Girl in the Cellar

Foreword

1.
A Difficult Childhood

2.
Wolfgang Priklopil: Portrait of a Monster?

3.
The Abduction of Natascha

4.
Life in Hell

5.
Trails Leading to Nowhere

Photographic Insert

6.
Limited Freedom

7.
Breakout

8.
Aftermath

Searchable Terms

About the Authors

Copyright

About the Publisher

Strasshof an der Nordbahn in Austria is not much of a town. It has a famous railway museum, a few guesthouses and a dark past that its 9,000-odd residents avoid mentioning to the tourists who pass through it. It was here, in a brutal concentration camp, that Adolf Eichmann, the supreme logistician of the Nazi Holocaust, incarcerated 21,000 Hungarian Jews towards the end of the war, hostages to a regime that had already dispatched millions in the extermination camps of Poland.

The inmates of the Strasshof camp were the lucky ones: most of them managed to survive the war as slave labourers in the factories and workshops of nearby Vienna. The locals—like most Austrians who, after 1945, tended to suffer a collective amnesia about the Nazi regime and their part in it—prefer to talk about the
Sound of Music
scenery, the beer and the flowers of this ‘garden city' suburb of the capital rather than their association with victims and tormentors. ‘It's all in the past now,' said one elderly resident shortly after his town
marched into the history books again at 12.53 p.m. on the sunny afternoon of 23 August 2006.

At that precise moment a young, pale, frightened woman, her skin ghostly white after years of being kept away from natural light, her eyes squinting and watery from the sunshine that she was so unused to, made a run from the driveway of No. 60 Heinestrasse. She dropped a Bosch vacuum cleaner that she had been using to clean the inside of a BMW car, and ran.

There were no searchlights trained on her, no border guards with guns or dogs, no razor wire or death strips to negotiate. But this was nonetheless a great escape, a triumph of the human spirit over an unspeakable cruelty that had been visited on this waiflike teenager for the previous 3,096 days.

This was the moment that a ten-year-old girl had dreamed of since she had been snatched from a street on her way to school by the kind of man parents warn their children about, a predator of the sort that Hollywood scriptwriters and imaginative novelists invent to represent evil incarnate. But what happened to her was no fiction, and there were many times during her imprisonment when she doubted whether the story of her life would ever have a happy ending.

The man who had robbed this young woman of her childhood, placing her life in suspension to satisfy the strange demons which drove him, had turned his back on her momentarily to answer a call on his mobile telephone. That distraction, that split instant in which God seemed to send a message that he had not forgotten
Natascha Kampusch, was the impetus to set her running to free herself from a captivity which by its nature and length would later, by turns, both stun and baffle the world.

She had little time. She had to use those first seconds—as the vacuum cleaner still buzzed on the floor of her captor's BMW 850i car and housewives in neighbouring homes cooked their midday meals—to put distance between her and the man who had stolen her life. The last time she had known freedom like this was as she walked to school on the blustery and wet morning of 2 March 1998, before vanishing into the clutches of the psychotic Wolfgang Priklopil.

Muscles unused to exercise, powered by the twin engines of fear and adrenalin, pumped her undernourished body as she scrambled over hedges, through back gardens and into a neighbouring street. It was a 200-metre dash that was not captured on camera. Had it been, it would have been a defining photographic moment…the moment she chose a better life. Later she would describe the decision to flee as spontaneous:

And so the officers checked with their superiors and a child who detectives had long listed as dead had been reborn as a young woman—frightened and uncertain but safe, finally freed from the clutches of a man who gave her gifts one day and threatened to kill her the next, if she should ever try to flee from him.

Hours later Wolfgang Priklopil was dead, propelled to throw himself under the wheels of a Vienna train by the impending shame and the punishment that was about to befall him. It robbed the world of the chance to see justice done in a court of law: it also meant that the complexity of their captive-captor relationship could only ever be explained by her.

And explanations are still needed. It emerged within days of this spectacular grand finale, as each jet landing at Vienna international airport brought more reporters and TV camera crews, as the fax machines of her lawyers overheated with offers of contracts for interviews, movies and TV rights spewing out on to the floor, that the relationship forged in the dungeon he constructed for her, and in the outings that he took her on, was far from the simple slave and master, victim and oppressor, good versus evil saga that a spellbound world wanted to believe.

That it was a crime of grotesque proportions to steal a child from her loved ones can never be denied. But the situation developed at No. 60 Heinestrasse during her years of captivity and gradually Natascha seems to have become to some extent the manipulator of Priklopil, to have shrewdly mastered his emotions to gain modicums
of freedom, material things and even affection. Some newspapers, perhaps unfairly, have latched on to this and portrayed her as the ‘hostage from hell'. As a result, less than four weeks after she was snatched, Austrian newspapers and Internet sites were being deluged with hate mail from people claiming she was not a victim but a willing guest—one whose DNA may have been found in his bed (someone's other than his own was discovered and it is known that he never had a girlfriend) and asking why she never tried to escape earlier despite what appear to have been repeated chances to do so.

Relationships, like life, are never simple. Things occurred under the roof of No. 60 Heinestrasse that only two people knew about, and one of them took their secrets to the grave. This book seeks to answer the questions that Natascha has so far chosen not to answer. In doing so, it passes no judgement on her. It does, however, attempt to solve the riddle of what has become the most spellbinding human interest story of the decade—we ask why him, why her, and what happened to turn a coldhearted kidnapping into something approaching a love story.

The authors have been following this story since Natascha Kampusch was first kidnapped in 1998, and we have unique access to investigators probing the intricate details of the case. So without denying the astonishing power of Natascha's own story, nor indeed her incredible personal heroism, we have been digging, and continue to dig, into areas that could yet give a new perspective to this most amazing drama.

