Natascha Kampush: 3096 Days in Captivity

Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil" – used to characterize the prosaic, workaday nature of the Nazi regime – was so apt and so popular that it ended up being overused, becoming, according to one critic, a "worsened word".

You can't help but hear echoes of the phrase, however, while watching Austria's Natascha Kampusch lead viewers through her 8 1/2 years of captivity at the hands of an engineer named Wolfgang Priklopil.

Taken on the way to school at the age of ten, Kampusch is an eerily composed victim of a grotesquely malevolent kidnapping, and although she has forgiven her jailer you can't help but wonder whether she will be imprisoned by him for the rest of her life.

Priklopil is unavailable to shed light on their weird, pathological relationship, having thrown himself in front of a train a few hours after learning that Kampusch had escaped.

The mind reels back from considering what he did to the girl and her family, even though she has resolutely refused to go into personal and intimate details since her escape.

The horror of her ordeal is possibly thrown into harsher relief because of the banality of the moments leading up to her capture, the fight with her mother, the prosaic details of the morning of the kidnapping and how pure chance played a part in her ill fortune, her mother having offered to drive her to school that day.

Banal too, the setting in which it all takes place, an unremarkable suburb of aesthetically worthless tenements and semi-detached houses. It could be anywhere.

But the longer Kampusch is on screen and the more she speaks of her ordeal - her fears that Priklopil might die and leave her to staff in her heat in the cellar, his dire warnings that the exits from the house were booby-trapped, the understanding she gives us of just how much control over a young, mind a malignant character like him can have - the greater becomes our appreciation for just how strong and resilient this young woman is.

Since her release many people have openly speculated that she is suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, in which she came to identify with her tormentor.

There may well be an element of that in the relationship, although her failure to escape over 8 1/2 years is just as easily explained by the power an adult can wield over the imagination and worldview of a child.

In the end we can never know. Although Kampusch has chosen not to flinch away from public view, there is much she will not reveal about her time in the cellar.

And a legitimate question would be why anybody would want to know those details anyway other than for sensation's sake?

Natasha Kampusch was a survivor. She lived and even flourished, managing to educate herself in the dark, when many others would simply have shriveled up and wasted away.

For that reason alone she is a fascinating study in human nature, probably more worthy of our interest than the man who held her prisoner.