Original subtitles

[calm sounds]

[narrator] Strasshof, a prosperous suburb of Vienna.

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

This is her story.

[Natascha] 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 their 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.

And 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.

[soft but dark music]

[hubbub of voices]

[Natascha] 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.

[soft music]

[news anchor] Austria One.

Since yesterday evening, a 10-year-old girl has been missing

in Vienna's Donaustadt district.

Natascha 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 widening 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 very 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.

[Natascha] 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.

[somber music]

[Natascha] I tried to scream, but no sound came out.

My voice box froze. No sound.

The kidnapper said

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

he wouldn't hurt me.

[dark sounds]

[Natascha] 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

'cause when I used to drive home with my mother,

I'd see the treetops and the telephone poles.

So I knew roughly where we were headed.

[the handbrake is pulled and the car door opened]

Then he drove the white truck up to his garage

wrapped me in a blue blanket and carried me into the house.

[dark sounds]

[Natascha] 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.

[mysterious sounds]

Then he left me in the cell on the floor

in the dark.

Natascha was always on time.

So when she was ten minutes late, I thought to myself:

"Where is she? I'm going to call the child-minder."

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.

[clock ticking]

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

[ticking continues]

[menacing sound]

[Natascha] 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.

[menacing sound]

[Natascha] 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 a 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'd burnt my shoes in the first few days.

He said I wouldn't need them.

[narrator] A massive search is launched by police

starting at the housing estate where Natascha 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, 2nd.

She had about a two-kilometer-walk to school,

starting from her home on the Rennbahn estate.

Halfway along, there is a roundabout on the Melangasse.

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.

At first 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.

[metallic knocking]

[Natascha] And then he installed an intercom system

so I could communicate with him.

I couldn't tell if it was day or night

because my inner clock had gone haywire.

[narrator] Years later, the entrance to Natascha's cell is discovered

in the garage beneath a disguised trapdoor.

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

They reveal a safe,

70 centimeters high, screwed flush with the wall.

[dark sounds]

Behind that, the half-meter-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.

[haunting sounds]

Finally, you turned left to open the double wooden doors and step down into a five square meter cell.

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

If he was working fast or he hadn't locked everything

it was a bit less.

The effort was enormous.

Pushing everything aside and opening everything up.

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.

[narrator] The statement by the young witness

triggers an enormous investigation.

Police question 1520 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 8000 inhabitants.

The man's name is Wolfgang Priklopil,

an unmarried 35-year-old communications technician

with no criminal record.

Priklopil 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 Herr Priklopil 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 Priklopil

because I knew he was a reliable person.

[birds chirping]

[Natascha] Later on, he installed a timer.

The lights went on at a particular time,

then it went dark.

Like in a prison where the lights go off at 8 p.m..

[Natascha] 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.

[fan motor rattles and buzzes]

And when it rotated for a long time, it became hot.

The blades began to melt

and then it didn't just make that droning noise

but another annoying sound.

Tock, tock, tock, tock.

And tock, tock, tock again.

That went on until the fan was broken.

[dark sounds]

[Natascha] 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, my stomach would twist into knots.

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

[door creaks]

I remember that Herr Priklopil 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 rock wool would be the best thing to suppress the sound of a hammer drill.

I was horrified.

Horrified to discover from the police investigations

that he used exactly this information to build the cell.

[narrator] Special investigators in Vienna receive a second tip-off

about Wolfgang Priklopil 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 Priklopil isn't registered

as living at the house, his mother is.

Priklopil is only staying there.

His truck was checked on the 6th of April.

The tip-off is filed and forgotten.

Natascha Kampusch has disappeared into thin air.

[ticking noise]

[solemn music]

[mother] Sometimes, when I was giving her pictures a dust in the living room

I would hold them

to my chest or kiss them. And I said:

"Don't give up. You're a strong, strong child."

[Natascha] 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 the tools.

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

he let me up.

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

[dark sounds]

[Natascha] 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.

[Natascha] 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 Priklopil 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 tankful of petrol

I could probably have survived for one or two weeks or even longer.

Depending on how much he gave me to eat.

Isn't that macabre?

[solemn music]

[mother] Sometimes, when I went with the police to identify things,

I felt I was going to 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 Natascha.

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 Natascha's.

[Natascha] 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 it with my mother -,

when I had time,

when I was locked up,

I sorted things out, tidied everything up.

And I dusted.

[Natascha] 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 leave 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 use the back of my hand

to wipe the prints off the refrigerator or the door frame.

[dark sounds]

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...

And then he saw that.

He said he might as well cut it all off.

And he did.

[sad music]

[Natascha] There were times when the torture and the humiliation were so bad

that I ran to the window

and shouted for the police.

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

[dark sounds]

So, of course, sometimes I would rather be in my cell

than 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.

[narrator] The pressure is building on the police to get results.

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

They hope the kidnapper will try to get in touch.

A caller claims to be holding Natascha captive.

But it's a hoax. One of many.

[Natascha] 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.

[dark sounds]

[Natascha] 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

that the hydrochloric acid in my tears would corrode his tiles.

[wind chime]

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.

[solemn sounds]

[Natascha] He just liked having someone to dominate.

And the more I resisted

and answered back

the more satisfying it was for him to 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 Priklopil 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 blond.

Of course, these were hard demands to fulfill.

[somber sounds]

[narrator] A private detective with his own theories about the crime

mounts a campaign 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.

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

Nothing is found.

A year later the private detective insists on another dig.

He suspects Natascha'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.

[mother] And of course, they found nothing.

[dark sounds]

[Natascha] You're locked up there in the dark.

There's no electricity and you're 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.

[birds chirping]

He had lots of books

and he'd probably kept all the books he had to read in school.

And then

I got them.

Later, he went out and bought me non-fiction books.

Because I liked them.

And some dictionaries.

And books on philosophy.

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

So I asked him to set me tests

from maths books.

He was good at maths.

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 and he wanted to dominate me

he just crossed everything out in red ink.

All the 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, grandson.

[dark sounds]

[mother] Some time 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.

Natascha 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.

[dark sounds] [fan motor rattles]

[Natascha] 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 grass and the wind on my skin.

Because, of course, there's 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 my cell.

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?

[birds chirping]

[somber sounds]

[Natascha] For a while I kept a diary.

A kind of work book.

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, he wouldn't use any tile 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 Natascha on her birthday.

And chucked it away after a couple of weeks.

But I always tried to keep Natascha 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 her.

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.

[soft guitar tunes]

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.

[dark sounds]

The kind of crime he committed

is usually the result of some illness or injury.

And the 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 or injury.

He had become so unstable

that he saw the kidnapping as a solution to his problems.

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 him ill.

[narrator] Seven years have passed since Natascha Kampusch's 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.

[Natascha] 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.

[dark sounds]

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.

[dark sounds]

[Natascha] 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 was crazy or a drug addict.

I own an events hall,

and in July 2006, Herr Priklopil 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.

Because he 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.

It 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.

[rattling noise]

[Natascha] ♪ I got everything that you want ♪

♪ Like a heart that's oh so true ♪

♪ Just call on me and I'll send it along ♪

♪ With love from me to you ♪

[Natascha] I could have committed suicide.

Though 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.

[news anchor] Austria One.

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 Natascha Kampusch.

He was talking on his cell phone.

And he'd told me to vacuum the van.

Which I was doing.

[Natascha] The noise was so loud that he walked over to the swimming pool.

Maybe eleven meters 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.

[news anchor] When they searched the house,

police found a prison cell in the garage.

[news anchor 2] It has just been reported that the alleged kidnapper

has committed suicide.

[Natascha] Then apparently

he drove to the train station and lay down on the tracks.

Then the train ran over his head.

Then he was dead.

[narrator] She becomes a media star overnight,

darling of the world's press.

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

There's talk of cover-ups, mistakes, half-truths.

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

The papers spread rumors of sadomasochism,

child pornography rings and possible accomplices.

[Natascha] 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 the 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.

[birds chirping]

[electrical humming]

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 abuse, too.

And they should be punished for it.

[dark sounds]

[Natascha] 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.

[somber music becomes more intense]