Original subtitles

Stratzhof, a prosperous suburb of Vienna.

Natascha Kampusch was imprisoned here for eight and a half years.

This is her story.

What I've learned about people is this.

No one is infallible.

And anyone can find themselves in a position where they lose control of

lives.

That's true for the kidnapper.

And it's true for me.

From the moment I was kidnapped, I still had control of my thoughts, but I

couldn't do anything about the world outside.

The perpetrator had blown a couple of fuses in his head,

and he couldn't control his life either, or he wouldn't have done what

he did.

I'm an outcast.

I have a sign on my forehead that says, crime victim.

I think everyone has preconceptions about me. Maybe when I'm older,

people will forget what happened to me.

Since yesterday evening, a 10 -year -old girl has been missing in Vienna's

Donorstadt district.

Natasha wears glasses, she's 1 meter 45 tall, has light brown hair with a fringe

and blue eyes.

She's been missing for more than 34 hours.

All efforts to locate her have been unsuccessful, and the police are

their search.

My mother always said, never part after an argument, because something could

happen to one of us.

And we'd never see each other again.

And then it happened.

She rarely went to school alone.

But on that particular day, she did.

I watched her from the window as she left and walked towards the shopping

center. Then she disappeared.

And that was it.

I was almost halfway to school when I saw a man in the distance standing in

front of a white van as though he were waiting for someone.

I wanted to cross the street, but then I decided

to keep going straight.

When I came nearer, he came towards me,

grabbed me and

dragged me into his truck.

I tried to scream, but no sound came out.

My voice book froze.

No sound.

The kidnapper said, if I didn't scream and didn't stand up and did what he

he wouldn't hurt me.

I didn't know what was going to happen.

In that moment, I thought it was the end.

I kind of knew the neighborhood from that angle, because when I used to drive

home with my mother, I'd see the treetops and telephone poles.

So I knew roughly where we were headed.

Then he drove the white truck up to his garage, wrapped me in a blue blanket and

carried me into the house.

He carried me downstairs.

and put me down for a moment.

I didn't know it then, but he'd opened everything up, then he

dragged me and carried me in.

Then he left me in the

cell on the floor.

In the dark.

Natasha was always on time, so when she was ten minutes

late, I thought to myself, where is she?

I'm going to call the childminder.

But no one answered.

I called half an hour later, and they told me she'd never arrived.

At that moment, I nearly fainted.

I knew something had happened.

It was as if the earth had just opened up and swallowed her.

I just sat there and counted to myself up to 21, 21 seconds,

and then to 60, and on and on, so I knew roughly how long I

had been there.

But at some point I lost track.

That first day he brought me a mattress.

It was just five centimeters thick and made of foam rubber.

I only had the same blue blanket to cover me, and I had to use my jacket as

pillow.

I wanted to keep my dress on, day and night.

I didn't want to give up anything.

or reveal anything about myself.

He'd taken away my school bag and he burned my shoes in the first few days.

He said I wouldn't need them.

A massive search is launched by police, starting at the housing estate where

Natasha lives.

Concerned citizens are calling in with information.

Soon, the police have evidence of an abduction.

Austrian police are investigating the disappearance of 10 -year -old Natascha

Kampusch, who was last seen walking to school on March 2.

She had about a two -kilometer walk to school, starting from her home on the

Rheinbahn estate.

Halfway along, there's a roundabout on the Mählandgasse.

At approximately 7 .20 a .m. that Monday morning, a girl standing at the

roundabout says she saw another girl in a red anorak being forced into a white

truck parked on the right side of the road.

I had no way to contact my kidnapper if I needed something.

He just came every day.

Sometimes when he didn't close all the doors behind him, he could hear me

knocking.

And then he installed an intercom system.

though I could communicate with him.

I couldn't tell if it was day or night, because my inner clock had gone

haywire.

Years later, the entrance to Natasha's cell is discovered in the garage beneath

a disguised trapdoor.

Down below, a heavy cupboard and tyres must be shoved aside.

They reveal a safe, 70 centimetres high, screwed flush with the wall.

Behind that, the half -metre thick wall has been hollowed out.

To get in, you had to crawl backwards through the hole.

and then close a 150 -kilo steel and concrete door behind you.

Finally, you turned left to open the double wooden doors and step down into a

five -square -meter cell.

