She has a sense of humour, that's the first surprise. Her manager, the third
in two years, has spent months preparing us for the worst. Not long ago,
she'd get through a whole day without uttering two words. Things are better
now but she has her whims, her caprices. The question “Did you ever feel
lonely” once sent her marching off a television set. That's what she does
when she doesn't like a question. If she doesn't like you, and this is
apparently especially liable if you are a woman, it's “no comment” five
times in a row.
Somehow, we're on the subject of advertising. “Nobody's asked me to appear in
a commercial,” Natascha Kampusch says in her precise, elevated German. “But
I assume that advertising companies are looking for people who embody
something positive. And what could I advertise after eight years in a
cellar? Some sort of special dry cement mix?” Her manager laughs the long
laugh of a man who is relieved that finally something is going according to
plan. Kampusch just sits there, composed, smiling secretively to herself and
sipping daintily at a cup of tea.
For two years now we have followed the Natascha Kampusch story in all its
strange permutations. We've interviewed every single person connected to the
case since she fled the home that she shared under duress with Wolfgang
Priklopil, an introverted loner who abducted her when she was 10.
Kampusch finally agreed to speak to this paper, the first time that she's
agreed to speak to anyone without copy approval or a list of pre-agreed
questions, in an attempt to retrieve her besmirched image from the tabloids
that, with time, have dumped their sentimental five-page spreads and stuck
in the knife. "Cellar Girl Had Romp With Perv" was one memorable
headline in The Sun. Her take is that they can't stand a woman who refuses
to be a victim. She finds it outrageous that people try to blackmail her so
often. Certain parts of the media have alleged the existence of
sadomasochistic pictures, which they have threatened to print unless she
agrees to an interview. She is adamant: “Those pictures don't exist.” Our
meeting takes place around an enormous conference table on the top floor of
the Viennese converted townhouse where Kampusch keeps an office. She's
straightened her hair for the photographer and put on some make-up, “so I
don't look so pale”.
She is still blonde but she's filled out. Not much more than 5ft 2in (1.57m)
and feminine, if not exactly provocative, in tight black trousers, matching
boots and a moderately low-cut top over which she has slung a purple
embroidered scarf. “People assume that I'm rich because I'm not shabbily
dressed,” she complains, “I'm not rich!” She flashes the watch that her
mother bought for her at Esprit. “People don't realise that they'd look
better too if they went to the hairdresser once in a while. Why not buy your
clothes from a proper store instead of wearing dreadful leggings with
enormous trainers? Change your outlook on life. It has nothing to do with
wealth.”
Her voice is high and melodious and seems to belong to someone much younger.
But she looks as she says she feels, somewhat “ageless, neither young nor
old, sort of timeless”. As if she's been beamed to earth. She admits that
she's often baffled by the habits of her peers. Nightclubs, for example.
What are they for? “I don't like loud badly lit bars where most
conversations are shallow and the person you're talking to is under the
influence of alcohol. They're a waste of time, really.”
Kampusch has undergone several widely televised incarnations since she arrived
at a local police station on August 23, 2006, covered in blankets - her way
of foiling the dozen or so expectant photographers. It shows just how media
savvy she was, even then. The first picture gave away frustratingly little:
two legs sticking out from beneath the hem of an orange dress. Eleven days
later, on September 6 Kampusch agreed to be interviewed on prime-time
television, a lilac scarf wrapped around her head, her skin pale, her eyes
so damaged by lack of sunlight that she kept them mostly shut, her body so
undernourished that she weighed just 48kg.
She was very composed and striking enough for the German-speaking public to
compare her to the Sixties screen idol Romy Schneider. Her diction was
something else, so strangely refined it belonged in another era, a million
miles away from her working-class roots in Donaustadt, the suburb of Vienna
where she lived as a child of divorced parents. And her escape and
Priklopil's subsequent suicide (she only ever refers to him as “Mr
Priklopil”) were so pleasing in their neatness and symmetry - the perfect
crime is foiled, the perfect girl emerges from its wreckage - that overnight
she became a star.
In the past, we have caught glimpses of her as she darted in, then out, then
irresistibly back in to the public eye. Which is what she's like in real
life: cautious, then suddenly passionate, then withdrawn again, but always
eloquent and precise. Never sloppy. A little unconventional and very
analytical in her thinking, unusually and emphatically moral but definitely
not mad, unless you count the fact that she still owns Priklopil's house -
awarded to her as compensation by the courts - and doesn't intend to sell
it. Wouldn't she like to see it demolished like the homes of Jeffrey Dahmer
or Fred and Rosemary West? Draw a line under the whole thing? “I don't want
to see it blown up, no.” Nor can she imagine living there. And tenants are
out of the question. The house is obviously on hold.
Natascha Kampusch is an extremely self-contained person, although few people
wouldn't instantly recognise her on television. She likes her privacy and
has gained a reputation for irritability and litigiousness. She was
profoundly disappointed when a court ruled that she had become a person of
public interest, and loathed it even more when a tabloid newspaper published
pictures of her in a bar, hanging off a man who was later identified as the
son of her lawyer. She hates it when she's recognised in the street or,
worse, touched by passers-by. Most people who meet her can't seem to get it
through their heads that she's a real person. Because of her past, even the
smell of others can be overwhelming. “I am not Paris Hilton,” she has said
more than once.
And yet she can't seem to stay away from the media. When the Josef Fritzl case
broke in April, she was ready to hold forth on its ramifications. And barely
two months later, she's hosting her own chat show, Natascha Meets... Last
night, the first in the series, showed Kampusch deep in conversation with
Niki Lauda, the Austrian car-racer-turned-aviation-entrepreneur, over a
glass of orange juice. All very intimate - I'll tell you my problems if you
tell me yours - although one has the feeling that she's too introverted to
command the audience in the long term.
Her ambition is to meet the Queen. “I'd really like to interview the Queen
because she took on a lot of responsibility at a very young age. And that's
very interesting for me. I see there are a couple of parallels.” If the
Queen says no, Sir Paul McCartney is No 2 on her list because the Beatles
are her favourite band. Odd choice of career for a former abductee,
television host. Doesn't she want to sink into the background, nurse her
wounds? She is surrounded by an almost permanent entourage of therapists,
psychiatrists, media advisers and private tutors to help her to do just
that. She's terribly busy filling in the gaps in her past. This leaves
little space for relationships. Even the word “friendship” still resists
definition, she says. “I don't have time to build a relationship right now.
There's also a safety risk. Psychologically as well as literally - if I put
my trust in a person who then disappoints me, I'll be doubly disappointed.
From a practical point of view, and from deep within my heart, I don't want
to put myself through that.”
The chat show series is a stop gap: “I'm not sure if that would be enough for
me to decide on a career in the media.” She's only 20 and there's so much to
catch up on.She draws, paints, takes photographs (her favourite is of the
Moon in daylight) - she's got her charity to set up [its purpose has yet to
be defined], to which people have already donated. “A lot of people think
that I've made empty promises with my charity, but people should just wait.
I'm not a projection screen for other people's wishes, I'm just a human
being.” As one might expect, she's a passionate reader: philosophy, novels,
medicine - she soaks it all up with an almost photographic memory.
“She's a sponge,” says her manager admiringly. It's not enough to know, she
needs to know why. “I have noticed that names in the Harry Potter books have
multiple meanings,” she says. Can we explain Albus Dumbledore's name,
perhaps with her fledgling English she's missed some crucial nuance? “Albus
is wisdom and Dumbledore, I think, may imply ‘folly'? What do you think it
means? Doesn't ‘dumb' translate as foolish? It could be something to do with
opening the doors into something. Someone that is foolish and unreasonable
but simultaneously very wise...” So detailed is her knowledge on the works
of J.K.Rowling it seems probable that, in a rare fit of generosity,
Priklopil bought Kampusch at least one volume of Harry Potter. Kampusch
won't confirm this and temporarily creeps back into her shell.
The sick joke that did the rounds after her escape held that Priklopil did a
better job of bringing her up than most parents. Kampusch neither smokes nor
drinks, she is of above-average intelligence and is thoughtful and
articulate. But the way she describes him, it's doubtful that she imported
many of his ideas: “I am really someone who sees things from a philosophical
point of view and who looks at everything from an intellectual perspective,
and he was somebody who was driven more by his emotions and his feelings,
which manifested itself in a love of order and a pedantry.”
Does she think he singled her out? She's not sure, although experts she has
talked to seem to think that he must have. Priklopil was a reclusive
technician with only two friends. His crime was certainly premeditated: the
nuclear bunker under his house in which he forced her to live was already
decked out by the time he kidnapped her. “Most of all he wanted someone who
wouldn't run away. So, a child because it can't defend itself, which he
locked up so it couldn't run away. He wanted someone who engaged only with
him, who was guaranteed never to betray or harm him. He just didn't want to
leave the womb or be a grown-up, that's the feeling I have. He had this
fantasy that if you force this feeling of security, you can just create love
or affection, that it just materialises somehow - like some people believe
that real love can bloom from an arranged marriage. It could happen but it
also might not.” In this case it didn't.
After six months in the cellar she was given occasional access to the upper
floors of the house, where she was made to cook and clean almost constantly.
His mother has recently alleged that subtle changes in his home led her to
believe that her son had a girlfriend: two pillows on his bed, tiny cactus
plants in the living room, the smell of cooking in the kitchen, when she
knew that her son never cooked.
And we know that, over time, Priklopil would relinquish his grip on Kampusch -
she accompanied him on a shopping trip, they even skied together. It's
almost inconceivable that she didn't run away. At first she denied the
skiing trip, then said that she had feared violent retaliation from
Priklopil if she spoke out.
The Fritzl case has made her experience relevant again and she admits to
feeling “relieved” when the story broke. There are parallels she thinks.
