Robbed of Her Adolescence

The startling escape from captivity of Austrian Natascha Kampusch is the very stuff of the human condition.

After years confined in a cell she suddenly sees and grabs a chance to escape from her cruel jailer.

It’s a glorious tale of ascent from dire oppression to freedom.

But it is a tale with a twist. When Wolfgang Priklopil captured her and bundled her into a white van in 1998, Natascha Kampusch was only 10 years old.

As Kate Connolly tells the story, Natascha

was ordered to climb down some narrow concrete steps, to slip through a square hatch into a tiny outer room, and then to walk through to another door. Behind it was the dank and windowless soundproof cell that would be her home for the best part of the next decade.

Now she is 18 and weighs less than she did 8 years ago.

No doubt there have always been monsters who have confined little girls like this. But somehow, in the impersonal and anonymous cities of today, it seems too easy. That is what “privacy” really means. You can get up to mischief without anyone knowing, or having the right to know, what you are up to.

Yet if freedom has any meaning it means precisely the right to do things without asking permission.

Unfortunately, as Vladimir Nabokov prophetically taught us half a century ago in Lolita, it also means men with a taste for “nymphets” getting the opportunity to indulge their taste.

By all accounts, Priklopil kept his captive thin and nymphet-like until the end.

But now Natascha has escaped into freedom. Now she must learn to live with the challenges and the temptations of freedom.

The psychologists say she will need long-term therapy. Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they?

She will still have to learn to live in freedom, poised like every other 18 year-old on the cusp of adulthood. But she must do it without the benefit of a life lived, for the last critical eight years, in the world.