Girl in the Cellar (10 page)

Professor Max Friedrich, Natascha's chief psychiatric adviser, said: ‘She was subject to isolation torture. That is the worst kind of torture of them all, when one is completely cut off from the world.'

Police believe that Priklopil exerted extreme self-discipline upon himself during the early days and weeks of her captivity. He had acquired that which had tormented him, and now the question was how to ‘enjoy' it.

Did he rape her? She has not commented on any sexual liaison, and police and the experts surrounding her have divided opinions.

The first policewoman she had contact with after regaining her freedom spoke of ‘sexual abuse'.

Natascha refuses to answer any questions regarding
‘intimacy'—a stance which in itself indicates that intimacy there was. In one of her enigmatic replies to police interrogators in an interview later printed by Austria's
News Magazine
, she said: ‘Wolfi was no sex beast and neither was I. We had a tender relationship.'

But the question of the physical side of this relationship, forged by circumstance and developed by her own forceful character, will not go away. Natascha, who surrounded herself with lawyers immediately after her breakout, threatens to sue newspapers worldwide who call her a ‘sex slave', even though she refuses to say what happened between them. The Austrian media have quoted several police sources saying it was ‘inevitable' that she was abused, although she refuses to admit or deny that any sexual relationship took place.

If she had sexual contact with him before she was sixteen, then he was guilty of breaking the laws of Austria and most other western nations. If any occurred after she was sixteen, and it was consensual, then Priklopil could only have been held to account for taking her in the first place. The way he chose to end his life, just when she began hers again, stopped a great deal of midnight oil from burning in the corridors of the Austrian justice ministry.

This reticence on Natascha's part muddies the water of the whole saga and her choice of words makes it hard for the world to understand how ‘tenderness' could be applied to a man who had snatched her. Just how this tenderness was expressed, in any physical form, is a secret still locked within Natascha. She became a young
woman with an incredible capacity to both understand and empathise with her captor: after she was free she even asked the media to stop writing about him, because she felt the details would upset his elderly mother.

Tender—perhaps sometimes. Other times he could, and easily would, show the hard, calculating side that had led him to take her without compassion in the first place. ‘He told me that he was continuously calling my parents,' she recalled. ‘They could have me back if they were ready to pay him 10 million schillings [approximately 500,000 pounds]. He showed me a piece of paper, on which he had written the telephone numbers of my mum and my dad. But he told me that neither was ever picking up. Because I was obviously not so important to them.'

Her kidnapper started using terms such as ‘We are sitting in a boat'—a German phrase implying partnership and isolation from the rest—as well as saying things like, ‘You and me are the only ones who matter' and ‘We belong together for ever'. They occasionally watched TV news reports about the hunt for Natascha. Sometimes she had the eerie experience of watching police officers hunting for her body in places far from the little suburban house of horrors.

According to Natascha, over the weeks and months Priklopil tried to break her down with a mixture of violence and care. She said that she soon realised that when she was ‘good' she would be rewarded with new books, clothes and sweets—so she tried to be ‘good'. And Priklopil set about trying to create, in his own image, the beauty he hoped she would grow into.

He travelled to stores far from his home so as not to arouse suspicion. He bought her make-up sets and a wide range of cosmetics, tubs of Nivea face cream, and small make-up cases to keep it all in. He also brought her teen magazines so she could read how to apply lip gloss and dye her hair correctly. He had occasionally mentioned to acquaintances how hard it was to find a beautiful woman who understood him, but that he was sure that one day he would find his ‘beautiful dream woman'.

Natascha said that the incredible sense of isolation she as a ten-year-old felt in her dungeon actually led her to look forward to Priklopil's visits.

Priklopil had never had a girlfriend in his life, let alone a child. Intuitively, however, he seemed to know how to become a father figure to Natascha, how to exploit her vulnerability in order to underwrite and support his immorality.

She explained how the kidnapper slowly earned her trust by becoming this authority figure, teaching her
geography and history and reading girls' books and adventure stories with her. She added that ‘he brought me books to read and I asked him totally normal children's questions' about foreign countries and animals, which he reportedly always answered.

Her kidnapper also read her fairy stories about princesses who were rescued by noble knights as a metaphor for their life together. He claimed to be the only one who really cared about her. It was a not-so-subtle attempt at brainwashing, at manipulating a mind still forming and susceptible to adult influences. Yet it almost seems as if she let him have just as much influence as she wanted to give. She wanted to remain in control. By seeing with the crystal clarity of a child's eye early on how flawed he was, she was able to manipulate him later to the point where they lived a seemingly normal life.

When, after the ‘long time' of isolation, Priklopil started taking Natascha out of her prison, and upstairs into his house, she repaid the privilege of being let out by doing what he asked, which was household chores, cooking, cleaning. They would eat together and sometimes she was allowed to watch a film with him. He would tell her stories about his childhood and show her photos of his mother. Police have said the Priklopil clan was a family addicted to the camera: dozens of albums containing hundreds of snapshots of Wolfgang, his father, grandparents, mother, cousins, aunts and family acquaintances were found at his house.

These used to be the centrepiece of a ritual he always
played out with Waltraud whenever she came to stay, looking back at times past instead of to future happiness. Now it was Natascha's turn to share them, and in knowing him, hoped Priklopil, she would come to love him.

Apart from the photograph-gazing sessions, which often went on for hours, he would try other, clumsier tactics in a bid to divorce her thoughts from her family. He would sometimes bring out a newspaper report about the kidnapping and its aftermath, saying: ‘Look, they are still writing about us,' and then following it up by saying her parents had given up on her. Translation: I am all you have.

But that was untrue: in the surreal playing-house existence that life became at No. 60 Heinestrasse, Natascha always had so much more. She had parents she loved, cats, a life. It was he who always had so much more to lose than her, and she knew it:

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: