Girl in the Cellar (18 page)

Despite the essential difference—Lolita was not kept imprisoned and brutally punished whenever her captor found it necessary—the parallels between the fiction and the real life story are striking. Like Lolita, Natascha had also learned with time how to deal with her captor and even how to assume control in certain situations; for example, when she, in her own words, ‘forced' him to celebrate Christmas and give her presents.

Humbert loses his diabolical attachment to Lolita when the child grows into a woman. Top psychiatrists and even Natascha herself have speculated that Priklopil, too, was towards the end simply defeated by the fact that his once helpless victim had developed into a young woman in many ways stronger than himself.

It is possible that he, like Humbert, might have lost some of his attraction to her, realising that his demented fantasies were never to become true.

She grew up. The mirror cracked. The spell was breaking.

‘He could not handle the increasingly independent, grown-up woman she'd become, and I am sure that he wanted to get rid of her in some way,' a psychiatrist said, adding that Priklopil probably ‘consciously or unconsciously wanted her to escape'.

As Lolita is becoming increasingly detached from her pathological captor Humbert, he tries to intimidate her into believing that the outside world would offer her no better alternative, just as Priklopil tried, and sometimes partially succeeded, to plant his paranoid, insane ideas into Natascha's mind. But at one point Humbert utters
what now might seem an eerie prophecy of Natascha's present—another example of life following fiction.

Talking to Lolita, Humbert says: ‘In plainer words, if we two are found out, you will be analysed and institutionalised, my pet, c'est tout. You will dwell, my Lolita will dwell […] under the supervision of hideous matrons. This is the situation, this is the choice. Don't you think that under the circumstances Dolores Haze had better stick to her old man?'

 

High-tech equipment must be deployed in a bid to find out Priklopil's secrets, but experts need nothing electronic to debrief Natascha about her time in captivity, particularly the months between February and August 2006 when she tasted this freedom of a kind. For this they need infinite patience and care.

Listening to her account brought Professor Berger and his team to their limits as psychiatrists. Because what she went through was unique, there were no textbooks to work from when it came to therapy for her.

‘We had no previous experience to draw on,' said Professor Berger. ‘There wasn't a textbook case for someone like Natascha—she wrote the textbook.'

Academia does not have a record of a criminal with Priklopil's profile, nor of a victim who suffered an ordeal comparable to what Natascha had to endure for almost a decade.

We can learn something from the trauma research of the fifties and the sixties, from the cases of former concentration camp prisoners,' said Berger, adding that
the 1945 report of the famous Vienna psychiatrist Dr Viktor E. Frankl about how he survived in Auschwitz, the most notorious death camp of them all, will be valuable in dealing with Natascha's mental scars.

In his book entitled
Man's Search for Meaning
, Dr Frankl gives a chilling account of the death camp existence between ‘vegetating' and ‘internal victory' and describes in detail how ‘an abnormal reaction in an abnormal situation' slowly becomes ‘normal behaviour'.

While he was imprisoned in Auschwitz and expected each day to be his last, Dr Frankl developed his own spiritual exercises in which he would speak to himself in his mind for hours and would analyse and re-enact seemingly irrelevant everyday things he had experienced in his life before he was incarcerated there. At the same time, he never erased from his consciousness the constant threat of death that was lurking throughout every single second of his captivity.

The doctors say that this is exactly the path Natascha went down from that first day. She constantly had to fear for her own life when Priklopil locked her up in the concrete cellar behind the 150-kilo steel door that could have easily become her tomb if anything were to have happened to him. But in contrast to the concentration camp survivors, the innocent child was also made to fear for her captor's life, as he constantly repeated that he would kill himself if she tried to break out.

Psychologist Philipp Schwärzler, from the Child Protection Centre in Vienna, likewise compared Natascha's situation to that of the victims of the worst manmade
horror of the twentieth, or any other, century—the concentration camp inmate. ‘Humans function by their will to survive, which makes its way through in the most terrible situations,' Schwärzler said.

He went on: ‘In order to do this, the psyche uses a protection mechanism: stop thinking, detach and discard anything dreadful. No person can live in constant resistance, because that only tortures them further. To live with the unbearable may not be healthy, but in emergency situations, it's necessary for survival.'

And Christoph Stuppäck, chief physician at the University Clinic for Psychiatry in Salzburg, said the Stockholm syndrome is, especially for these reasons, very pronounced in Natascha Kampusch's case. ‘To identify with your aggressor is a survival strategy. If you can't conquer the enemy then you show solidarity with him,' he says, indicating why she felt unable to escape on prior occasions even though the slightest of chances may have been there.