It probably took him an hour or so to open the cell.

If he was walking fast or he hadn't locked everything,

It was a bit less.

The effort was enormous, pushing everything aside and opening everything

If anything had happened to him or he had been taken ill, he'd never have

got it open.

I would have been sealed up like an Egyptian pharaoh, buried alive, dead and

mummified.

The statement by the young witness triggers an enormous investigation.

Police question 1 ,520 owners of white trucks and 650 other people,

including a man from Strasshof, half an hour from the center of Vienna, a

township with one main street.

No real center.

And 8 ,000 inhabitants.

The man's name is Wolfgang Pricklopiel, an unmarried 35 -year -old

communications technician with no criminal record.

Pricklopiel lives in his mother's house, where two investigators question him.

His truck is full of rubble from a building site.

He claims to have been at home on the day of the crime, but has no one to

confirm his story.

Police have no probable cause to search his house.

They take Polaroids of his truck, write a report, and file it.

I met her at Siemens.

We did our vocational training there in the early 1980s.

and we both worked there.

Later I set up a company renovating apartments, and I hired Herr Priglopil

because I knew he was a reliable person.

Later on he installed a timer.

The lights went on at a particular time and then it went dark, like in a prison

where the lights go off at 8 p .m.

Every drop of water meant more mold.

It was humid and wet in the little room.

And there were all kinds of insects there.

It smelled musty.

It was very cold and damp.

Really disgusting.

And the ventilator was a kind of torture.

It was very loud.

And when it rotated for a long time and became hot, the blades began to melt.

And then it didn't just make that groaning noise, but another annoying

That went on until the fan was broken.

I began to get a sense for when he was coming.

I would become very nervous.

And then I'd hear the sounds of him unscrewing the safe and

opening the concrete door.

Lots of pounding noises.

I'd sense it in advance somehow.

And I'd get palpitations. My whole body would go into knots.

would twist into nothing.

I'd break out in a cold sweat and I'd feel really queasy.

I remember that Herr Priglopil asked me once,

before the kidnapping, when we were renovating a flat,

how one could effectively install sound insulation to reduce the noise

of a hammer drill.

I told him that cement is a good insulation against voices, but

rockwool would be the best thing to suppress the sound of a hammer drill.

I was horrified, horrified to discover from the police investigation

that he used exactly this information to build the cell.

Special investigators in Vienna receive a second tip -off about Wolfgang

Pricklepiel eight days after his initial questioning.

The informant is a police dog handler who lives in Strasshof.

He reports on a neighbor, a reclusive man who owns a white truck.

He's a shy loner and protects his house with electronic surveillance systems.

He may store weapons there, and he's thought to have a sexual interest in

children.

The officer has never learned his name, but provides a description.

The special task force immediately orders local police in Strasshof.

to check the man's address.

Then a fax arrives.

Wolfgang Pricklepeel isn't registered as living at the house. His mother is.

Pricklepeel is only staying there.

His truck was checked on the 6th of April.

The tip -off is filed and forgotten.

Natasha Kampusch has disappeared into thin air.

Sometimes, when I was giving her pictures of dust in the living room,

I would hold them to my chest or kiss them, and I said, don't give up, you're

strong, strong child.

At first, I didn't have to help him with his work, because he was afraid.

that if I came upstairs, I might attack him with a tool.

But when he was sure I was too scared of him to run away, he

let me out.

But he made sure everything was locked, so I couldn't get out.

I didn't see any daylight for a long, long time.

Then, when I finally came upstairs, I still didn't see any, even though it was

daytime, because he closed the blinds.

He began integrating me more and more into his household until I became

a... kind of slave.

He always made sure I couldn't run away.

He threatened me and kept everything locked.

It must have been incredibly gratifying for him to keep someone captive, someone

who was there for him alone, someone not even his mother or grandmother knew

about.

From the time that Natascha Kampusch was kidnapped, I visited his house about

twice a year, but never noticed anything unusual.

Herr Priglopil was very concerned with hygiene and cleanliness, and he was

extremely frugal.

On the one hand, he could afford a BMW.

But on the other, he let me go hungry.

That's cruel.

For the money he spent on a tank full of petrol, I could have

survived for one or two weeks.

or even longer, depending on how much he gave me to eat.

Isn't that macabre?

Sometimes, when I went with the police to identify things, I felt I was going

my own execution.

I'd have to go somewhere near the school or near my flat because they'd found a

bag and wanted to know if it belonged to Natasha.

Sometimes it was a shoe in a bush or a pair of panties in a car or a red jacket

in a garage.

I was always so relieved when I saw that none of these things were Natasha's.

If I had some skin cream, I rubbed some into the wooden boards of my bed,

because it was a bit like furniture polish.

I did a lot of dusting, and at the weekends, because I'd got used to doing

with my mother, when I had time, when I was

locked up, I sorted things out, tidied everything

up, and I dusted.

He was

obsessed with cleaning, and of course he was constantly wiping off things that I

might have touched.

I wasn't really supposed to touch anything because of course fingerprints

ugly, greasy marks.

He would punish me if he found a fingerprint anywhere.

Not only because it was potentially dangerous to find my fingerprints in his

house, but because he hated the look of fingerprints on his household surfaces.

He would grab me by the wrist.

and used the back of my hand to wipe the prints of the refrigerator or the door

frame.

Right at the beginning, he made me wear plastic bags on my head.

I stitched them together and attached them with a rubber band.

It was horrible because the color came off onto my skin and it hurt because I

had to fix it with clips and rubber bands.

It would have been easier just to tuck the hair under the plastic.

But he insisted on the clips and grips and they dug into my scalp and hurt. It

was tight.

Really unpleasant.

It made me frown all the time. It was horrible.

Then he said, if I shaved my head, it wouldn't be so bad.

And it was torture.

So when he trusted me enough, I got a pair of scissors.

Blunt, of course.

so I couldn't harm myself.

And I used them to cut my hair.

And then he saw that.

He said, he might as well cut it all off.

And he did.

There were times when the torture and the humiliation were so bad that I ran

the window and shouted for the police.

Then he grabbed me really roughly and choked me and hit me.

So, of course,

sometimes I would rather be myself.

then have to leave it to do something I didn't want to,

like help him work, something he did when he was sick,

not at first, but later.

I had to come up, and I'd have to make him soup or tea, and then he'd

take me down again.

It was very frustrating because

when he was sick, he'd completely forget that I have my needs

too, that I might want to eat too or need some daylight or I want to

wash myself.

The pressure is building on the police to get results.

They decide to tap the telephone of Natasha's mother.

They hope the kidnapper will try to get in touch.

A caller claims to be holding Natasha captive.

But it's a hoax, one of many.

Going hungry was dreadful.

You almost feel like a drug addict and ask yourself,

Why am I hungry?

Why do I even feel hunger?

Why can't I manage without food?

He would show me all the food there was before he gave me anything to eat.

But then he'd only cut off a tiny piece for me.

He decided exactly how much I got to eat.

He never let me have what I wanted or as much as I wanted.

because he said, I moved around so little in the cell, I didn't need it.

He didn't want me to cry, and each time I did,

He rubbed my tears into my face with the back of his hand.

Or he took me by the throat and dragged me, choking me, to the bathroom,

where he held my face over the sink so I couldn't cry anymore.

He wouldn't let me cry because he was afraid the hydrochloric acid in my tears

would corrode his scalp.

He always forced me to look him straight in the eye or look down at the ground

in a very submissive way.

Of course I couldn't do that for long, because I won't be forced to do anything

against my will.

And of course he got back at me because of that. He kept telling me I'm

useless and worthless.

and that I'll never have a chance to escape.

He just liked having someone to dominate.

And the more I resisted and answered back, the more satisfying it was for him

put me down and dominate me, to boost his own self -esteem.

He despised people.

He hated his neighbors, although he was nice to them.

He hated his surroundings and society, so he pretended to be a

conformist.

Herr Bricklopil was an only child, and after the death of his father he

developed a very intense relationship with his mother.

He placed high demands on women.

They had to be well -groomed, slender and blonde.

Of course, these were hard demands to

fulfill.

A private detective with his own theories about the crime mounts a

against the police's handling of the investigation.

As a result, 120 files have to be transferred to a new police commission.

By the end, there will be 167 files.

Natasha's body has supposedly been buried in an allotment.

Nothing is found.

A year later, the private detective insists on another dig. He suspects

Natasha's mother.

The private detective cooked up a theory that I was having an affair with a

businessman and Natascha was in the way. So we murdered her and buried her in a

pond he owned.

And the detective kept on at the police about digging there until they agreed.

And of course they found nothing.

You are locked up there in the dark.

There is no electricity and you are hungry.

And then, yes, you think to yourself, what's the point?

Why not put an end to all this?

But then you come to the conclusion that you mustn't give up

because the whole thing is such a monstrous injustice.

You mustn't allow yourself to be defeated.

It was a kind of fighting spirit that kept me alive.

He had lots of books, and he'd probably kept all the books he had to read

in school.

And then I got them.

He went out and bought me non -fiction books, because I liked them, and some

dictionaries, and books on philosophy.

I wanted to learn and discover things in my own way.

So I asked him to send me tests from math books.

He was good at math, so I asked him to mark the tests for me, and he did.

But unfortunately, it's the way he did it.

He found mistakes everywhere, and because he had this controlling side,

wanted to dominate me.

He just crossed everything out in red ink.

All that time I felt he wanted to be like some old -fashioned teacher.

I'm in charge here, and that's probably how he was treated in his childhood.

I appreciated the fact that he was always polite and very

reliable. On the other hand, he was rather shy and a bit introverted.

He always tried not to offend anyone, and I'm sure he was a very obliging

person, neighbor, son and grandson.

Sometime later, the Vienna City Council offered their help.

They said something I shall never forget to this day.

I should buy a grave, a plot, so I could have a place to go to talk to Natascha.

I left the office, sat in my car and burst into tears.

I couldn't even drive home.

My child is alive.

She isn't dead.

Natasha was never dead for me.

No one ever showed me any proof.

There was no evidence to the contrary.

So I always believed Natasha was alive.

Right through the eight and a half years.

After a few years, I could go out into the garden with him, sometimes at night,

for five or ten minutes.

I was so happy I could touch the trees and the hedge, and I could feel the

and the wind on my skin.

Because, of course, there is no wind in the house.

And it was so good.

I asked him if I could take a twig from the hedge back down to myself so I could

always think about it as a kind of memento.

Who takes something from the garden into the house to remember it by?

For a while I kept a diary, a kind of workbook, where I wrote

down everything I did in the house.

Clearing up this, cleaning that, siliconing.

I had to wash every tile by hand before it could be laid.

I had to check every tile for flaws because of course you wouldn't use any

that wasn't perfect.

I squeezed out sponges, shoveled rubble, carried heavy packets of tiles.

It was exhausting.

I was extremely weak and thin.

The first few years I baked a cake for Natasha on her birthday and

chucked it away after a couple of weeks.

But I always tried to keep Natasha alive in my mind.

to include her wherever she was.

I tried to let her know somehow, maybe by telepathy, that I was thinking of

On my birthday, I always remembered all the birthdays I had celebrated with lots

of other kids and with a special cake.

And how different it is now.

all alone in the cell.

Well, of course, at the beginning nothing.

The kidnapping, of course, but all the humiliation and the other

things didn't come till later.

Then I really began to hate him for the way he was torturing me.

But maybe the secret, the reason I survived all those years, was because

I forgave him for everything almost as soon as it happened.

I think if I hadn't forgiven him,

I would have been so full of hate and

negative feelings that it would have become unbearable and it

would have destroyed me physically.

The kind of crime he committed is usually the result of some

illness or injury.

And a person can't usually do anything about an illness.

But this criminal had a conscience.

He still had a conscience.

He was aware on some level of what he was doing.

You could see that he was weak and unstable because of some kind of illness

injury.

He had become so unstable that he saw the kidnapping as the solution to his

problem.

It didn't matter what the problems really were or how he thought this could

help, but he did see it as a solution.

That actually made me feel...

pity and compassion for him.

Because many people are looking for the meaning of their lives and many fail.

Some commit suicide, others take a wrong turning.

And he thought that if life hadn't given him what he wanted,

he must take it by force.

He felt that he must become like everything that had injured him and made

ill.

Seven years have passed since Natasha Kampusch is kidnapping.

Seven years in which she has grown into a young woman.

No one would recognize her now.

They're still looking for her, or rather for a name in police files.

