Austria: scale of the physical scars from Josef Fritzl emerges

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article3842886.ece
From The London Times
April 30, 2008
Austria: scale of the physical scars from Josef Fritzl emerges
Roger Boyes in Amstetten, Austria

The scale of the physical scars borne by Josef Fritzl's victims was
becoming apparent today as the three children he kept imprisoned for
years in a cellar were reunited with their siblings.

While three of the six children to survive from Mr Fritzl's incestuous
relationship with his daughter Elisabeth were brought up as part of
normal Austrian society, the others lived their lives without daylight
in rooms 1.7 metres (5ft 6in) high.

The Austrian authorities revealed that all the imprisoned children
have emerged with defective immune systems and suffering from vitamin
D deficiency.

None of them had ever seen a doctor or a dentist before their release
and the oldest, at the age of 19, has already lost most of her teeth.

The height of their prison ceilings has left them each with a cramped
physical posture and all three are anaemic.

One of the children is being tested to see if his sight and hearing
have been impaired by 18 years of confinement

Experts said that the psychological problems resulting from being the
child of an incestuous relationship – and of living in a
claustrophobic bolthole – are unique.

“Psychologically a lot depends on what their mother has told them over
the years, whether she has explained the reason for their imprisonment
or whether they have come to accept it as a normal condition,” Rotraud
Perner, a psychotherapist from Vienna, said.

The details emerged as the two sets of children were allowed to meet
by those now caring for them.

In a hospital room an elderly mother hugged her long-lost daughter and
sisters smiled shyly at their newly discovered brothers. This was not
a conventional family reunion: it was a gathering of the Fritzl clan,
divided for years not by continents but by a staircase and a concrete
wall.

Ignorant of each other’s existence but joined by the genes of Josef
Fritzl, a 73-year-old electrical engineer, the family was reunited
under the nervous gaze of Austrian psychiatrists. The fear was that
the offspring of Mr Fritzl and his daughter Elisabeth would shun each
other.

“But it was not like that – it was astonishing how easy and natural
this first encounter was,” Berthold Kepplinger, the director of the
clinic in Amstetten where the family is being treated, said.

Until this moment they had led an upstairs, downstairs existence.
Upstairs, three of Mr Fritzl’s children – disguised as his
grandchildren – were brought up by their strict but seemingly
benevolent grandfather and his wife Rosemarie. It was a well-ordered
life of sports days, karate training, music lessons and parent-teacher
meetings.

Downstairs, three other children and their mother Elisabeth were
confined to a three-room dungeon. The two eldest, aged 19 and 18, had
never seen daylight, never been to school nor a disco; their
experience of the world was channelled through a television set that
was on day and night. The third child, aged 5, was barely aware that
there was life outside the cell that Mr Fritzl had constructed so many
decades earlier, on the pretence of making a nuclear fall-out
shelter.

The two worlds collided when Mr Fritzl was arrested. The meeting
between the two wings of the family took place on Sunday morning, even
before DNA tests had confirmed that they were all his incestuous
offspring. The eldest girl was in hospital – and remained there
yesterday in an artificial coma – but the other two children, still
scared of strangers and the sunshine, were greeted warmly by the three
children from upstairs, aged 16, 15 and 11. “It was a genuinely happy
occasion, not forced, as was the very moving meeting between Rosemarie
and Elisabeth,” Doctor Kepplinger said.

Rosemarie – who is herself a mother of seven children – is 68;
Elisabeth is 42. Yet doctors say that 24 years in a bunker has aged
Elisabeth so that she looks almost as old as her mother. “We are
looking after all of them with a large team of child and adult
psychologists, therapists, neurologists, logopedists and
physiotherapists,” Dr Kepplinger said. “Each of the patients is
traumatised in a different way and we are giving them individual
therapy.”

Of the children reared upstairs, brought up on fresh milk and used to
playing in the garden, one has a heart problem that may derive from
the genetic composition of her parentage. Otherwise, she and the other
upstairs siblings are reported to be healthy. All were born downstairs
and taken out when they were infants. The explanation offered by Mr
Fritzl was that they were dumped on the doorstep by their wayward
mother. One was formally adopted, the other two were classified as
foster children – entitling Josef and Rosemarie Fritzl to cash
benefits.

But these relatively privileged children may also have suffered
psychological damage. One was a twin whose brother died three days
after childbirth. The dead baby was burnt in the household incinerator
by Mr Fritzl. The boy was never told that he was a twin.

During the reunion, Dr Kepplinger said, it was clear that the
vocabulary of the downstairs children was very limited; they stumbled
and searched for words. Their mother had taught them some reading and
writing, although Elisabeth herself lost much of her childhood because
of years of sexual abuse that began when she was 11, and her
imprisonment from the age of 18. There were no books in the dungeon:
the main education, over the years, has been the television.

It was the television that helped to liberate the children – the
downstairs family spotted a broadcast appeal for anyone who could
locate Elisabeth so that she could supply medical information to help
doctors trying to save the life of Kerstin.

Elisabeth administered cough medicine and aspirin to her daughter
before she fell unconscious. Josef had supplied no other medication.

How much did downstairs know about upstairs? Did they hear the
upstairs children playing in the garden? Police believe the walls were
too thick, although one of the tenants in the house now remembers
hearing childlike noises from the cellar area. But Josef Fritzl had
strictly forbidden any of the tenants from straying downstairs to the
basement. And no one – no one – questioned the authority of the Tyrant
of Amstetten.
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