Repeatedly shutting her eyes against the glare of TV cameras, the Austrian teenager imprisoned for more than eight years described in a nationally-broadcast interview today the horror of being locked into her dark underground cell for the first time.
The cover of NEWS magazine shows Natascha Kampusch - the young Austrian woman who escaped from her eight-year hostage ordeal two weeks ago.
"I was very distraught and very angry," Natascha Kampusch, now 18, told Austrian public broadcaster ORF in her first televised interview since dashing to freedom on August 23rd while her captor busied himself with a cellphone call.
Early in her captivity, Miss Kampusch said she threw water bottles at the wall in frustration and despair and would have "gone crazy" if kidnapper Wolfgang Priklopil had not occasionally allowed her upstairs six months after she was snatched off the street as a freckle-faced 10-year-old.
The wheezing of a ventilator that pumped air into her cell was "unbearable," Miss Kampusch said in the interview — a 40-minute pre-recorded account that gave Austrians their first glimpse of the young woman whose nightmare entranced the nation.
Since her escape, Miss Kampusch said she slipped away incognito to enjoy some ice cream. "It was nice to smile at people, and no one recognised me," she said, dabbing with a tissue at her eyes, which ORF said were sensitive to light because she was confined to darkness for such a long time.
Earlier today, the weekly magazine News and the mass-circulation daily Kronen Zeitung published separate interviews in which Miss Kampusch said she "thought only of escape" during her entire ordeal and once tried to jump out of Priklopil's car.
The 44-year-old communications technician killed himself within hours of her escape by jumping in front of a commuter train.
When Priklopil took her out on errands, "he always wanted me to walk in front of him, not behind him", apparently to minimise the chances of her escaping, she said.
Miss Kampusch told the newspaper how she attempted to leap from the car, but Priklopil "held me back and then sped away".
She did not specify when that escape attempt occurred, saying only that she felt "it was much too risky" to try to get away because she feared Priklopil would kill her if she failed.
That, she said, didn't stop her from dreaming about beheading him with an axe. "I always had the thought: Surely I didn't come into the world so I could be locked up and my life completely ruined," Miss Kampusch was quoted as saying by News.
"I always felt like a poor chicken in a henhouse. You saw on TV how small my cell was — it was a place to despair."
News printed a large colour photograph of a pensive-looking Miss Kampusch on its cover, showing her with piercing blue eyes and a pink scarf covering part of her strawberry blonde hair.
In the TV interview, she wore a loose, glittery purple blouse and the scarf. The magazine said it interviewed Miss Kampusch at Vienna's General Hospital, where a cardiologist examined her for possible heart trouble. She said she had suffered throughout her captivity from heart palpitations that at times made her dizzy and blurred her vision.
It was unclear whether she has been diagnosed with any chronic problems. Miss Kampusch also said she often did not get enough to eat.
Another Austrian magazine, Profil, had reported that at the time of her escape she weighed just 92lb — exactly her weight when she was taken on March 2nd, 1998, while walking to school.
Miss Kampusch called her escape from her captor's house in suburban Strasshof "completely spontaneous". "I was there behind the gate to the garden and I felt dizzy. I realised for the first time how weak I really was," she said.
But Miss Kampusch added that she felt well enough — "physically, mentally and no heart problems" — to make a run for it. Once out on the street, "I saw a window open and someone busy in a kitchen, and I asked the woman to call the police," she said.
At first, she said, the woman refused to let her inside: "She didn't want me to step on her lawn." ORF said Miss Kampusch had decided which questions to answer and had refused to be asked anything intimate. Police have said she may have had sexual contact with her captor, but have refused to elaborate.
Miss Kampusch told News she regretted that Priklopil committed suicide — "because he could have explained so much more to me and to the police" — but no longer wished to talk about him. She said she wanted to complete her high school education and was considering a range of possible careers, including journalism, psychology, acting and art.
She had not yet decided whether to write a book about her ordeal. Miss Kampusch also told the magazine she loved her parents, who divorced after she was taken, and denied there was any controversy.
Psychologists treating her have said she has been in touch with her mother, but has not asked for her father since they were briefly reunited after her escape. "It was worse for them than it was for me. They thought I was dead," she said.
AP