Priklopil's mother “was blind with mother-love. It was the same with Josef
Fritzl. He idolised his mother to an abnormal degree and that's what my
abductor was like. He was very attached to his mother. Before she came over
to tidy up I'd have to clean the whole house so that she thought he was this
proper upstanding person. Regardless of what I did, he would always say, ‘My
mother does it better'.”
We move on to other subjects, her favourite being TV. Kampusch says that she
found her moral bearings by watching Star Trek. “I watched a lot of Star
Trek and you have a complete philosophy of life in there, even if it's a bit
idiotic and very much of its time. It had this kind of ethical and moral
dimension, which I learnt from. For example, when you visit another planet
you don't question the practices of other civilisations and you don't
interfere - you shouldn't get involved.
“I mean, the first episodes with Captain Kirk were somehow quite misogynistic
but quite hedonistic, too. Lieutenant Uhura sat there in her miniskirt and
other female crew were portrayed as secretaries. It really was a reflection
of how things were at the time. And then in the Eighties with The Next
Generation, the overall Star Trek, you see this conflict between the
Russians and the Americans. These Romulans and the Cold War. It's amazing,
isn't it, that you can read something political into such banal light
entertainment?”
It was through TV that she decided to cover herself with blankets when she
escaped. It taught her the value of images. And the value of secrets. Before
she got away she had promised herself never to reveal the whole truth.
Instead she sees her life story as a “puzzle”, pieces of which she imparts
to her therapists, her counsellor, her friends or journalists. “For me, it's
important that the story doesn't take on a life of its own. I've seen how
people read things into this whole story. And if I now came out with the
truth, or my truth, if I now described what really happened, nobody would
believe me either. People would embellish the truth or modify it to fit
their purposes.”
One can't help but think that this is a woman who has spent her whole life
being mistreated. By Priklopil; by the police, who were accused of
mishandling the investigation and then covering up their failure to follow
up vital clues that might have led to Kampusch's early release; by her
mother, Brigitta Sirny, who took back her married name Kampusch when she
wrote a biography of her life last year, in which she revealed many private
details about her daughter; and by her father, Ludwig Koch, who has accepted
money for interviews and publicly speculates about things his daughter would
prefer him not to. Her relationship with her parents has “not changed in
itself. But the way I interact with them has”.
The lacunae in her story regularly sends parents, journalists, crime-writers
and even members of the Austrian judiciary into a speculative frenzy. Now a
retired judge, Martin Wabl, is aching to prove that Kampusch's mother was
involved in the kidnapping. Kampusch dismisses Wabl as “a conspiracy
theorist. The kind of person who is totally convinced that Elvis Presley is
alive and that aliens exist”, and humiliated him when the case came to
court. Who else had been home on the day of her kidnapping? he asked her.
“Our two cats,” she replied. Feelings have cooled, too, in the direction of
Priklopil's mother, who last month told a journalist that she hoped that
Kampusch had in some way loved her son. “I have no contact with her. At
first I thought that it would be a good idea to meet her to help her to deal
with her bad conscience, because she hadn't noticed anything, and to help
her come to terms with her situation, because she'd not only lost her son
but she'd lost the son who she thought was a well-behaved, well-adjusted,
nice man. But I don't see it the same way. I don't really want to meet her.”
Over the past few months she has rethought her life strategy. She has decided
that she's now through with being a victim, that's why she's not content to
slink in to the background. The TV work, among other things, must carry deep
meaning for her as a symbol of freedom and the outside world - that's what
it must have stood for during her years incaptivity. She does not, she says,
“exist for other people's satisfaction”. She tries not to waste too much
time thinking about how she comes across: “I don't know if people see me as
spontaneous, or arrogant and conceited, or mentally impaired. Or the kind of
person who needs to be taken special care of, or as some sort of
incompetent, who's not worth taking seriously because she's been locked up
for eight years and has no experience of life.” So what kind of person is
she? “Well, probably a combination of all of the above.”
Those lost years have left their mark. She is prone to “vulnerability and
sadness”, she says. “I am just very sensitive, and I just need very slowly
to get used to people. I have to engage with other people's moral or ethical
perspectives and accept them, and get used to their quirks and wishes and
adapt to them. Which is difficult for me because I don't really like to get
involved. But I have to say it's interesting where some people draw their
boundaries ... the things that they're prepared to talk about, or hygiene,
or their views of the world. It's so varied, there are so many differences,
it was very difficult for me at the beginning.”
Is she happy? “I believe that one characteristic of being happy is that it is
not a constant state. If one were constantly happy, how would one notice the
difference when one is unhappy? In that sense, I can say that I am happy,
among other things.” Will there come a day when she is famous for something
other than having been locked in a cellar for eight years? “It will be a day
where something so spectacular happens that it will overshadow the past.
Something that leaves such a deep impression and renders the past
meaningless and irrelevant.” It is a noble ambition and maybe just
achievable.
