VIENNA — The abduction and eight-year captivity of Natascha Kampusch is the story of a nightmare that finally ended -- and a willpower that continues.
In interviews Wednesday on Austrian television and in newspapers and a magazine, her first since the 18-year-old escaped two weeks ago, Kampusch offered a narrative of her life as a kidnap victim that gave a glimpse of the psychological world created by her abductor and her struggle to survive.
Wearing jeans and a lavender blouse, she looked frail in her television interview on the Austrian ORF network, but she spoke with certainty.
She weighs 92 pounds, the same as when she was abducted at age 10.
She often closed her eyes during the interview because she is hypersensitive to light after spending long periods locked in an underground room.
She knew darkness, hunger, fear, intimidation, but ultimately forged an uneasy bond with Wolfgang Priklopil, who abducted her. The 44-year-old committed suicide, lying in front of a train, hours after her escape.
One theme prevails: her absolute determination to get away.
For the first six months after she was kidnapped, Kampusch told interviewers, she was kept in the dark room, unable to see the walls of her prison or her face in a mirror. On the floor was a mattress, in the corner a toilet.
Amid silence broken only by the hum of a ventilator, which she grew to hate, she thought she would go mad.
"There was no bulb, so it was completely dark. I was very desperate, very angry with myself that I hadn't changed sides of the street," she said, remembering how Priklopil followed her the day of the kidnapping. "It was terrible. I was crying because I felt so helpless, so impotent.
"Most of all it was the ventilator that was horrible. I really couldn't bear the noise; I felt I was going out of my mind. I became really claustrophobic. Sometimes I would smash bottles with mineral water against the wall, out of frustration and of hope somebody would maybe hear me."
After six months, she was allowed upstairs to wash. She then began spending several hours a day in the main part of her kidnapper's home. But she was never allowed to forget that she was a captive.
On a whim or because he had to leave, Priklopil would return her to the "dungeon," as she called it in several of the interviews.
