Girl in the Cellar

by Allan Hall

  This was the moment he had waited for, had rehearsed in his mind a million times for the sexual frisson it gave him. Master! Ruler of a strange world with a population of two. It was a time to cherish and, while he always celebrated birthdays and Christmas with Natascha, in his mind the best anniversary of all would remain that of the day he acted, finally acted, and brought her into his world. In fact, made her his world.

  Aside from nearly severing his finger in the steel trap door when he had first locked her inside the dungeon, this was his first mistake. Natascha was a wilful girl in freedom: if anything, in captivity, she became even more so. In spite of his size and the situation he had forced Natascha into—his complete control over her movements, her total severance from her family—if he had dreamed of a pliable beauty for his secret room he could not have been more wrong. In devoting himself to his Pygmalion-style task, to make her love him, he had embarked on the road to his own destruction. She was not the obedient wallflower of his sick dreams, as he would soon learn.

  Naturally, there was terror instilled into her, particularly in those first hours and days. She fought the horrors that jostled for space in her mind, stricken with anxiety that she would run out of water or air or food. She feared that he might become involved in a road accident and not be able to come and rescue her; the precise theme of a story in a Pan Book of Horror Stories from the 1970s in which a hapless, cellar-bound female kidnap victim is reduced to a rat-eating, half-mad skeleton after her captor ends up in hospital for six months after a road crash.

  ‘When he was going out of the house I would always wonder: how long would he stay there—hours? The whole day? The thought that something could happen to him…an accident, a heart attack. Then I would never, ever get out. How long would the ventilator last? Longer than I would?’

  Someone else in her situation might have said to themselves: ‘If it makes him feel good to be called master, then why not?’ But not Natascha. She steadfastly refused to bend to his wishes.

  Subservient she may have been: sugar, she would tell police later, always gets you more than vinegar, no matter what the situation. But beg? Not Natascha Kampusch’s style.

  Paying lip-service to his grandiose ideal of himself was a far cry from bending her will to him. That she refused to do from day one. That is why she would later say that everything that went on between them was voluntary. That is why she remains convinced he never broke her. ‘I was always the stronger one,’ she said. ‘I think he had a very bad guilty conscience, but massively tried to repress it and deny it. That shows in itself that he felt guilty.’

  So they embarked together on this unnatural journey, one which would consume the rest of her childhood, her puberty and some of her young adult life before it ended. They forged the accommodation which fulfilled his fantasy and allowed Natascha her small victories which, ultimately, added up to a great many.

  For the first six months he never let her out of her prison. She had books—the fairy stories, mostly, even though Natascha had long outgrown those before she fell into his clutches—but no TV or radio during that period. She ate, performed her bodily functions, washed, slept, cried, dreamed and grew stronger in her isolation. She saw him regularly but there have been few details from her of what they discussed. It is known that they read together and that she began to look forward to his company: when you have nothing and no one to talk to, say the experts, then ‘Stockholming’ is bound to come into effect.

  ‘Stockholming’, or Stockholm syndrome, is a psychological response sometimes seen in an abducted hostage, in which the hostage exhibits loyalty to the hostage-taker, in spite of the danger in which the hostage has been placed. Stockholm syndrome is also sometimes discussed in reference to other situations with similar tensions, such as battered person syndrome, child abuse cases, and bride kidnapping.

  The syndrome is named after the Norrmalmstorg robbery of Kreditbanken at NorrmalFrautorg, Stockholm, Sweden in which the bank robbers held bank employees hostage from 23 to 28 August 1973. In this case, the victims became emotionally attached to their victimisers, and even defended their captors after they were freed from their six-day ordeal. The term was coined by the criminologist and psychiatrist Nils Bejerot, who assisted the police during the robbery, and referred to the syndrome in a news broadcast.

  Yet what Natascha underwent, and the period she underwent it for, required a new term for a new phenomenon, and after it was all over it was called ‘Vienna syndrome’. Stockholm syndrome became a redundant phrase for a young woman who would, in many senses, start dictating the pattern of life at No. 60 Heinestrasse.

  In her curious ‘Letter to the world’, released after the maelstrom of publicity that engulfed her when she was finally free, she told of how that daily life developed:

  This was carefully regulated. Mostly it started with a joint breakfast—he was anyway not working most of the time. There was housework, reading, television, talking, cooking. That’s all there was, year in and year out, and always tied in with the fear of being lonely.

  He was not my master. I was just as strong as him, but he would, symbolically speaking, sometimes be my support and sometimes be the person who kicked me. But with me he had picked the wrong person, and we both knew that.

  Indeed, evidence that she was the ‘wrong person’ came within the first few weeks of captivity. Priklopil had installed a bell in her chamber that she was to use to call him if she wanted anything. She used it so much and so often that, in a fit of frustration, he simply ripped the thing out. Another point to Natascha.

  After that first dark night, in which she hardly slept at all, a kind of routine developed.

  I always got up very early, the lights would turn on automatically at 7 a.m. There was a certain order and structure, but there was no spring, summer, autumn or winter. Not like for the other children, who went to school, and went on holidays and went into the arms of their mothers. At night the light would not go off so precisely, but sooner or later it would get dark.