And that allows her kidnapper to take her out into the city, even to work for

him. renovating an apartment.

Many people ask why I didn't simply run away while he was busy.

But he always made sure I was carrying something heavy or there was some other

reason I couldn't just run.

He was very good at keeping up the pressure.

And we'd be out in his van, and I wasn't allowed to speak to anyone.

He said he'd kill anyone I spoke to, or he'd kill me and anyone who'd seen me.

It was hopeless.

Once we were on the way to the hardware store, we got caught in a traffic jam.

And there was a police checkpoint up ahead of us.

There was a rather stocky policeman there. A friendly type.

But he didn't look too intelligent.

And I tried to signal him with my eyes that something was wrong,

but he didn't pick it up.

He probably thought I was mentally disturbed or epileptic or something.

Anyway, he didn't notice or ask any questions.

He just checked the car documents and waved us through.

If someone jumps out of a car and starts pounding on the windows of other cars,

they don't look especially normal or trustworthy.

The way I looked at the time, so thin and pale, people might have thought I

crazy or a drug addict.

I own an events hall, and in July 2006, Herr Priglopil called me

and told me he wanted to borrow my trailer.

And one evening we drove to this hall.

He had to pick up a trailer he owned, or he owned

with Holzapfel.

And then I saw Holzapfel.

But I didn't know if he was his accomplice or if he would believe me

was obviously his best friend.

When he came,

he was accompanied by a young girl.

I saw the girl as I opened the door to the hall and he introduced her to me

as an acquaintance.

I shook her hand and said hello.

That was hardly a situation where I could have said something.

So I didn't try to escape.

I just did what I was supposed to do.

shook his hand and said nothing, the way he'd drummed it into me.

Then I had to leave because I was under time pressure.

I got everything that you want.

Like a heart that was so true, just call on me and send a

love with love from me to you.

I could have committed suicide, thought it was much better to be dead than

locked up for good.

But that day, thank heavens, I found the courage and just ran away.

At 1 .04 p .m. today, a confused young girl was discovered in a garden in the

town of Strasshof.

When police arrived, the young woman claimed to be Natasha Kampusch.

He was talking on his cell phone, and he'd told me to vacuum the van,

which I was doing.

The noise was so loud that he walked over to the swimming pool, maybe 11

away.

He'd left the garden gate open, unlocked.

So I grabbed the opportunity.

I left the vacuum cleaner on and ran away, really, really fast, as

fast as my legs could carry me.

When they searched the house, police found a prison cell in the garage.

It has just been reported that the alleged kidnapper has committed suicide.

Then apparently he drove to the train station and he laid down on the tracks.

Then the train ran over his head.

Then he was dead.

Natasha Kampus becomes a media star overnight, darling of the world's press.

The missed tip -off from the police dog handler causes a political storm.

Their talk of cover -ups, mistakes, hard truths.

Austria's scandal -wracked government resigns two years later.

The papers spread rumours of sadomasochism, child pornography rings

accomplices.

Of course they want to make headlines.

Child pornography and Natascha Kampusch are linked all the time.

That's so painful.

No sadomasochists, no pornography ring came by.

As far as I was concerned, I only had contact with a kidnapper.

Did he do something like that?

I don't think so, because he didn't have the time.

But we'll never know.

We could only ask him, and he would probably deny everything.

But no one would believe him, because people like to hear stories about

sadomasochism and child -porn rings.

That's the way it is.

People love horrible things and they can't get enough of them.

They seek them out and exaggerate them and embellish them, make them even more

terrible and disgusting and revolting and vile.

The press asked me straight out whether I was raped or sexually abused and that

kind of thing.

But in my eyes, the way the media treated me after my escape is a form of

too. And they should be punished for it.

In many people I trigger some kind of unconscious aggression.

Maybe the whole crime and what happened to me triggers aggression and I'm the

only one they can still reach and so it all lands on me.

Right from the start I said I'm not a victim.

Because I knew that if I present myself as a victim and show everyone how

terrible it was, they'd never accept me as a normal person again.

They'd say, you, you've debased yourself so far.

What do you think you're doing here?

Go back where you came from. Go back down to your filthy swamp.

That's how most people are. That's how they think.

I just want people to treat me normally.

I deserve a chance like anyone else. I think people should be glad I halfway

survived all this.