by moths and I almost collapsed with sadness.
At Natascha’s school her loss hit hard and deep. Many schoolfriends recalled the fateful day she vanished from their lives. Michael Ulm, who was in the same class as Natascha—4C—fell ill with worry because she had gone. ‘She was my friend,’ he said. ‘I want the person who took her away to bring her back.’ Schoolchildren pleaded with teachers to be allowed to form search parties to scour the streets and wasteland nearby, but the idea was soon scotched for fear of more unsupervised children going missing.
Mothers who took their children to school were the lucky ones: most parents were too busy working to ferry their offspring to the gates and to pick them up again. Gabriele Boehm, 38, who started escorting her son to school after Natascha vanished, said: ‘Most mothers work around here. You can only hope every day that things will turn out OK, but there are no guarantees—we know that now, don’t we?’
Liane Pichler, 45, was upset that the authorities hadn’t seen fit to inform the mothers that another school in the area had posted a warning about a sex criminal they believed was stalking children in the area. Whether or not the suspect was Wolfgang Priklopil will now never be known.
Newspapers at the time printed the messages of hope and love that they hoped would touch a nerve in a stony-hearted man:
YVONNE: Hopefully, you will come back to us soon.
KATHARINA: I was her best friend and she told me everything.
JENNIFER: She told me that there was lots and lots of rowing in the house and that she was often sucked into them. She didn’t like that.
MARCEL: She was inventive, funny, strong, quiet—sometimes—and cheeky. And she could sometimes scratch and bite.
The children were allowed, after a time, to take her books home with them to keep as totems of the pal they lost. For a long while her seat was left empty in school, a reminder that they never stopped thinking of her. But as the years passed and her pals grew up, it was occupied by other pupils as the memory of her, inevitably, faded.
‘We pray each evening for Natascha,’ said her form teacher Susanne Broneder, who added that a planned excursion for the pupils to see Amy and the Wild Geese had to be cancelled because her chums were too upset at her vanishing.
The headmaster back then, Guenter Willner, said the only way to carry on was to believe in a happy ending. He thought that if his pupils believed Natascha had gone for ever, many of them would have been unable to cope.
Numerous children came forward to say they had seen her on the morning she went missing. Bettina Hoffmann, 12, said she saw her ‘not more than 100 metres from the school gates. She was heading in the direction of the school.’ But Bettina had not seen what happened next.
Twenty-one children, her school classmates, went off to a local church for a special prayer service. Their prayers went unanswered for over eight long years.
Well-wishers left flowers at the door of Natascha’s flat, while others who had lost children, through illness, accident or murder, wrote letters of condolence to Ludwig and Brigitta. None of them could know she was alive, well, and beginning her slow metamorphosis from victim to victor in a cellar three metres below ground just a few short miles from the old bedroom which her mother visited every day to draw strength from her spirit.
In 2002 Frau Sirny admitted in an interview with the Austrian magazine Woman that she knew, for certain people, she was a suspect. The interview went thus:
The Sonderkommision (SOKO) has recently reopened the Natascha case. That Frau Sirny, Natascha’s mother, is one of the prime suspects now, does not shock her. That she was informed about these new investigations through Teletext, however, did surprise Frau Sirny, as she tells us in the WOMAN interview:
Woman: How were you informed about the recent renewed investigation by the police into the disappearance of your daughter?
Frau Sirny: I was sitting in my car, when my cell phone rang. My sister-in-law informed me that she had just read the news on Teletext.
Woman: Have the investigators established contact with you yet?
Frau Sirny: No, and that is precisely what makes me so angry. They did not think it was worth the effort to inform me about this. I called at the Bundeskriminalamt several times…
Woman: What did they tell you?
Frau Sirny: Nothing. Because none of the gentlemen was able to talk to me. I asked them to call me back, but am still waiting!
Woman: What do you feel about this?
Frau Sirny: It’s not acceptable, that they just leave me standing in the rain, that they have me run after them.
Woman: There are plans to search for your daughter at a lake near Vienna. What do you think about that?
Frau Sirny: If they want to dig, let them dig. If they think they are going to find something there…
Woman: But shouldn’t you be relieved that everything is checked again? Relieved to possibly find out what really happened to Natascha?
Frau Sirny: Yes, actually I should. Maybe they overlooked something back then.