Did her family know the kidnapper, even as a passing acquaintance? Just how unhappy was Natascha as a child? Was the cellar a place of comfort, a refuge from a home fractured by rowing and separation? What was the ‘tenderness' that bloomed between Natascha and her captor? Did she have opportunities to escape before she actually fled?

Did she, in other words, choose to remain?

It is a story quite unlike any other the world has known, with concluding details yet to be written by Natascha herself. But this work will attempt to give readers enough information to conclude for themselves if this case should be seen in black and white, or in the many shades of grey that complicate the emotions naturally triggered by what took place. Things are seldom as they seem in this incredible story.

Vienna. A city of romance, of suspense, of intrigue, history and glory. The imperial heart of the Habsburgs, the setting for Graham Greene's masterly post-war thriller
The Third Man
, the city of the not-so-blue Danube, Strauss waltzes and cream cakes that seem to make one put weight on simply by staring at them. It lures visitors from all over the world throughout the year and hosts important global organisations, such as the International Atomic Energy Agency and various UN bodies. These are what the visitor knows, the grand buildings of times past are what they see; the boiled beef and Sacher Torte cakes are what they eat. There was never a reason to spoil a holiday with a walk to the dismal 22nd district, where Vienna becomes less of a
grande dame
and more a pockmarked old hag.

The area is now called Donaustadt (Danube town), in a bid by the city authorities to sever the sinkhole housing estates and decrepit industrial areas from their old reputation, but a name change alone cannot lift the miasma of
despair that hangs over much of this area. Tower blocks where up to 25 per cent of the inhabitants are jobless, public areas where addicts shoot up and drunks brawl, fall over, fight again and fall asleep, menacing half-lit walkways of tenements where predators offer drugs or sex or both—these were not what the average visitor to Vienna wanted to put on the itinerary. But the 22nd district is on the must-see map now, destined to become a magnet for ghouls, crime enthusiasts and the merely curious. Like the ‘grassy knoll' in Dallas, where conspiracy theorists put the second gunman involved in the assassination of JFK, or the underpass in Paris where Princess Diana died, it generates its own aura for a world spellbound by what happened to a little girl who grew up here. Taxis regularly come to the Rennbahnweg estate and pull up outside apartment block No. 38, that houses flat No. 18. The driver winds down the window and points, and his passengers stare, following his finger as it traces an arc in the sky towards the seventh floor. Sometimes they just click a camera; sometimes they step outside to sniff the air, clamber back inside and are gone, their curiosity sated. Now they can tell their friends, when poring over the holiday snaps, ‘That's where she lived, you know.'

This is the touchstone of victimhood, the place where Natascha Kampusch was born on 17 February 1988 and grew up to fulfil her peculiar, unique appointment with history.

Her home was part of one of the huge social housing blocks built by the left-wing government of Vienna in the post-war reconstruction years. The building has more
than 2,400 apartments and 8,000 residents. The area she ended up in, by contrast, was designed as a garden suburb for the city's well-to-do.

 

The story of Natascha could begin with the Brothers Grimm formula of ‘Once upon a time', because, once upon a time, life was good for her father and mother. Ludwig Koch, a 24-year-old master baker—thrifty, industrious, solid, respectable—fell in love with attractive divorcee Brigitta Sirny, 29, mother to two daughters. The year was 1980 and Ludwig's business was expanding.

Things are very different now. Eight and a half years of coping with the catastrophic loss of his daughter and of his businesses—he had at one time a string of bakeries on the go—have taken their toll on Ludwig.

He drinks too much, and he seems both confused and saddened by the events of August 2006: overjoyed at an outcome he never dreamed of, while bitter at what he can see is an industry forming around his beloved Natascha—something which, like the forces which stripped him of love and work, he has no control over.

The relationship with Natascha's mother fell apart long before she was taken from their lives, but he has flashes of nostalgia, Kodak moments of tenderness for the woman he once loved. He told the authors in an exclusive interview:

Love and pride radiate from Ludwig Koch for his child, that is evident. But life was not rosy for the young
Natascha, not before she was taken, and certainly not afterwards. She lived on a dreary estate in a flat that was often empty after her parents broke up. Her two half-sisters were grown-ups now and lived away, and there was, and still is, an aura of the downtrodden among the residents. To them, life's glittering prizes seemed destined for other, luckier folk. Not people like her.

Neighbours who still live there say the tensions that existed between the parents were passed along to Natascha, who expressed them in the classical ways of children uncertain of themselves or their world: bed wetting, anxiety, low self-esteem and oscillating weight. By the time she was taken she endured a cruel nickname among her classmates: Porky. She had put on 10 kilos in just two months before she was snatched.

She was, like the man she would share her formative years with, not brilliant at school, whatever her parents say. She had above-average intelligence but was an average student: indeed the fact she was snatched while on her way to school earlier than usual came about because she needed extra tuition in German. She was regarded as a pretty, charming girl by neighbours and the mothers of her school friends, but nothing marked her out as extraordinary. She was good at handicrafts, and at kindergarten, when she was four, she made a clay figurine that her father keeps to this day.

The Alt Wien (Old Vienna) kindergarten on Leopoldauerplatz 77 in Vienna's 21st district, where Natascha went after school, is only two minutes' walk away from the Brioschiweg Volksschule, where she was a pupil.
Josefine Huttarsch is headmistress of the kindergarten, where she has worked for the past 30 years. She smiled at the mention of Natascha and spoke very fondly of her: