For 8 years, Natascha was held captive behind a trap door. Then she saw her opportunity to escape.

Natascha Kampusch was 10 years old when her mother let her walk to school by herself for the first time.

That morning, in May 1998 in a street in Vienna, Austria, Natascha noticed a man standing by a delivery van up ahead.

As she walked past, the man grabbed her by the waist, opened the door to the van and threw her inside.

"Everything happened in one fell swoop," Natascha later wrote in her book, 3,096 Days.

"The moment the delivery van door closed behind me I was well aware of the fact that I had been kidnapped, and that I would probably die."

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Once inside, the man, an IT specialist by the name of Wolfgang Priklopil, told Natascha to sit down on the floor and not move.

Remembering a crime show she watched on TV, the 10-year-old knew she needed to note as many details about her kidnapper as possible to later help police. So she asked him a question.

"What size shoes do you wear?" she said, before being snapped at her to be quiet.

Natascha later arrived at Wolfgang's home in the suburb of Strasshof, not far from her parent's home.

Once there, he carried her through a trap door and into a tiny soundproof and windowless cellar under the garage — a space she would call home for the next 3,096 days, or eight years.

"It was beneath a trapdoor in the garage, down some stairs, through a hollowed-out concrete wall hidden behind a cupboard," she told The Guardian.

"It was five by five metres, bare, soundproofed, windowless — and filled with the rattle of a fan."

Wolfgang told her the doors and windows were booby trapped, and her family had forgotten about her.

The house and room where Natascha was held captive for eight years. Image: Police Handout via Getty.

Natascha would soon learn that Wolfgang had two sides to his personality.

"I call the one part the dark side, and the other part the bright side," she later told Sunday Night.

"He was... this inconspicuous and polite person on one side, and the other side, the dark side, he [was] a brutal person."

Natascha said that because Wolfgang "admired" Adolf Hitler, he wanted her to "feel like the Nazi victims".

"He gave me little to eat, little clothes, humiliated me, let me do heavy work and shaved my head," she told Austrian broadcaster ORF.

Over the years, Natascha was beaten up to 200 times a week, chained to her captor while they slept together in his bed, and forced to act as a domestic slave while half-naked.

"He wanted to show more and more that he was stronger than I was, that I was someone who had to obey without question," she told The Guardian.

"I saw that I had no rights."

The treatment took its toll and in her book she wrote she tried to take her own life a number of times.

By the time she reached 18, she had been pushed to the "brink".

One day she turned to Wolfgang and told him, "I really am grateful to you for not killing me and for taking such good care of me. That is very nice of you. But you can't force me to stay with you. I am my own person with my own needs. This situation must come to an end."

Recalling the conversation to The Guardian, she said Wolfgang looked defeated.

The door behind a cupboard led from the garage into a hidden room. Image: Police Handout via Getty

"I think he understood that I was at the end of my strength... I had no energy left, but in a way that empowered me. He had nothing to counter it with."

Weeks later on August 23, 2006, Natascha was in the garden vacuuming Wolfgang's car when an opportunity to escape presented itself.

Wolfgang's phone began to ring, and he walked away from the noise of the vacuum to answer it.

"Previously he has observed me all the time, but because of the vacuum cleaner whirring in my hand he had to walk a few steps away to better understand his caller," she told German newspaper Bild.

Natascha knew it was her chance.

"I stood frozen," she recalled in her memoir. "Then everything happened so fast. I dropped the vacuum cleaner and bolted to the garden gate. It was open."

After almost a decade in captivity, the now 18-year-old ran from the house to a local allotment where she spotted two men and a boy.

She asked them to call the police, but they ignored her and continued on.

"Then I saw a woman in a garden house and knocked on her window and whispered: 'Please help me!'" she told the publication.

"She asked what I was doing in her garden and then called the police."

Natascha was finally free.

Later that day, Wolfgang was found dead. He had taken his own life.

After escaping, Natascha's story quickly made headlines around the world.

That year she told The Guardian, she 'mourned' for Wolfgang.

"In my eyes his death wasn't necessary," she told the publication. "He was a part of my life. In a certain way I mourn for him because of this."

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Following Wolfgang's death, Natascha later bought the "house of horrors" she was kept in for almost a decade.

A lawyer told the ABC she received two-thirds of the property as compensation and reached an agreement with Wolfgang's mother for the remaining third.

Speaking about her decision to keep the house, she told Sunday Night, "I don’t want to have false people in this house... I don’t want to have a kind of theme park in here."

She says that while there have been calls for her to destroy the home, the law prevents her from doing it.

"I’m not allowed because there are many bureaucratic hurdles. I think it's not, not easy to go there... I'm emotional."

She said she still cleans the house, where she would sometimes spend weekends, just as she was forced to do by Wolfgang.

In the years since, Natascha, now 37, has openly shared her story and the horrors she was subjected to as a kid.

Her book, 3096 Days, was released in 2010 before it was made into a film three years later. She later released a second book, 10 Years of Freedom in 2016.

Natascha, who has also become an activist, and briefly a talk show host, tries to help families in similar situations,

In 2017, on the 10th anniversary of British toddler Madeleine McCann's disappearance, she told her parents to "never give up" during an interview on Good Morning Britain.

"Please stay strong and never give up yourself. I hope that Madeleine appears."

Feature Image: Getty.

This article was originally published in June 2023 and has since been updated.