  She explained that her captor regularly brought her books of her choice: ‘At the beginning I wanted the children’s classics like Karl May, Robinson Crusoe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I was reading and reading.’ The Karl May books she particularly liked were about the Old West and the immense bond of friendship between a cowboy, Old Shatterhand, and Winnetou, an Indian brave. Like Natascha, Karl May had never travelled to America when he wrote the books. Like him, she would dream of the vast open spaces, trying to visualise them from her captivity.

  Unlikely compadres, Old Shatterhand and Winnetou. A bit like Natascha and Priklopil.

  For the first six months she was not allowed upstairs. She had to take showers in her dungeon, with a mineral water bottle with some holes in it. This was replaced by a hose with a kind of shower head attached to it. She was later allowed to take showers or baths upstairs, every week or every two weeks. She would be let out under the intense scrutiny of her captor. He would check security monitors, ensure that no one was approaching the house, and keep the blinds drawn and the shades down before leading her from the dungeon to the bathroom. He had installed special locks on the bathroom window, and there was no lock on the bathroom door, so he could burst in if he felt she was up to anything other than her ablutions.

  As soon as she was given permission to move around the house, Priklopil started bringing her video tapes; for example, episodes from Star Trek, the 1980s television series Magnum and recorded Austrian TV programmes. Police later said he was ‘very economical’ with his tapes. He had hundreds and hundreds of them, and every inch of usable tape was recorded upon, even if it was snippets of news items or advertisements after the main programme he had wanted to record was finished.

  At some point he installed a TV and radio in the dungeon. ‘So I developed myself more and more,’ said Natascha. ‘Because I was reading so much, I thought to myself, I could also start to write books, novels. I started writing in different notebooks, it wasn’t only the diary.’
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br />   Were these books about escape, about love, about imprisonment, a sort of pre-pubescent Papillon? Natascha has kept them as secret from the world as she did from Priklopil.

  While she was committing her thoughts and dreams to paper, she said Priklopil respected her privacy. She recalled that he never came into her ‘room’—she referred to it variously after her escape as her room or her dungeon—without knocking.

  The ‘master’ was reduced to acting in the manner of a servant in a remarkably short time. It was evident, too, that harming Natascha was not on the agenda. If he wanted her to love him he was prepared to do anything, and that included performing to an agenda rapidly being dictated by her.

  She went on: ‘My diary and everything I wrote belonged only to myself. He could never take a peek into it. He never got mixed up in my private things. But he intervened in a humiliating way when it came to random daily things, like the way I was supposed to wash my toothbrush and things like that. But my writings belonged to me alone. And he also never entered my room just like that, unannounced.’

  A pattern was emerging which would put Natascha, in a bizarre, but strong position. She was coping better than many adults would. Major-General Gerhard Lang, the spokesman for Austrian police on the Natascha case, reported how he had himself locked up in the dungeon for five minutes in order to try and understand how she felt during her captivity:

  I have seen a lot in my time, but this is another dimension. It is impressive how complicated it is to access, how well hidden it is and how small the actual space is, when one is inside.

  She was locked up in there for over six months before she was allowed to go out. I was there for less than five minutes and I could hardly take it. The silence, the hopelessness and the despair of the feeling of being cut off from the whole world outside. It must have been horrible.

  Imagine how a child aged ten would feel, locked up like that. She told us she was hitting on the walls with plastic bottles and screaming for help. But it took over six months before he allowed her to go up, and that was only to take a bath or use the toilet.

  Professor Max Friedrich, Natascha’s chief psychiatric adviser, said: ‘She was subject to isolation torture. That is the worst kind of torture of them all, when one is completely cut off from the world.’

  Police believe that Priklopil exerted extreme self-discipline upon himself during the early days and weeks of her captivity. He had acquired that which had tormented him, and now the question was how to ‘enjoy’ it.

  Did he rape her? She has not commented on any sexual liaison, and police and the experts surrounding her have divided opinions.

  The first policewoman she had contact with after regaining her freedom spoke of ‘sexual abuse’.

  Natascha refuses to answer any questions regarding ‘intimacy’—a stance which in itself indicates that intimacy there was. In one of her enigmatic replies to police interrogators in an interview later printed by Austria’s News Magazine, she said: ‘Wolfi was no sex beast and neither was I. We had a tender relationship.’

  But the question of the physical side of this relationship, forged by circumstance and developed by her own forceful character, will not go away. Natascha, who surrounded herself with lawyers immediately after her breakout, threatens to sue newspapers worldwide who call her a ‘sex slave’, even though she refuses to say what happened between them. The Austrian media have quoted several police sources saying it was ‘inevitable’ that she was abused, although she refuses to admit or deny that any sexual relationship took place.

  If she had sexual contact with him before she was sixteen, then he was guilty of breaking the laws of Austria and most other western nations. If any occurred after she was sixteen, and it was consensual, then Priklopil could only have been held to account for taking her in the first place. The way he chose to end his life, just when she began hers again, stopped a great deal of midnight oil from burning in the corridors of the Austrian justice ministry.

