10 Years of Freedom Read online

  The sad thing is that I have been criticized for my actual “strength” or the “strength” that was visible on the outside. That people confused my reticence with “hiding something”. And failed to make the effort to differentiate, to look below the surface. Instead, I was increasingly confronted with opinions, such as, “Anyone who talks like her, who views her situation in such a nuanced way, could not have suffered enough.”

  In the end, that letter, which was well intentioned by everybody and at the time was correct and expressed matters important to me in many areas, laid the foundation for exactly this perception of me.

  In keeping with my metaphor, a couple days later I built the “first floor” on top of that foundation myself. The letter did not achieve its intended goal in the public, namely for me to have some peace and quiet. Just the opposite happened. The request to give me time until I was able to explain myself in more detail fell on deaf ears. What I had briefly revealed from my everyday life in captivity, and primarily what I had thought had not (yet) been disseminated in public simply fanned the flames of curiosity even higher. Media outlets were constantly trying to outbid each other to be the first to get an interview. The US was the only country with a strangely reluctant request – at least from one newspaper: “OK, a girl was locked in some basement by a madman in Vienna for eight and a half years, and everybody wants to talk to her. But can you tell me once again what the story is?”

  That was the story. In essence. That request from the US was, looking back, a warning that it was not going to be enough. That the story would take on a life of its own, that the gaps the public believed it had a right to fill had to be filled. And if I were unwilling to fill them, then other people would do it for me. Then their imagination and fantasies of what had happened in the intervening years would be the ones people remembered. As if people could not allow actual events to stand on their own, as if they had to attach something more to them, making them even uglier, more disgusting, more unpalatable.

  This is the kind of exaggeration that I described above, that apparently makes it easier to hold a crime like this at arm’s length. The moment when it exceeds every value benchmark, every norm, we feel we no longer have to doubt or re-examine our own values and norms.

  It took me some time to understand these mechanisms. I myself did not have this artificial space between me and the crime. For me it was not an abstraction of cruelty beyond anyone’s ability to imagine. For me it was something I lived every day. I could not understand why people were looking for further revelations. Very quickly it was no longer about verification and facts, but about new speculations one after the other, and bigger and juicier headlines in order to drive up circulation numbers. It is sad to see how far some media outlets will go – even today. How they willingly ignore the consequences or even exploit them for their next sensationalist cover. First they signal the hunt is on and then, somewhat later, hypocritically admonish others to leave the girl in peace already. She can hardly set one foot outside the door, the poor dear.

  Looking back I asked myself again and again whether it was the right thing to do to provide the public with the information the way I did. I had no influence on anything that was leaked or planted in a targeted way. I do not regret that I sat down in front of the camera and spoke for myself, even though I had only a limited impact on when that took place. I had wanted my freedom, and that also included my freedom to express myself. Despite my efforts, exactly what I was trying to avoid ended up happening anyway.

  Everything that was left unsaid in my first three interviews, because I was not yet able or willing to talk about it, was later used against me. As if I had purposely wanted to keep something secret. Either to avoid having to reveal the entirety of the horror or to mask that the whole thing hadn’t really been that bad after all.

  By stepping into the public spotlight, in a way I lost control of my own story. Other people took control of it, interpreting it, falsifying it, interpreting and evaluating me and my behaviour against their own expectations. They couldn’t just be content to let me be me, and they couldn’t allow my experiences to be what they were. As a result, I was once again transformed into an object, into a projection screen for the thoughts and imaginations of others. That was exactly what I was in captivity. A kind of modelling clay, supposedly malleable, able to be shaped according to the wishes of the kidnapper who believed that he could in his own small way play God. On the outside, I became the same modelling clay once again.

  I didn‘t want to have to live up to expectations, to go along with how other people wanted me to be. I just wanted to be me. Freedom implies for me permission to be where I want to be, to say what I want to say and to keep silent about what I don’t want to say. But that is apparently an understanding of freedom that many have a problem with.

  In the beginning I suddenly was the victim of the nation that people wanted, felt they had to help. It was like an occupying force. All around me, my family, the advisors, attorneys and psychiatrists. Caregivers who monitored when I slept, what I ate. Who offered me pills so that I could finally get on a normal day-night cycle. Doctors who wanted to give orders about which questions the investigators would be allowed to ask and who would be allowed to see me and when. Out in front of the hospital, the paparazzi, on the newspaper stands at the kiosk downstairs the brightly coloured publications with their at times well-meaning, concerned headlines, and at other times sensationalistic speculations about intimate details.

  *

  After the pressure increased yet again as a result of the press conference, my team of advisors decided that I should address the public myself by giving one or several interviews as soon as possible. My corresponding interview partners would also be selected “according to medical criteria”. In other words, taking into account a certain level of integrity that was to be expected with regard to protecting me as a victim and protecting my privacy. This was to prevent any re-traumatization. They were to be three interviews: one with Austria’s largest newspaper in terms of circulation, the Kronen-Zeitung, one with the magazine News and a TV interview with the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF).

  Innumerable requests had come from Germany, mainly from private commercial broadcasters. Many in the press were speculating that up to € 1 million had been offered for an exclusive interview on television. I don’t know whether those numbers are correct, and in the end it didn’t matter to me anyway. I wanted a framework that allowed me to feel comfortable, inasmuch as that was possible. I wanted to be taken seriously and treated with respect, and I did not want to be used to drive ratings, wedged in between the report about cosmetic surgery and Ballermann08.

  A room at the Vienna General Hospital was remade into a comfortable studio for the ORF interview. The television viewers were not supposed to see right away that I was staying in the hospital. The broadcaster sent 30 people to the interview, making it into an enormous affair. The camera operators were women, and everything was bathed in a soft light. A blue-grey carpet was laid down in the otherwise rather austere room, a cream coloured cabinet was set up and a number of green plants dotted the room. A living room atmosphere with two light-coloured leather chairs, each with a side table with small table lamps and books. Next to my chair was a stack of colourful pillows. That was the only thing that I had asked for, aside from a package of Kleenex tissues. The tissues in case I felt the need to cry, and a pillow in case I needed to hold tight to something. Neither of them was necessary. But I liked one of the pillows so much that I was allowed to keep it as a souvenir.

  Everybody was extremely tense in the hours leading up to the interview. That afternoon we role-played the interview situation briefly. “So that you won’t be startled by everything later on,” as one of my advisors put it. Then the makeup team went to work on me in my hospital room, with doctors’ orders to make me look “as natural as possible”.

  Then we went downstairs into the “hospital stu
dio”. In the corridor I met Christoph Feurstein for the first time who was to conduct the interview. In the last eight and half years since my disappearance he had reported on my case on numerous occasions. It’s probably not an assignment that journalists are usually clamouring for, namely to knock on doors and ask for interviews with family members still suffering from the loss or the disappearance of a loved one. Two days after my kidnapping, he visited my mother for the first time at our flat at Rennbahnweg. After that, his desk reported on my case every year on 2 March, the day of my disappearance. And every time that there were supposedly new developments, dead ends that the investigators had run up against, or every time somebody reported to have seen me somewhere, or claimed to have information that “would lead to my discovery”.

  Years later Christoph Feurstein told me that he was the youngest journalist on the team for the news magazine Thema and it simply “fell to him” to have to ask about the feelings and fears that my mother felt those first few hours and days after my disappearance. And also because his reporting had made him feel a special kinship with “difficult stories”. He had never followed a family for such a long time, particularly as the story never really went anywhere, he says. There was nothing to report over the years that would have constituted a serious contribution toward solving my case. Nothing seemed to turn out for the better; it was always the same tragic situation. Stagnation. He said that my parents’ grasping at every straw was what upset him the most. On one hand, the small-scale war waged by the former couple, on the other hand their unified stance in declaring that if I were no longer alive, they would no longer have any reason to live. The interviews that Christoph conducted with my parents during my captivity were also used as visual evidence for the doctors who were now treating me. They form the basis for the psychological assessments aimed at clarifying whether and to what extent first my parents had perhaps abused me, second whether my childhood had been miserable and I could have simply run away, and third if they could’ve had anything to do with my kidnapping in any way.

  When it was clear that the ORF was to carry out and broadcast the exclusive interview, it was also clear who my interview partner would be. The questions were roughly coordinated with me and my doctors in terms of content. But still, nobody knew how I would react when it came down to it. We also agreed that I could take brief breaks from recording – not least due to my cold and my hoarse voice. It was even agreed that it would be possible to suspend the interview if the attending doctors were of the opinion that I was not able to handle the whole situation. It would’ve been a problem not only for the ORF, but also my team of advisors would likely have been the target of massive criticism if I had been unable to withstand the pressure.

  Christoph had a preliminary meeting with the psychiatrists, who told him that I was surprisingly eloquent and a strong young woman, and that the trauma I had suffered would likely only become fully visible and comprehensible over time. He didn’t know any more than that. It was certainly unusual that we did not have a meet-and-greet before the interview, and that he was unable to get a feel for me, his interview partner. I wasn’t able to get a feel for things either. It was like jumping into the deep end for everybody.

  We briefly said hello and then went to our respective chairs.

  “Over the last several days so many people have been asking me how you are doing. And it is unbelievable that you are sitting here now and that I can ask you myself. Ms. Kampusch, how are you?”

  “Mh, yes. Good, con… considering the circumstances.”

  “You have now been free for two weeks. How have you experienced your newfound freedom. What have you been up to?”

  “Well, primarily I am trying to recover from the exertions of my escape, to relax. (…)”

  “Who are the people that you are talking to most right now, that you trust the most?”

  “Yes, well, the ones I trust the most, hm. Dr. Friedrich, for example, but also all of the psychologists who are taking care of me. And mainly I really trust my whole family. And of course I trust in myself.”

  After the interview a survey was carried out asking people what they thought of the interview and what they wished for me. A total of 98 percent said they wished me all the best and hoped that I would now be left alone in order to prepare for my new life.

  Shortly thereafter public opinion changed completely after the German news magazine Stern reported that I had gone skiing with the kidnapper. At the time I had denied it even though it was the truth, albeit a very abbreviated version of the truth. Because it did not reflect the very complex kidnapper-victim relationship that had developed over the years in which a ski trip shortly before my 18th birthday was in no way a pleasure outing, but rather a tool with which to show me just how much of a nobody I was and how far Priklopil could project his power. During our trip to the Hochkar ski resort I had tried to attract the attention of a woman I encountered in the toilet of the ski lodge. After I had gathered up all of my courage, nothing more than an inconsequential peep came out of my mouth. The woman smiled at me in a friendly way and walked through the door where the kidnapper was already waiting impatiently for me.

  I have been asked over and over why I was unable to or did not escape sooner. And, as I’ve already pointed out, over and over again people suspected me of staying with him voluntarily. These are accusations that heap scorn on what I have experienced. In order to make everything easier for observers on the outside to cope with? I don’t know.

  Every step I took was carefully monitored and controlled by the kidnapper. I was weighed, and the food I ate and the air I breathed were rationed. I had to beg to be given attention in any shape or form – be it in the shape of a book or an audio cassette. Any misbehaviour from the perspective of the kidnapper was punished. And when he was upstairs in the house, his voice boomed through the intercom into my dungeon, “Obey!”

  Over the years he gradually increased his threats and intimidations of me. He claimed that he would kill the neighbours who happened to hear my voice while I was working in the house. And then I would never see the light of day again. After many years, whenever I drove with him to a DIY outlet or some other shop for the first time, he would show me out in front of the driveway what he planned to do if I made a false move. “Look, I can use that to slice open your carotid artery.” Or, “I can use that to beat your skull in. Nobody would be quick enough to stop me.”

  Once a journalist actually asked me why I believed everything he said. It really is quite obvious that anyone who is ready and willing to kidnap a child and to lock her in a windowless basement dungeon for years is capable of anything. Sometimes I got tired of answering questions like that. On one hand the need for embellishment and horror and on the other hand the naïveté, the refusal or inability to imagine that some things truly go beyond anyone’s comprehension, is not something you can blame anyone for. But I would have liked for someone to at least try to grapple with the concept that there is such a thing as an internal and external prison.

  My external prison was in place from the very beginning, while my internal prison was constructed over the ensuing years. Priklopil knew all too well how to paint the world outside as a nest of terror. He was my protector and nobody else. He was my rescuer, the only one I meant anything to, nobody else. The only one who took care of me when everybody else had long ago turned their backs on me. Even the police, who were now only searching for my remains.

  One of the worst scenes during the last several years of my captivity was when he shoved me, wearing only a pair of panties, half-starved, covered in bruises and with my head completely shorn, in front of the front door and said, “Come on now, run. Let’s see how far you get.” I was so humiliated and filled with shame that I couldn’t take a single step. He tore me away from the door, saying, “So you see. The world out there doesn’t want you anyway. Your place is here and only here.”

  Immediately after my escape, the psychiatrists were of
the opinion that the complex kidnapper-victim relationship, which had developed over all those years between Priklopil and myself, could not be summed up in just a few short sentences. They said that it would be difficult for people to comprehend that my internal prison had grown much stronger than my external one over time. That people felt the need for simple solutions and simple explanations, even though such a thing was de facto impossible in my case. What we didn’t realize at the time was that with a story of these dimensions nothing can be kept secret. However, at the time some things were not included in the narrative for good reason. But when they were made public, I was punished.

  In the minds of many our “ski holiday” was the symbol that supposedly relativized my time in captivity. However, just the opposite was the case. This episode demonstrated nothing more than the extent of my internal prison. Just how deeply I had internalized the kidnapper’s threats. Just how omnipresent he was at all times of the day and night. And at the same time how difficult it is to penetrate this interwoven mesh of dependency, power and its abuse and to make it comprehensible to the public.

  *

  The next step in my new life began with a change of address. I no longer wanted to stay in the hospital. The most important examinations had been completed, and I wanted out.