WITH the poise of an actress, Natascha Kampusch stepped out of the gloom of her dungeon existence last night into the blinding lights of a television studio.

It was her first interview since she escaped the clutches of a psychopath in Vienna. The words tumbled out. Between the ages of 10 and 18 she had talked to one person only: her captor, Wolfgang Priklopil, whom yesterday she called simply “the criminal”. Tens of millions of viewers in Austria and Germany tuned in to hear her.

“I think I was stronger than him,” she said. “He had an unstable personality . . . no self-confidence. Within a few hours of him kidnapping me I could see that he wasn’t normal.”

The slightly built young woman lightly camouflaged her appearance with a headscarf but she showed herself to be highly adept in the 40-minute performance. Her skin was pale and seemed as thin as parchment after years of confinement in the windowless basement prison of the deranged handyman Priklopil.

For the first six months after the kidnap in 1998, she had no contact with the outside world apart from visits from her captor. “After two years he gave me a radio,” she said, “and then he would buy me newspapers. Afterwards he would check that I had not written anything on them. He was paranoid.”

From the age of 12, she had been planning to make a break for freedom. “I promised my future self that I would never abandon the thought of escape,” she said in a clear, sophisticated German that she learnt through reading rather than conversation.

“Once I wanted to jump out of the moving car on to the road but he held me tight and accelerated so fast that I was thrown against the door,” she said. Perhaps the most poignant moment came when she described how, on a rare visit to the outside world with her captor, she would try mutely to appeal for help. “On a visit to a shop with him, I was approached by a sales assistant who said: ‘Can I help you?’ I didn’t know what to do. What could I say? The best I could do was to smile in such a way that I resembled my old photograph which I supposed that the police had issued.”

Syndication of a newspaper and magazine interview is expected to make more than €1 million (£680,000) and is intended to pay for her education. It may also be needed for medical treatment. Fräulein Kampusch, she objected vehemently to being called Natascha, suffered from heart and circulation problems.

“I had palpitations, I was dizzy, had blurred vision, perhaps it was because of lack of food,” Fräulein Kampusch, who shares a room with a teenager in the eating disorders ward of a Vienna hospital, said. “I can identify with anorexics. There were times when I ate very little.”

The thrust of her interview was to correct the image that she had somehow come to terms with her kidnapper and that she had rejected her parents.

In an open letter a week ago she had expressed some sympathy for her captor, who threw himself under a train after her escape on August 23. Last night, perhaps guided by therapists, she spoke in harder tones.

Suicide, she said, “is a waste. No one should kill himself. There was so much information he could have given.” Information, she hinted, that would have helped her to reconstruct her life. As for her divorced parents, she declared bluntly: “I love them. There is no argument with my parents.” Even so, she has yet to have a long meeting with either of them.

She is still reliving her escape. When her captor was distracted by a phone call from his mother, she sprinted across allotments and managed to persuade a woman to help. For 12 minutes before the police arrived, she feared that her kidnapper would find and kill her.

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