An undated photo released by Austrian police in March 1998 shows Natascha Kampusch who vanished in Vienna, Austria, on her way to school on March 2, 1998 when she was ten years old. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo) Photo Gallery >>>

    BEIJING, Sept. 7 (Xinhuanet) --  An Austrian girl who was kidnapped at the age of 10 and held for eight years in a basement "dungeon" before she escaped two weeks ago gave her first TV interview Wednesday.

    Speaking on television, 18-year-old Natascha Kampusch talked about the years of loneliness, hunger and agony she spent in a windowless cell beneath the garage of Wolfgang Priklopil's house near Vienna.

    "I promised myself I would grow older, stronger and sturdier to be able to break free one day," Kampusch said in her first television interview, looking fragile but composed and confident despite her ordeal and the subsequent media frenzy.

    
    "I made a deal with myself that the Natascha of the future would come back to free that little 12-year-old girl," she said in the interview with Austrian Television (ORF).

    
    Kampusch recalled her horror when being thrown into a pitch-black room, and banging on the wall with mineral water bottles and her fists in the futile hope that someone would hear her.

    "It was terrible,"  Kampusch said, her face pale and her voice raw from a cold. "I had claustrophobic feelings in this little room."

    "It was harrowing and if he had not taken me up into the house at some point to have a bit more space to move, I think I might have gone crazy."

    The kidnapper, Wolfgang Priklopil, who killed himself after Kampusch's escape by jumping under a train, never left her side, warning that if she tried to seek help, he would kill her, himself and any would-be rescuer.

    "I wasn't scared (for myself) -- I love freedom and for me death is the ultimate freedom, the redemption from him," she said. "But he said all the time he would first of all kill the neighbors, then me and then himself."

    Until the morning of Aug. 23, when she was vacuuming his car and he turned his back on her for a split second to answer a cellphone call.

    "I knew, in that moment, if not now, then maybe never again," Kampusch said. She left the vacuum running and fled. She leapt over a garden fence, then clambered over more fences separating adjacent gardens of fruit trees and colorful flower beds. After one neighbor shrugged and turned away at her pleas for help, she said, she approached a woman in a kitchen window, who called the police.

    "I told her (Priklopil) could kill us," Kampusch said. "Despite this the woman was very concerned I would step on her lawn."

    Kampusch is currently living in a hospital, shielded from reporters and cared for by doctors and psychiatrists

    As to her goals, Kampusch said she wanted first to obtain her high school diploma. After that, she said, she hoped to travel and to help victims of hunger in Africa and kidnapping in Mexico. She even talked about dreams of an acting career.

    "I had all these thoughts about what I have been missing, like my first boyfriend and all that," she said.

    "But I already personally fulfilled my biggest wish in the past few days -- freedom!"  Enditem

(Agencies)