Loading ...
In her autobiography she tells how she was beaten up to 200 times a week, chained to her captor while they slept together in his bed, and forced to shave off her hair and work half-naked as a domestic slave.
Miss Kampusch, now 22, was kidnapped at the age of 10 by Wolfgang Priklopil and was confined to a cellar under his garage in Austria.
Her book, entitled 3,096 Days in reference to the amount of time she was held captive, will be published on Wednesday in a deal which reportedly will earn her £1 million.
“I now feel strong enough to tell the full story of my abduction,” she said.
She writes that Priklopil forced her to refer to him as “My Lord” or “Maestro”, and told her “You’re no longer Natascha. Now you belong to me.”
She claims that she was beaten so badly by Priklopil that he broke her bones.
“He hated it when the pain made me cry. Then he’d grab me by the throat, drag me to the sink, push my head underwater and squeeze my windpipe until I almost lost consciousness.
“I also vividly remember the snapping sound in my vertebrae when Priklopil struck my head repeatedly with his fist.”
In her autobiography, which is being serialised in the Daily Mail, Miss Kampusch writes about the trauma of lacking human contact.
“Yet I was still a child, and I needed the consolation of touch. So, after a few months underground, I asked my kidnapper to embrace me.
“It was difficult. I went into a claustrophobic panic when he held me too tight. After several attempts, though, we managed to find a way – not too close, not too tight, and yet tight enough so that I could imagine feeling a loving, caring touch.
She also tells how Priklopil forced her to share his bed.
“When I was 14, I spent the night above ground for the first time. I lay stiff with fright on his bed as he lay down next to me and tied my wrists to his with plastic cuffs. I wasn’t allowed to make a sound.
“As I felt his breath on the back of my neck, I tried to move as little as possible.
“My back, which had been beaten black and blue, hurt so much that I couldn’t lie on it, and the cuffs cut into my skin.
“But when he manacled me to him on those many nights, it wasn’t about sex. The man who’d beat me and locked me in the cellar had something else in mind: he simply wanted something to cuddle.”
Her book reveals that despair forced her to attempt suicide several times.
“I knew I couldn’t spend my whole life this way. There was only one way out: taking my own life.
“At 14, I’d tried several times to strangle myself with articles of clothing. At 15, I tried to slit my wrists with a large sewing needle.
“This time, I piled paper and toilet rolls onto my hotplate. The dungeon would fill with smoke and I’d gently drift away, out of a life that was no longer my own.”
The book’s publication comes at an embarrassing time for the Austrian authorities, as an MP has claimed that police missed tip-offs that could have prevented her imprisonment.
Miss Kampusch escaped at the age of 18 on August 23, 2006. Tipped off that the police were about to arrest him, Priklopil, 44, committed suicide by jumping in front of a train.
source: telegraph.co.uk