‘When you only have one person as an attachment figure, you lose the ability to communicate,' says Stuppäck. ‘All the experiences that you have on your way to becoming an adult were taken away from her.'

Schwärzler also says that one could rebuild the capability for bonding and relationships. Even with the best of therapies, however, Natascha's martyrdom cannot be undone. ‘She will have to learn to live with it. That will take a long, long time.'

But Natascha's supreme psychological strength is evi
dent. When asked if she really was, eventually, the stronger of the two, Dr Berger only said, ‘There is a simple answer to that: her survival is the proof of her strength. She is alive, he is dead.'

Wolfgang Priklopil planned and executed the taking of Natascha Kampusch with the precision of the engineer he was. In contrast, her choice to free herself from his grip on 23 August 2006 was as spontaneous as the decisions of an eighteen-year-old girl should be when choosing a new hairband or picking a new shade of lip gloss. Impulse, not planning, told her that D-Day had arrived.

Several times before, she had gone towards the garden gate at No. 60 Heinestrasse, that alarmed, mute sentinel guarding her captor's domain, fully intent on crossing the boundary into a universe beyond Planet Priklopil, only to be drawn back into his strange orbit. She was pulled by the conflicting forces of fear, apprehension and, probably, a kind of affection for the man who brought her up.

Even love?

She had tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to catch the eyes of strangers in stores, to communicate who she was with pleading looks and a smile which she tried to make as similar to that in her schoolgirl photo as it was possible
to do, on numerous occasions. She had cried in frustration, dreamed of her parents, written down her deepest feelings in exercise books she managed to keep secret from him—and now, on this day, at 12.53 p.m. Central European Time, all the gods were smiling on her. Wolfgang Priklopil decided it was a good day to clean his car.

Rather, he thought it was a good day to let his prized possession clean it for him. No stress for him, and a breath of fresh air for her in the big outside. What could be better?

It was time for Natascha Kampusch to grow up and get out.

The weather was good. Natascha was given his vacuum cleaner and told, as always, that he would be ‘right beside you'. As if she needed reminding. He was an aura, omnipresent, ready to pounce if his illusion of keeping this perfect woman-child should ever be endangered.

In the end the techno-freak was brought down by that most indispensable of personal technological items of the twenty-first century—the mobile telephone.

He took a call as Natascha did what she was instructed to do—first clean the driver's side of his beloved BMW before moving on to the passenger cockpit and finally the back seat. On the line was a man enquiring about renting the apartment in the Hallergasse that Priklopil had renovated with Natascha's help.

The noise of the vacuum cleaner coupled with the poor reception just where he was standing made Priklopil drop his guard momentarily. He was charming on the phone
to the young Austrian IT technician who was asking about the property, when it would be ready and how much he wanted to rent it for.

Unbeknown to the caller, he had released a young woman from captivity. A banal enquiry to a banal man broke the chains that bound her for over eight long years.

Wolfgang K's boss was later called back by police to be told how his employee's innocent enquiry about somewhere to live had ended the nightmare for Natascha, her family and for everyone who cared for them. He in turn told Wolfgang how his simple telephone call had brought the tragedy to closure. Herr K—his full name has not been revealed by police at his request—is still flabbergasted to think of his role in history:

Far from it. He was a Ferris wheel in the saga, which just happened to stop at the right place at the right time.

Still barely able to explain it when she appeared on TV just fourteen days later in one of the most watched programmes ever screened in Austria, she admitted: ‘I just knew that if not then, then maybe never. I looked over at him. He had his back to me. Just moments before then I had told him that I couldn't live any more like that. That I would try to escape. And well, I thought, if not now…'

Yet at the same time as she was closing the door on his life, it was nonetheless a shared life, one that had its highlights, tenderness, tears, laughter: the full spectrum of human emotions divided into 74,304 hours that were far from all bad. By her own admission Priklopil had saved her from drugs, from tobacco, from bad people, from wrong decisions. However warped her rationale, there would always be—will always be—a place in her heart and her head for the man she ‘sat in the same boat with' on this voyage through life.

