Childhood in a Cellar

By Anastacia Mott Austin

The news of an Austrian man kidnapping his own daughter and keeping her in a cellar for 24 years was bad enough. Then came the news that he had repeatedly raped and abused her, fathering seven children.

Three of the children had been kept in the dungeon-like cellar along with their mother, two of them until adulthood.

Austrian man Josef Fritzl has been charged with kidnapping his then-18-year-old daughter Elizabeth in 1984, and forcing her to live in a windowless, soundproof cellar under his home. He also faces potential murder charges stemming from the death of one of Elisabeth’s children shortly after birth, and will also face murder charges if the oldest daughter, Kerstin, dies of her illness. He is also charged with sexual assault and other related offenses.

Neighbors of Josef Fritzl and his wife Rosemarie in the quiet town of Amstetten say they had no idea of the horror that went on beneath the home.

Even tenants who lived there on and off over the years told reporters they didn’t know there were people living beneath them.

Fritzl explained Elizabeth’s disappearance by saying she had run away to join a cult and had told her parents she would never return. He crafted a letter that was supposedly from Elizabeth so that her mother would believe the story.

When Elizabeth began having children, the tyrannical abuser allowed the first two to remain in the cellar with her. Three other children born to Elizabeth were taken from her, and Fritzl claimed to authorities that they had been left on his doorstep as infants with letters from Elizabeth saying she could not care for them.

When twin boys were later born, Fritzl claims that one of them died soon after birth and his body was thrown into an incinerator. The other one stayed in the cellar with his mother.

The mother and her three children were discovered after the oldest, Kerstin, began having serious health issues and was hospitalized. She is now in a coma in a nearby hospital, and is expected to die of multiple organ failure. Her illness may have been caused by a lifetime of no sunshine and very little health care.

Her fate seems to be sealed, and local Austrians mourn the fact that she had been hidden away her entire life, and nobody knew.

But what about the other children? A nineteen-year-old boy and his five-year-old brother were rescued from the cellar along with their mother.

What can life possibly be like for these children now, and is there any hope for them to have normal lives?

Doctors and psychologists say there is much hope for the younger boy, who at five years old may be able to one day catch up to his peers.

But first their physical challenges must be dealt with. The older boy suffers from anemia and a permanently hunched posture, having grown up in a tiny room only five feet, six inches high. He has lived his entire life without sunshine, without exercise, without books, without social interaction beyond his fellow prisoners in the cellar.

None of the children had ever seen a doctor or a dentist, and the oldest daughter had already lost almost all of her teeth. The two boys have limited speech, and though it’s clear that their mother tried to teach them some reading and writing, they were not allowed to have books, and their primary understanding of any outside world was the television. However, not having ever experienced the world they saw on TV, they would have had no way of knowing that theirs was the strange, enclosed world hidden away.

The children are currently undergoing extensive testing to assess their physical and mental health.

While physical effects can be diminished with physical therapy and gradual exposure to sunlight, the psychological scars may never heal, especially for the older children.

"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," said Rotraud Perner, a psychotherapist from Vienna, to reporters.

Elisabeth’s own mental condition was said to be fragile, however. Accounts of her physical appearance described a white-haired woman who looked far older than her 42 years. One cannot fathom how she would have held onto any shred of sanity, even for the sake of her children.

However, doctors reported a joyful reunion between Elisabeth, her mother Rosemarie, and all of the surviving children, at the clinic where they are being treated.

"It was astonishing how easy and natural this first encounter was," said clinic doctor Berthold Kepplinger. "It was a genuinely happy occasion, not forced."

A team of psychologists is working with the family, and a clinic representative told reporters that many traumas, both physical and emotional, will need to heal before they can look forward to normal lives. The children, both those living underground and their siblings who had no awareness of the situation or the criminal duplicity of the man they believed to be their father, will need to undergo extensive treatment, and may never fully recover.

"We are looking after all of them with a large team of child and adult psychologists, therapists, neurologists, logopedists and physiotherapists," said Dr. Kepplinger. "Each of the patients is traumatized in a different way and we are giving them individual therapy."