Woman: Before they find the offender, everyon
e who was close to the victim is under suspicion from the investigators. Therefore also you, as Natascha’s mother. How do you handle this?
Frau Sirny: What am I supposed to do, if they suspect me again? I have to accept that. I will definitely cooperate.
Woman: The owner of the lake is a friend of yours. What does he say about these planned diggings?
Frau Sirny: He said they should just go ahead and dig…
Woman: Have you ever had any ideas about what might have happened?
Frau Sirny: No. Never!
Police later had to admit that Frau Sirny had been dropped as a suspect in the case.
Time passed, the seasons blending into one. Ludwig Koch lost his businesses one by one as he ploughed money and time into trying to find his daughter, prowling the streets late at night, scrutinising the waifs outside the city’s West Station to see if she was among them, looking at the young hookers in the red-light district, asking anyone and everyone to look at the photo of Natascha he carried around with him.
‘Have you seen this little girl?’ he would ask. ‘Have you seen her with anyone?’ But the strays, the junkies, the hookers, the flotsam and jetsam of urban life, answered with mute shakes of the head.
Frau Sirny, too, coped with her own private hell—first the animosity of her husband, then of people like Anneliese Glaser. Placing faith in clairvoyants gave a little comfort and hope, but only a little. Nothing could make up for the loss of her flesh and blood.
The agonies were piled on whenever headlines surfaced in another country of a child killer—and the worst pain came in 2004 when 62-year-old Michel Fourniret, the ‘Beast of France’, hit the headlines as the mass murderer of at least nine women and girls. He took some of his victims in a van similar to the one that a witness had told police she had seen someone dragging Natascha into. Frau Sirny said in an anguished interview at the time:
About three weeks ago, late one evening, when I saw a report about the arrest of this man, and found out that he frequently used a white van when he was looking for victims, I immediately thought about Natascha. And I began to pray: ‘Please not, please not, my kid cannot be one of his victims…’
I only know: there are so many things that would match up. The thing about the white van is just one of them. But in the meantime I have also found out how this killer approached his victims: that he pretended to be sick and needed help. And Natascha was always helpful: she would only have come near a stranger if she felt that her help was really needed. Then she would have surely approached him. And I don’t want to think any further: the thought that my child became victim of this beast is just awful.
Asked in the same interview if she still clung to the hope that Natascha was alive, she said: ‘I will never lose that hope, until I know, one hundred per cent, that Natascha is dead. And in my dreams it happens every now and then, that my little girl suddenly stands at the door and says: “Mommy, now I’m back.” And waking back up is so awful, because I’m back in reality, and there is the terrible uncertainty…’
If she could have known how her daughter was conducting herself in those first few hours she would have had nothing but pride in her. Natascha would later say: ‘In principle, I knew within the first couple of hours of my abduction that he was lacking something. That he had a deficit.’
She would go on to say that he had a ‘labile personality’ in contrast to what she judged a ‘healthy social environment around me—maybe not a particularly happy, but a loving family. Both my parents had assured me that they loved me. He didn’t have that. In a certain way he lacked self-assurance. And something else—security. He didn’t have that.’
A labile personality. A complex word describing a complex complaint, learned by a little girl who taught herself such things in her cellar world.
Her freedom was to the psychoanalyst’s profession what war is to armaments industries, with theories about him, her, her family and relationships piling up like wrecks at a stockcar rally. But she was closest of all to Priklopil in a hothouse environment unencumbered by other social contact. Perhaps her take on him is one that has more value than any of those ‘experts’ who would swarm around her after 23 August 2006.
A labile personality is described as manifesting itself in people who are chaotic, whose relationships are stormy, short-lived and unstable. Those who suffer from Borderline Personality Disorder often display a labile—wildly fluctuating—sense of self-worth and self-image and affect emotions they do not really feel.
Sam Vankin, an authority on such types and author of Malignant Self Love—Narcissism Revisited, said:
The main dynamic in the Borderline Personality Disorder is abandonment anxiety. Like co-dependents, Borderlines attempt to pre-empt or prevent abandonment (both real and imagined) by their nearest and dearest. They cling frantically and counterproductively to their partners, mates, spouses, friends, children, or even neighbours. This fierce attachment is coupled with idealisation and then swift and merciless devaluation of the borderline’s target.
