Natascha Kampusch, a Scarred Child Kidnap Survivor

The first words of the young Austrian woman who emerged in 2006 after eight years held captive in an underground bunker were eerily similar to those of Amanda Berry when she called police in Ohio on Monday.

"My name is Natascha Kampusch. You must have heard of my case," she told incredulous police more than 3,000 days since disappearing on her way to school.

"I'm Amanda Berry. I've been kidnapped. I've been missing for 10 years," said Berry, found on Monday with two others missing for years, according to a recording of her frantic 911 call.

In perhaps the most notorious case of its kind, unemployed telecoms engineer Wolfgang Priklopil grabbed Kampusch from a pavement in Vienna and bundled her into his van on March 2, 1998.

There he shut her in an underground room of less than six square metres (65 square feet) he had constructed under his garage at his house in nearby Strasshof.

He told Kampusch that the doors and windows of her dungeon were booby trapped and that her family had forgotten about her.

Over the following years, he hit her repeatedly, gave her very little to eat -- sometimes nothing for days on end -- and forced himself upon her once she reached puberty.

"I never screamed... My body was unable to scream. It was a silent scream," Kampusch, now 25, said earlier this year of her ordeal.

Taking advantage of a momentary lapse of concentration by Priklopil -- he was talking on his mobile phone about selling the same white van he had kidnapped her with -- Kampusch ran away on a summer's day in 2006.

Priklopil committed suicide by throwing himself under a suburban train the same day. He was 44.

Just like Berry and her fellow prisoners Gina DeJesus and Michele Knight, Kampusch also emerged into a media storm, making headlines around the world.

She has since written a book about her experience, given several television interviews and earlier this year a movie, "3096 Days", named after the length of her imprisonment, was released.

But Kampusch appears to have struggled to readjust to normal life, saying she has "grown apart" from her parents. She lives alone in Vienna with her pet fish and orchids, and likes watching crime series on TV.

Having missed out on an education, Kampusch worked to complete her school studies and began training to be a goldsmith, which she then abandoned.

In 2011, she opened a children's hospital in Sri Lanka, funded by the many donations she has received and money earned from her autobiography.

Her best friend, she said in an interview with German television this year watched by 4.7 million people, is her hairdresser.

"The time I am most happy is when I am sitting in the chair and she is doing my hair," she said in her tiny voice.

"I try to go about every day in a positive way, to deal with what happened to me," she said.

"A carefree youth is something I will never be able to get back again. What helps me now is to communicate with other people and that these people share with me experiences from their youth."

Kampusch has also spoken of her confused feelings about mummy's boy Priklopil, saying she cried when she heard he was dead.

"With my escape, I hadn't only freed myself of my tormentor. I'd also lost someone who was inevitably very close to me," she wrote in her book.

Kampusch said that Priklopil, "the man who beat me, locked me in his cellar and let me almost starve to death, wanted to be cuddled".