Even in the nano-seconds that it took her brain receptors to kick in, to tell her to run like the devil if she was ever going to break free, Natascha's caring side also demanded to be heard:

But the momentous decision had come and she ran. With the electric thrumming of the vacuum cleaner in the background and with his back turned to her, she took the one chance she had and bolted. Racing through her mind were the previous, failed attempts at freeing herself.

‘Once I wanted to jump out of the moving car on to the road, but he held me tight and accelerated so fast I was thrown against the door,' she would later say. This time she would make certain he was not able to get to her.

It took minutes for her to scramble over fences, across neighbours' gardens and to the door of an elderly lady who treated her with bemusement and suspicion. Undernourished and a sickly colour she may have been, but Natascha was determined. She feared that if Priklopil
came after her now, the old lady she was pleading with through an open window to call the police would be dead. This is how she recalled her flight:

The old lady, whose full name was withheld from the media by police, later gave a statement saying: ‘She was just suddenly standing in front of my kitchen window. Panicking, white in the face and shaking. She asked me if I had any old newspapers from 1998, but I didn't find out who she was until the police came.

I couldn't stop thinking about her all night. She had no childhood and had to become a young woman all on her own.'

As Natascha waited, she feared that Priklopil could come at any moment.

Was there a significance in the fact that she choked off the word kidnapped mid-sentence? ‘Kidna—' It is incomplete, like the refusal to say where the white van driver stopped en route after he had chosen her.

Later, the full complexity of the relationship she shared with Priklopil would confuse people who had thought the story was a simple morality tale of good, eventually, winning out over evil.

The police, when they arrived, were indeed of the local variety sort, more used to dealing with stolen cars than stolen children. Natascha's account continued:

Whatever else the years of solitude with Priklopil had done to her, they had imbued Natascha Kampusch with a finely tuned sense of her impending self-worth as a media star. In those first moments of safety and freedom she asked only for a blanket to put over her head. ‘As soon as I was in the police car I demanded a blanket so that no one could see my face, so that no one could take a picture of me. I thought maybe an irritated neighbour might take a photograph of me over the garden fence and then later sell the picture,' she said. ‘I can, as a matter of principle, always react quickly to situations. I knew that I couldn't allow myself to make any mistakes.'

As she was driven to the local police station, the last minutes of Wolfgang Priklopil's life were ebbing away.

In the car, enunciating in her high German speech learned from years listening to the radio, she told the officers where she had been held and who the captor was. A massive police operation swung into action. They had failed Natascha down the years, causing her through blunder and inefficiency to lose her young life. They
would not fail her now, they promised. But they did—at least in her eyes.

 

Within minutes, hundreds of officers had been mobilised. Traffic in the north-eastern part of the capital was paralysed, with literally dozens of police cars sealing off roads while a helicopter hovered in the region of the Strasshof house. All vital traffic arteries were blocked, as well as every approach to the borders, creating mile-long lines of cars in streets like the Wagramer Strasse and the S2 in the city and on motorways like the A23. Frontier police were issued with the registration numbers of Priklopil's vehicles.

Locked gun cabinets in police stations were opened, automatic weapons with extra ammunition clips distributed. The specially trained police commando units were set loose. Priklopil became more than just a perp on the run, another criminal. He was the walking embodiment of evil, as far as lawmen were concerned, and one who had outsmarted them for the greater part of a decade.

Erich Zwettler of the Vienna police said: ‘We covered pretty much the whole of eastern Austria to try to prevent any attempts to escape across the border. We used everything we had, hundreds of officers.' As the news spread that a little girl lost had come back from the dead and began to leak out to the media, details of the search for Priklopil were announced on the radio. It worked. Drivers sitting in traffic jams caused by the police operation began calling in that they had seen the BMW with
Priklopil at the wheel, careering like a madman through the streets of the capital.

A motorised patrol spotted the car near the Bruenner Strasse—an area with high-rise flats not dissimilar to those where Natascha had once lived—and tried to follow it, but they were no match for his 12-cylinder BMW. His attention to detail always kept the car in perfect working order, and he was able to accelerate away at speeds of just over 140mph. Shortly after that he also managed to shake off a second patrol that tried to chase after him near the Erzherzog-Karl-Strasse.

Herr Ordinary knew how to drive, the police would later say, somewhat embarrassed that the special courses that officers took for high-speed pursuits were no match for the kidnapper.

Christine Palfrader, whose truck-stop played such a central role in the drama, saw Priklopil's BMW racing down the street as he came from Strasshof. She later recalled watching as he took a sharp curve at the junction where her bar is located at an unusually high speed.