As someone who just escaped a mugging intact about an hour ago, so many things right now are hitting home about how lucky I am. This poor poor girl. I have never heard such a horrifying story. She is such a pretty thing and she missed her entire childhood.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articl...archived=False
Austrian kidnap girl says never lost hope of escape
Reuters
Wed Sep 6, 2006 6:28pm ET
By Karin Strohecker
VIENNA (Reuters) - An Austrian girl held captive for eight years told on Wednesday how the thought of escaping kept her alive, but that she feared fleeing might provoke her kidnapper into killing her and others in a murder spree.
For the first time since her dash to freedom two weeks ago, 18-year-old Natascha Kampusch spoke about the years of loneliness, hunger and agony she spent in a windowless cell beneath the garage of Wolfgang Priklopil's house near Vienna.
"I promised myself I would grow older, stronger and sturdier to be able to break free one day," Kampusch said in her first television interview, looking fragile but composed and confident despite her ordeal and the subsequent media frenzy.
"I made a deal with myself that the Natascha of the future would come back to free that little 12-year-old girl," she said in the interview with Austrian Television (ORF), recorded on Tuesday and aired on Wednesday.
Priklopil locked Kampusch in the 6 square meter (65 sq ft) cell in the sedate commuter town of Strasshof, 25 km (15 miles) outside the capital, after abducting her at the age of 10 on her way to school in 1998.
Kampusch recalled her horror when Priklopil made her enter for the first time the cell that would be her home for years.
"It felt very claustrophobic in that small room," said Kampusch, who was short of breath and suffering from a cold.
"I threw water bottles against the walls or banged against them with my fists so that maybe someone could hear me.
"It was harrowing and if he had not taken me up into the house at some point to have a bit more space to move, I think I might have gone crazy."
The details of one of Austria's most notorious crimes have kept the nation spellbound since Kampusch escaped while her abductor took a phone call outside his house on August 23. He killed himself shortly afterwards by jumping under a train.
ESCAPE
Kampusch, who frequently closed her eyes during the interview to shield them from the bright camera lights, explained eloquently how she had told her captor that she could no longer exist as she was.
"I told him I could no longer live this way," she said. "I told him I would certainly attempt to escape."
The Weekly News magazine and daily newspaper Kronen-Zeitung also published interviews and pictures of Kampusch, now subject of national soul-searching and an international media frenzy.
Strands of blonde hair were showing from under a pink and purple scarf, which advisers told her to wear to give her greater options should she want to change how she looks to avoid media publicity.
The young woman with a bright smile and baby blue eyes described how she feared for others after she escaped.
"I wasn't scared (for myself) -- I love freedom and for me death is the ultimate freedom, the redemption from him," she told News. "But he said all the time he would first of all kill the neighbors, then me and then himself."
Kampusch spoke of how people shrugged and walked on by when she begged them for help after she finally ran away.
When she ran into a garden and knocked on the window of a woman pottering about in her kitchen she was met with much caution, she told Kronen-Zeitung.
"I told her (Priklopil) could kill us," Kampusch said. "Despite this the woman was very concerned I would step on her lawn."
Kampusch is currently living in a hospital, shielded from reporters and cared for by doctors and psychiatrists.
For her future, Kampusch said she was hoping to travel with her family and finish school before going to university.
"I had all these thoughts about what I have been missing, like my first boyfriend and all that," she told ORF.
"But I already personally fulfilled my biggest wish in the past few days -- freedom!"
(Additional reporting by Boris Groendahl and Alexandra Zawadil)
She is incredibly brave, and hopefully she can do all the things she has dreamed of now
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