Girl in the Cellar

by Allan Hall

  Some long-term prisoners use the time of their incarceration to hone their bodies: Natascha chose to train her mind. It was an extraordinary feat, say the experts, to on the one hand be living in fear of someone who has taken you away from your family, and on the other be able to compartmentalise that trauma so that learning and knowledge can be absorbed on a daily basis and with a high degree of competency.

  Some 1,400 days into this bizarre life, Priklopil bestowed upon her what he obviously thought was a great honour—she could call him by the nickname that his mother and only his closest friend and business associate Ernst Holzapfel knew him by. As she put it: ‘After around four years he said I could call him Wolfi, because during that time we had gotten to know each other well.’

  She said: ‘At some point we started to have a very normal life together. We talked a lot and watched TV.’

  To continue his hold over Natascha as she entered her teens, Priklopil told her horror stories of the real world and backed them up with newspaper reports about alcoholics and drug addicts. He told her: ‘Look, I’ve been protecting you from all these terrible things.’ Yet at the same time he concocted James Bondesque fantasies about the booby traps in the house that would be triggered to kill her if she ever tried to run away.

  Natascha feared, given the fragile state of his mind, that he was permanently heavily armed, and that if she made even the tiniest of noises, he would trigger explosions that would kill them both. Neighbours reported that he once used the expression ‘grilled to the bone’ to describe the fate of any intruders foolish enough to breach his formidable DIY security system. It is also possible, of course, that he was bluffing.

  Seen in hindsight, many aspects of life in Strasshof have the elements of a slightly dreary sitcom: her as maid cum servant cum cleaner and him as the breadwinner relaxing over his stuffed beef rolls and potato dumplings after a day at work, the pair of them probably bickering over whether to watch a comedy or a war film on telly that evening. But the undercurrent was always one of menace. He had taken her by force and she remained there under the constant threat of harm. The secret—Natascha—had to remain just that and for ever. Blinds and shutters were drawn on the sunniest of days, a sensor and video camera alerted Priklopil if anyone was about to come up the path. Then Natascha would be bundled back into her hiding-place. That was the one constant that never varied during the whole of their time together; he never lost sight of the fact that what he had done, and continued to do, was wrong, and that discovery would mean the end of everything.

  It was particularly gruelling for Natascha when Frau Priklopil came, as she did most weekends, bearing food and groceries to ‘keep my Wolfi’s strength up’. Back to the cellar she went, hearing only the faintest of sounds above but smelling the cakes Priklopil’s mother baked, the aromas wafting through the ventilation system pumping the life-giving air into her cell. These were the delicacies she would be allowed to eat after his mother had gone. Priklopil risked visits down to her at night, after his mother had gone to bed, but never during the day.

  Psychiatrist Dr Haller, who has been following ‘this most fascinating’ of cases, said that the young woman did not just see her kidnapper in a negative way but indicated that there could have been a love relationship between the two. He said that the letter she wrote to the media years later revealed that Natascha was indeed not locked up in her cellar room all the time, but lived what resembles a normal life with her captor. He added: ‘Priklopil was not only the dominant and cruel kidnapper, but also a father, a friend and possibly a lover. The diversity of their relationship, which is proving so difficult to express, is probably a reason why she wants her private sphere protected at all costs.’

  This ‘diversity’ is a complex one and goes far beyond Stockholming. One British newspaper went so far as to say that Natascha became the ‘hostage from hell’. A crude label, intended to imply a swift reversal of roles.

  Despite the times he had to stuff her back in her room, who was really in charge here? She had gained enough trust from him to sit and watch movies with him, read books with him, cook and clean and perform all those housewifely duties conservative Austrian men expect from their Frauen [wives]. And she remained mentally alert and strong, teaching herself high German from a radio he installed in her dungeon, learning about far-away places on nature documentaries. Priklopil, on the other hand, just remained what he always was: a deviant creature who could only measure his self-worth by having her around.

  After she freed herself the complexity of her character was assessed by Professor Ernst Berger, who was put in charge of co-ordinating Natascha’s socio-psychiatric team. He said: ‘The public have a one-dimensional image of Fraulein Kampusch and I realise that the complexity of a person is difficult to understand for most people. But like others, she has also got two and more sides to her personality. On the one hand she is immensely strong and very much in control of what is happening around her, but on the other she is quite weak and very vulnerable.’

  Everything she is now, he said, is as a result of her time in that windowless void of her dungeon and playing housemaid for Priklopil. He went on:

  Some aspects of her personality are very infantile. For example, she told me she wanted to live in an apartment with a security guard at the gate and a security camera system.

  It is a bit unusual for a kidnapping victim to be keen on appearing in the media after her ordeal, but you have to understand that the media were her only contact with the outside world.

  During the time of her captivity she only received input from Herr Priklopil and from the media he allowed her access to. So in a way, those were her two eyes that she saw the outside world with. It is therefore no wonder that she has a special relationship with the media.

  Of course, there is a certain narcissistic component in her desire to appear in public, but that is probably part of a defence mechanism. As we know from Anna Freud, if one individual defence mechanism becomes too independent and gets out of control, it could lead to psychological anomalies.