Borderlines shift dizzyingly between dysphoria (sadness or depression) and euphoria, manic self-confidence and paralysing anxiety, irritability and indifference. This is reminiscent of the mood swings of Bipolar Disorder patients. But Borderlines are much angrier and more violent. They usually get into physical fights, throw temper tantrums, and have frightening rage attacks.
Curiously, most borderlines are women, but not all, and a woman, Wolfgang’s mother, was the single biggest influence on his life. Weak, violent, dependent, sometimes self-hating…Natascha spotted the weak spots in her kidnapper’s armour from the outset.
This would be priceless ammunition in the war of wills against Wolfgang Priklopil.
4
Life in Hell
It is unimaginable, but we must try to imagine it. We must try to place ourselves in Natascha Kampusch’s skin if we are to understand what she went through in her man-made grotto. The asthmatic wheeze of a ventilator pumping in tepid air, the light which went on early every morning and faded out each evening, the utter silence: no birdsong, no chit-chat of neighbours, no watching the vapour trails of planes high in a blue sky or hearing the friendly rustle of leaves blowing in mini tornadoes in a garden. When it was dark down there, at night, or if Priklopil had turned the light off in some temper fit, it was akin to complete sensory deprivation. It is the kind of mind-training undergone by élite soldiers to enable them to survive torture in captivity and to keep their sanity when lost in deserts or jungles. It is not meant for little ten-year-old girls thinking about cats and dolls and homework left undone. The experience compresses time: although the experience is unpleasant, if the captive has no access to timekeeping—as Natascha did not have for the first few months—time, paradoxically, seems shorter than normal time. In one test in the 1980s a subject who spent 58 days underground to gauge the effects on both psyche and body thought he had been under for just 33. But Natascha could not have known that when she awoke after her first night; nor could it have offered much comfort if she had.
Whatever the shortcomings in her upbringing, she had been schooled by her parents, like all children everywhere, to beware the bogeyman, not to accept lifts from strangers, not to talk with them outside school gates, nor take sweets from anyone offering them. Kindly policemen, either too fat or too old to pound the beat any longer, had come to her school to hammer the same message home. Now, on 3 March 1998, as the light in her cell came on at 7 a.m., she realised all the nightmares had come at once. It is testament to an incredible will allied to a keen intelligence that she rallied, marshalled the forces of resolve and said to herself: this will not beat me. I will survive.
If she emerged as a remarkable young woman, it was because she went in there as a remarkable young girl.
Later she would be asked if she cursed the fate that put her, rather than anyone else, three metres below the ground. She replied: ‘No! Straight after the kidnapping I asked myself what I did wrong. I asked myself if I had done
anything to the Lord God. I was seriously in despair. I had claustrophobic feelings from that tiny room and it was really harrowing. And I had no idea what was going to happen to me; whether they would kill me, what they would do with me. At the beginning I thought there were many offenders.’
But there was only one. At the time of writing the police have just finished their lengthy investigation of the crime scene. They used sniffer dogs and, after pumping in artificial fog in a bid to find other possible hiding-places for other potential victims, could find no other secret chambers or hidden, deceased girls. They dragged numerous bags of earth away from the site and continue to pore over the ancient, Commodore computer he used (which wasn’t connected to the Internet) to see if its relatively primitive memory holds any secrets of his plan or of what he might have subjected Natascha to over the years. Or if he had an accomplice at any time for his diabolical scheme.
Yet while detectives believe that he may have had contacts with other perverts, they are certain he acted alone in the kidnap and only had one victim—Natascha. Heat-seeking sensors and rods pushed deep into the earth around the property have turned up no unmarked graves.
‘Gebieter,’ he said to her during their first meeting after she was taken to the clandestine jail. ‘That is what I want you to call me.’ ‘Gebieter’ is German for master, and it shows that from then on Wolfgang Priklopil intended to shed the persona of the seven-stone weakling who always got sand kicked in his face. He was to be in charge in a way that he had never been in charge of his life. But Natascha never once bowed to his wish.
Criminal psychologist Thomas Mueller claims he was ‘a high-grade sadistic perpetrator, who wanted complete control over his prisoner. He wanted the power of life and death over her.’ Despite the books of fairy stories he bought, the videos he would later let her watch, the clothes he chose, the toiletries, cutlery and food, he was staking his claim to superiority.