  This reticence on Natascha’s part muddies the water of the whole saga and her choice of words makes it hard for the world to understand how ‘tenderness’ could be applied to a man who had snatched her. Just how this tenderness was expressed, in any physical form, is a secret still locked within Natascha. She became a young woman with an incredible capacity to both understand and empathise with her captor: after she was free she even asked the media to stop writing about him, because she felt the details would upset his elderly mother.

  Tender—perhaps sometimes. Other times he could, and easily would, show the hard, calculating side that had led him to take her without compassion in the first place. ‘He told me that he was continuously calling my parents,’ she recalled. ‘They could have me back if they were ready to pay him 10 million schillings [approximately 500,000 pounds]. He showed me a piece of paper, on which he had written the telephone numbers of my mum and my dad. But he told me that neither was ever picking up. Because I was obviously not so important to them.’

  Her kidnapper started using terms such as ‘We are sitting in a boat’—a German phrase implying partnership and isolation from the rest—as well as saying things like, ‘You and me are the only ones who matter’ and ‘We belong together for ever’. They occasionally watched TV news reports about the hunt for Natascha. Sometimes she had the eerie experience of watching police officers hunting for her body in places far from the little suburban house of horrors.

  According to Natascha, over the weeks and months Priklopil tried to break her down with a mixture of violence and care. She said that she soon realised that when she was ‘good’ she would be rewarded with new books, clothes and sweets—so she tried to be ‘good’. And Priklopil set about trying to create, in his own image, the beauty he hoped she would grow into.

  He travelled to stores far from his home so as not to arouse suspicion. He bought her make-up sets and a wide range of cosmetics, tubs of Nivea face cream, and small make-up cases to keep it all in. He also brought her teen magazines so she could read how to apply lip gloss and dye her hair correctly. He had occasionally mentioned to acquaintances how hard it was to find a beautiful woman who understood him, but that he was sure that one day he would find his ‘beautiful dream woman’.

  Natascha said that the incredible sense of isolation she as a ten-year-old felt in her dungeon actually led her to look forward to Priklopil’s visits.

  At the beginning I didn’t know what was worse: when he was with me or when I was alone. I only came to an arrangement with Priklopil because I was afraid of being lonely. When I was good with him, he spent a lot of time with me; when not, then I had to be alone in my room. If I couldn’t have gone into the house now and then, where I could move, I don’t know, maybe I would have gone crazy.

  Priklopil had never had a girlfriend in his life, let alone a child. Intuitively, however, he seemed to know how to become a father figure to Natascha, how to exploit her vulnerability in order to underwrite and support his immorality.

  She explained how the kidnapper slowly earned her trust by becoming this authority figure, teaching her geography and history and reading girls’ books and adventure stories with her. She added that ‘he brought me books to read and I asked him totally normal children’s questions’ about foreign countries and animals, which he reportedly always answered.

  Her kidnapper also read her fairy stories about princesses who were rescued by noble knights as a metaphor for their life together. He claimed to be the only one who really cared about her. It was a not-so-subtle attempt at brainwashing, at manipulating a mind still forming and susceptible to adult influences. Yet it almost seems as if she let him have just as much influence as she wanted to give. She wanted to remain in control. By seeing with the crystal clarity of a child’s eye early on how flawed he was, she was able to manipulate him later to the point where they lived a seemingly normal life.

  When, after the ‘long time’ of isolation, Priklopil started taking Natascha out of her prison, and upstairs into his house, s
he repaid the privilege of being let out by doing what he asked, which was household chores, cooking, cleaning. They would eat together and sometimes she was allowed to watch a film with him. He would tell her stories about his childhood and show her photos of his mother. Police have said the Priklopil clan was a family addicted to the camera: dozens of albums containing hundreds of snapshots of Wolfgang, his father, grandparents, mother, cousins, aunts and family acquaintances were found at his house.

  These used to be the centrepiece of a ritual he always played out with Waltraud whenever she came to stay, looking back at times past instead of to future happiness. Now it was Natascha’s turn to share them, and in knowing him, hoped Priklopil, she would come to love him.

  Apart from the photograph-gazing sessions, which often went on for hours, he would try other, clumsier tactics in a bid to divorce her thoughts from her family. He would sometimes bring out a newspaper report about the kidnapping and its aftermath, saying: ‘Look, they are still writing about us,’ and then following it up by saying her parents had given up on her. Translation: I am all you have.

  But that was untrue: in the surreal playing-house existence that life became at No. 60 Heinestrasse, Natascha always had so much more. She had parents she loved, cats, a life. It was he who always had so much more to lose than her, and she knew it:

  I wasn’t actually lonely. In my heart I had my family. And I always had happy memories. I thought about all the things I was missing out on. My first boyfriend, everything. I tried, for example, to be better than all the people on the outside, or at least be the same as them. Especially when it came to schooling. I had the feeling that I was missing out on something big. That I lacked something. And I always wanted to change that. That’s why I tried to gather knowledge and to educate myself. And to teach myself skills. For example, I taught myself how to knit.