  So far we have not had any evidence that Fraulein Kampusch suffered actual physical violence, she did not speak about beatings and she had no traces of it on her body. There were some blue spots on her legs, but they were not a result of violence.

  However, she did tell us about three forms of torture she was subjected to: hunger, light and air. The kidnapper had control over her food intake, he controlled the light in her living space, and also the ventilation, the amount of air in her room.

  These forms of torture also have a somatic aspect, for an example the hunger torture, and in that sense one could say that she did suffer physical torture. Fraulein Kampusch, however, lived in some kind of union with Herr Priklopil. We know about their occasional trips to the shops, we also know about the one-day skiing holiday. She also helped him renovate and decorate an apartment he wanted to let. She painted the walls and helped him with his work. They also went shopping for building materials together and picked some of the items. At home, in his house, she would cook and do the housework. In a way she had the duties of a housewife. He told her he would kill anyone who would try to help her escape, and this was blocking her thoughts about escape.

  Despite the apparent normality of the grotesquely abnormal situation, Natascha insists that she first formulated plans for escaping when she was just twelve: ‘By the age of twelve, or around that age, I started dreaming about breaking out of my prison…But I could not risk anything. He suffered badly from paranoia and was chronically mistrustful. A failed escape attempt would have meant that I would never be able to leave my dungeon. I had to gradually win his confidence.

  ‘At the age of twelve I basically promised myself that I would escape. I told myself, my “I”, that I would escape, and never abandon any thoughts about escaping.’

  Asked how she coped with loneliness, she said: ‘I had no loneliness. I had hope and believed in a future…I thought about my family during the whole time. For them the situati
on was even worse than for me. They believed I was dead. But I knew they were alive and fading away because of worries about me. At this time I was happy to be able to use my childhood memories as a way to freedom.’

  Of her captivity, she said: ‘Sometimes I dreamt of chopping his head off, if I only had an axe. Obviously I would then reject all that because I can’t look at blood and I would never want to kill a person. I continuously looked for logistical approaches to a solution. First the escape, and then whatever was to come next. Was I simply to run into the streets of Strasshof, screaming, going to the neighbours?’ Asked if Priklopil had threatened her, Kampusch said: ‘Yes, but before, I didn’t have any fear. I am freedom-loving and for me death was the final freedom, the release from him. I knew that he would kill himself.’

  As this strange life continued, the outside world passed her by. In February 2000, in Austria, a right-wing party led by bogeyman politician Joerg Haider entered a power-sharing government. On the streets of downtown Vienna, a few short miles away, protestors clashed with police, and the world’s opprobrium rained down on the country. In November of the same year 155 skiers lost their lives on the funicular railway fire at the ski resort of Kaprun. Both events requiring massive resources of police manpower: both events that eclipsed a long-lost little girl who hardened detectives and child charity workers were now convinced was dead.

  One year previously, Natascha was still in her media blackout phase, so she never heard or saw the 1999 broadcasts on radio and TV shows by 61-year-old popular clairvoyant Rosalinde Haller, who said she could feel ‘the energy of Natascha’. She went on: ‘Already back then I suggested that she was in the north-east of Vienna, past the pond for bathing in Hirschstetten. I saw the kidnapper as a slim man, around 40 years old,’ says Haller, who had already offered her help at the mining disaster in Lassing 1999, and who ‘saw’ the tsunamis that devastated parts of the world on Boxing Day 2004 in her book published five years earlier. Natascha was north of Vienna, but such vagueness triggered no new police momentum to try to find her.

  At some point in 2000 Priklopil allowed Natascha limited access to papers, TV and radio. Life on the outside came to be viewed through the prism of what Priklopil wanted her to see and hear. As well as being her gaoler, he acted as censor. But Natascha was hardly the kind of person interested in frivolity. She liked listening to serious news programmes on her radio and watching nature documentaries. She recalled: ‘For the first two years I didn’t see the news. I was just scared. Then I got a radio, and I could hear the Austrian news again. It was quite emotional really.

  ‘Sometimes I would get a weekly newspaper. He read it, then I would read it. He had control of everything I did. He checked I hadn’t left any messages on the newspaper or anything like that.’ Checked so that when he threw it away, no garbage worker might find a clue as to what he kept in his cellar.

  Although Hollywood films fascinated her, she found articles and programmes about the private lives of the stars prurient and of no concern to anyone but themselves: a yardstick she would apply to the media and herself when the long confinement finally ended.

  In the only TV interview she gave shortly after her breakout Natascha gave another clue to the slowly changing nature of the captor-captive relationship at No. 60 Heinestrasse. She told how she insisted that Priklopil shower her with Easter eggs, Christmas and birthday presents, saying:

  I forced him to celebrate those days with me. Other children or young people can buy things for themselves: I obviously could not. And he was obviously thinking that he would give me at least some kind of compensation.

  Every once in a while he even in some way suggested how I could escape, as if he wanted it. I kept telling myself to escape, to do something. I told him, ‘It’s not the right thing what you are doing. The police are out looking for me.’ I always felt like a poor chicken in a hen house. You saw how small my cell was. It was a place to despair.

