Girl in the Cellar Read Online Free Page A

area. There was a football pitch we used to like to stop at—I was mad about football and always wanted to kick the ball about—and she would always join in, although I don’t know how much she liked football. But that’s what she was like, always willing to join in with everything.
    We never used to take food with us, we went home for that, usually at my place, as my mother was there and Natascha liked her a lot. I never saw Natascha’s mum in Hungary. She was only ever there with her dad. I know he was a great cook, obviously, especially with the bakery stuff, but I think he likes just to rest at the weekends and get away from it all. But you could see he loved Natascha a lot, they had a great relationship, and he was really considerate and caring about her. When we had the grill evenings, sometimes there would be five people there and sometimes there would be 15, but it was always the same.
    When Natascha wasn’t playing she would be cuddling her dad. I think he was the most important player in the whole search for her. He never gave up. Everyone else I’m sure believed she would never be seen again—I didn’t think I would ever see her again. But her dad never for a second wavered in his belief that he would one day find his Natascha.
    Natascha’s last day of freedom before her ordeal began was spent in Hungary with her father and the Bartsch family. They shared a meal together, which was late coming to the table, making them late in turn getting back to Vienna and triggering the row that was to have such catastrophic consequences.
    It was a meal where everyone sat around ‘laughing and talking’, according to Erika Bartsch, Hannes’s wife. Natascha had spent the morning playing with the Bartsch family sheepdog and the early afternoon picking plumsfrom her garden to make jam. She is remembered as a child especially fond of nature, who loved butterflies and enjoyed the nature trails which criss-crossed the region. She liked climbing trees, stroking the heads of the horses in a nearby meadow and, in wintertime, took special delight in sledging on nearby hills. The absence of nature, of the seasons themselves, when she was a prisoner in his dungeon, must have been particularly hard for her to bear.
    Sometimes she took a sewing kit with her on her weekends away and made clothes for her dolls. Often she would weave bracelets from grass and tell her hosts, ‘I am making one to give to Mami.’ She is remembered, above all, as the opposite of the man who would come to possess her: sociable, likeable, charming, kind and extrovert. Frau Bartsch recalled those happy days:
    The kids would play football together on the pitch nearby, or go skipping or hopping, or else they were climbing in the trees. Right opposite us there was a path that led into the woods which was great for the cycles. It was a good life for them. They were forced to amuse themselves to a certain extent, because the other children were Hungarian and they only had a few words, so they couldn’t really talk with each other.
    When we had a barbecue the kids would play in the garden—we had 2,600 square metres—and we adults would sit and talk about everything under the sun. Natascha’s mother never came there, she was always just there with her father. You could see she was happyand had a good relationship with him. Sometimes when she was tired she would sit on his knee and have a cuddle, they were very close.
    Hungary was a kind of Narnia for Natascha, a never-ending holiday away from the dispiriting tower blocks and potholed streets where she lived. There was no one there to call her Porky or poke fun at her bed-wetting. In fact, according to her father, it stopped when she was there.
    They were joyous episodes, which she cherished when in captivity, and her father hopes to take her back there soon to explore the haunts of a lost childhood.
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    A lost childhood indeed—and a childhood