Kidnapped Austrian Teenager Thought ‘Only of Escape’

BERLIN — Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian teenager who was held in captivity beneath a garage for eight years, said yesterday she had thought “only of escape” during her imprisonment and dreamed of cutting off her kidnapper’s head with an ax.Speaking to journalists for the first time since her ordeal ended with her escape two weeks ago, Ms. Kampusch appeared self-confident, witty, articulate, and strong-willed.A journalist who interviewed her for the Austrian magazine News said she had the vocabulary of a “highly-educated academic.”Dressed like a typical 18-year-old in jeans, platform shoes, and with her strawberry-blonde hair tucked under a purple silk scarf, Ms. Kampusch gave a sweeping interview covering everything from details of her captivity to her plans for the future. Most movingly, she spoke of her constant thoughts of escaping from the windowless, airless cell in which her captor, Wolfgang Priklopil, held her.“I thought only of escape,” she said. “I always had the thought: Surely, I didn’t come into the world so I could be locked up and my life completely ruined,” she told News. “I always felt like a poor chicken in a hen house. You saw on TV how small my cell was — it was a place to despair.”She said she became convinced that she would never see her grandmothers or her pet cats again. On her release, she learned they had all died.“I had terrible thoughts,” she said. “Sometimes, I dreamed that I would cut off his head. Had I had an ax … You see the extent to which the brain is tormented when it is searching for a solution.”Rather than having fallen in love with her captor, Ms. Kampusch said she spent almost her entire incarceration working out how to escape from Priklopil, whom she called a “criminal.”“When I was only 12, I dreamed that around the age of 15 — or at some point — that when I was strong enough to do so, I would break out of my prison.“I repeatedly puzzled about when the time would be ripe. But I knew I couldn’t risk anything, least of all a failed escape attempt. A failed attempt might have meant never being able to come out of my cell ever again,” she said.“I had to work on building up his trust over time.”Ms. Kampusch finally escaped last month and, hours later, Priklopil threw himself under a train. She called his death “a waste,” saying she would have had many questions to ask him.She agreed to give the interview on the understanding that she could chose which questions to answer and approve the final version. The interview, the first time that she has met anyone beyond the circle of experts caring for her, did not touch on the subject of whether Priklopil sexually abused her.After her escape, she showed an extraordinary presence of mind by demanding to be put under a blanket as police escorted her away so that she could not be photographed.Recalling the time shortly after she was kidnapped, Ms. Kampusch said she felt “written off” when she heard on the news that lakes were being dragged in the hope of finding her body.She said she hoped to travel abroad and at home, specifically taking the train to Berlin from Vienna. “The journey is what I look forward to, not the place itself,” she said.One of the first things she wanted to do was get a flu shot, complaining that she was very susceptible to illness having not been exposed to germs for years.She hoped to go on a cruise with her mother, dismissing out of hand the numerous reports that relations between them were frosty.“I love my mother, and she loves me,” she said. “We don’t need to live together to know that we belong together.”

Kidnapped Austrian Teenager Thought ‘Only of Escape’

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