  The desperate need to control, to dominate, married to his innate animal instinct that she would bolt if he let her outside, meant that the touchy-feely life of watching Star Trek together, eating meals that she had learned to cook from books he bought for her, washing, tidying, cleaning, sewing, preparing shopping lists for the food she would cook that evening, ended each day with a return to the dungeon and the slamming shut of the impenetrable steel door.

  One side-effect of this housebound existence was to reduce the effectiveness of Natascha’s immune system. Because she was not exposed to the everyday germs and viruses carried around by people, this would hit her hard when she was finally free. She also felt she suffered some kind of heart problems during her captivity, as she later said:

  I also had problems with my heart one day; it was not all that great. I had all sorts of symptoms such as tachycardia, cardiac flutter, heart rhythm disturbances. Meaning, it would suddenly stop and then go on pumping again. I got dizzy, at one point I could not see anything and everything disappeared. It was probably caused by the constant lack of nutrition.

  But how was I supposed to have a doctor in my dungeon? I know it was all a result of the fact that I got too little food to eat.

  When asked to elaborate on her heart problems, she said: ‘I didn’t receive any treatment; he only kept annoying me and giving me grief and had me carrying bins full of earth.’

  The controlling of her by controlling her food is an interesting aspect of her confinement and one that seems to contradict the otherwise cosy aspects of their time together.

  During my captivity I was starved very often. And I know about everything that comes with it: circulatory problems, concentration difficulties. You are only able to have the most primitive thoughts. You cannot focus on anything. Every sound, every scratch is exhausting and painful. I can well imagine that these people must go through unbelievable suffering.

  We always make out that we are so clever, but if we didn’t get all the food we do, then we would be stupid too. You just cannot think when you’ve got nothing to eat.

  She says he literally starved her—but then says she prepared their dinners, which surely must mean she could have scarfed down food when he wasn’t looking. She says she was allowed to eat the cakes that his mother baked on her weekend trips. She had her own fridge with its own comestibles in it and, as she was capable of teaching herself high German, handicrafts, science and other subjects, it seems unthinkable that she would not have also been able to learn what kind of nutrition she needed and to get it from him: after all, she wheedled most other concessions from him, including, eventually, the right to venture outside. Could she not have asked for, and got, more than the tinned and frozen foods that she has since told investigators they lived on?

  That Priklopil aided her in her schooling cannot be denied. Superintendent Sabine Freudenberger was the first to speak with Natascha after she freed herself. She said: ‘Natascha has a huge vocabulary; the kidnapper taught her, gave her books. He also told her that he had chosen her. If he hadn’t taken her on that day, he would have caught her another day.’

  It was only in 2006 that Priklopil decided to grant Natascha the ultimate concession, day-release from his ordered and closed universe into an outside world that he had for so long painted bleaker than a starless sky. Priklopil had reached a stage in his disturbed mind where he considered Natascha to be a ‘proper’ girlfriend.

  It was the beginning of the end of everything.

  The parallels between the John Fowles novel The Collector and Natascha’s situation have been mentioned before and, at the time of writing, police confirm that they are still trawling through Priklopil’s possessions to see if he read this book or used it as any kind of blueprint for what he did. Even as Priklopil prepared to step out into the real world with Natascha—the world he had deliberately retreated from in order to enjoy his illicit life with his captive—the thoughts that his captive has mirror exactly those of Miranda Grey in the Fowles book.

  Natascha says she dreamed of attacking Priklopil with
an axe, and that is the very way Fowles’s heroine Miranda attacks the nerdy, obsessive Frederick Clegg; the real girl and the fictional girl, both kept in dungeons, took on the female role of making shopping lists, and both are concerned about the plight of the starving in the world. In her diary, Fowles’s Miranda writes: ‘There is a sort of relationship between us. I make fun of him. I attack him all the time but he senses when I’m “soft”…so we slip into teasing states that are almost friendly. It’s partly because I’m so lonely…part weakness, part cunning, and part charity. But there’s a mysterious fourth part I can’t define. It can’t be friendship. I loathe him.’

  That complexity of feeling was apparent in Natascha from the first time she spoke of her captor. Fowles said of his fictional captive: ‘Knowing somebody automatically makes you feel close to him. Even when you wish he was on another planet.’ Miranda is so lonely that she wants her captor to come to her, saying: ‘I had a feeling…of the most peculiar closeness to him—not love or attraction or sympathy in any way. But linked destiny. Like being shipwrecked on an island—a raft—together.’

  Yet when he came to Natascha, to take her out, parade her like a girlfriend so she could boost his ego the way steroids boost a weightlifter’s muscles, Priklopil was laying the foundations for the destruction of the world he cherished. He had duped himself into thinking that being bonded together by circumstance was genuine love and affection, when it was only ever an accommodation to get by. It was his Achilles heel and would, ultimately, kill him.

  It was after her eighteenth birthday on 17 February 2006 that he began taking her with him to shops and museums, having warned her that he was heavily armed and wired with explosives. If she made any attempt to attract attention, he said, he would blow both of them up.