Two years now passed in relative tranquillity. The day would begin with the sound of the alarm clock at 6 A.M: breakfast, then a wash, then lessons, as taught to Kerstin and Stefan by their mother with the help of books and newspapers that Josef could occasionally be persuaded to buy for them. Around the kitchen table the children learned reading, writing, and the rudiments of arithmetic. They would take regular exams. Much of the rest of the time would be spent either watching television—films were their favourites—or at meals, with Josef joining them at the table as often as he was able: a regular participant, he liked to think, in “family life.”
The Mercur supermarket was barely ten minutes’ walk from Ybbsstrasse, but Josef, in his continued efforts to avoid detection, preferred to buy his groceries in the relative anonymity of the Metro supermarket in Linz, an hour and a half’s drive away. A receipt later discovered by the police would show that the provisions with which he would furnish the cellar included frozen fish fillets, bottles of Fanta, bread dumplings, sausages, cans of various preserved foods, potatoes, rice, beans, spaghetti, and ice cream. From these basic ingredients Elisabeth would, three times a day, attempt to conjure up a meal. And there was usually sufficient flour, butter, and sugar for her to bake a cake for the children’s birthdays. Although the atmosphere of the cellar did not naturally lend itself to festive occasions, Elisabeth would attempt to provide them with “parties” of sorts, decorating the rooms with paper chains and sewing together patches of different materials to make “dressing-up” costumes for them; these parties delighted Kerstin and Stefan except on those occasions when their father was present. Josef liked to join in the celebrations by appearing in the cellar wearing a mask, always the same mask; it depicted the face of Krampus, a horned creature from Germanic fairy tales that, according to tradition, would beat unruly children. He would creep up on his children in the mask “as a joke.” But Josef was a frightening man at the best of times. And, more often than not, the day would end with one or other of the children in tears.
There were “good times,” although the highlights of these monotonous days could be counted on one hand: the time Josef brought the gift of a shovelful of snow to the cellar; the time he presented his family with their first mirror, the only one Elisabeth had seen in more than eight years and an object of wonderment and fascination for two children who had so far only glimpsed their reflections on the backs of spoons and kitchen knives. (Four years into Elisabeth’s incarceration, he had replaced the plastic cutlery with metal.) When Kerstin turned five and her father, in a fit of uncharacteristic generosity, had brought down to the cellar a container of yogurt, a strawberry cake, a bottle of Fanta, a package of chips, and two Kinder Surprise eggs. And the time, in June 1993, when Elisabeth had switched on the television and recognized an old friend from her days training in Waldegg, who had become a prominent psychotherapist. She was so happy to see him. But these episodes were always short-lived, and sooner or later her father’s unpredictable and violent behavior would return. By far the happiest times in the cellar were the times when he wasn’t there at all.
Life carried on as it had always done. The assaults continued, with the difference that, now that his daughter had apparently given up any attempt at resistance, Josef had convinced himself that the two of them were engaged in “a proper relationship.” He would take her into one of the bedrooms while the children stayed in another room. He later said that his feelings toward his daughter had become mutual. If you believe Josef, Elisabeth would kiss him when he came down to the cellar, as a wife might kiss her husband when he comes home from work. Just like any other couple.
April 1996: Elisabeth’s twelfth year underground. Aboveground it was the year that Josef finally sold the Seestern, the family’s holiday home and B&B at Mondsee, and began to invest his money in properties closer to home.
By the end of 1995 Elisabeth knew she was pregnant again. And both the movements in her womb and the size of her belly suggested that she was carrying twins. The delivery of twins, even by the best obstetricians, is considered a complicated undertaking, and for months Elisabeth had been preparing herself for the birth in a state of unusually profound anxiety. But around 6:50 P.M. on April 28, 1996, she succeeded in giving birth to identical twin boys. Three days later, one of them would be dead.
Having accustomed himself to dropping in on his “downstairs family” with increasing frequency, Josef was in the cellar when the birth pangs began. Six P.M. found him with Kerstin and Stefan in the kitchen, where together they ate supper while next door, on the floor beside the double bed, Elisabeth struggled with the agony of labor. Her father was beside her when the first twin, Michael, was born. Josef had taken the baby, whose umbilical cord he noticed to be conspicuously pale, and laid him on the bed. Then came Alexander, a more difficult birth. A situation that, in a hospital, usually requires the intervention of a doctor.
The babies seemed fine until, a few hours later, Michael began to experience difficulty breathing. He was wheezing and refusing to feed, and his legs were becoming rigid. The next day he was still alive, but his condition had deteriorated. Observing this, his father, who had come down into the cellar with a new cot for the twins, merely shrugged and said to Elisabeth, “What will be will be,” at which point Elisabeth panicked and pleaded with him to fetch help. But Josef, hoping that the situation would resolve itself, simply disappeared upstairs for another couple of hours.
Michael Fritzl died shortly after midday on May 1, 1996. At the time of his death his mother, in her desperation, tried everything to save him, but it hadn’t worked and she saw how his body had turned quite rigid and blue in her arms. For twenty-four hours his tiny corpse, which Elisabeth wrapped in a blanket, remained in the cellar. On May 2, Josef returned to the cellar, picked up the body, carried it through to the furnace room, and burned it. In a characteristically sentimental—and false—recollection of the events, Josef would later claim that he and Elisabeth had first baptized their dead son and together resolved to cremate him because “we didn’t want to bury him and let the worms eat him.” Josef, he claimed, then gathered up Michael’s ashes and scattered them in the garden. Josef would later say to her, “Perhaps he would have been disabled. Who knows, maybe this was a good thing.”
Another year passed. On August 3, 1997, a third child was found on the doorstep of number 40: Alexander, a little blond boy of fifteen months who would grow up, despite the glasses he would need for nearsightedness, looking “the spit of Josef,” according to Paul Höra. The first Paul had heard of the discovery was in an “angry phone call” from Josef on August 5. “Pauli, they’ve dumped another kid in front of the house,” Josef’s irate voice had barked down the line. To which Paul, calling Josef by the familiar form of his name and only half-joking, had replied, “Sepp, this has got to stop. Your house is turning into a kindergarten.” Again the case was reported by the Fritzls to social workers, who noted: “Lisa and Monika are jealous of the boy and are asking when the boy will be picked up again.” The Fritzls “try hard to give Lisa and Monika the necessary attention so that they [will] not feel neglected.” Even though the arrival of a third child required an “adjustment” by the Fritzls, they were deemed “capable” of coping. “Herr and Frau Fritzl treat the children with love and they obviously feel and the children obviously feel happy in the family.” Also noted by social workers was a complaint by the Fritzls, who felt they were “limited in their ability to plan holidays” because Alexander had not yet received Austrian citizenship and were now “hoping” for the direct intervention of the governor of Lower Austria, Erwin Pröll, who, they expected, might be able to fast-track the procedure.
Amstetten’s social services had been happy enough for the Fritzls to become Alexander’s legal foster parents. But, as was the case with Monika, Josef hadn’t applied to adopt the boy because, as a foster parent, he stood to be paid more by the state: around four hundred euros per month per child. For a third time he escaped detection. It appears t
hat no attempt was made to find Elisabeth, nor to examine the note she had left behind with her son. And, despite the displeasure Josef had initially shown at the discovery of the child, he soon seemed to accept Alexander into the family “as one of his own.” Indeed, he felt confident enough of Rosemarie’s ability to take care of the children that later that year he took off on a safari holiday in Kenya, leaving both his “families” for more than two weeks. In Kenya he had written a postcard to Paul Höra and his new girlfriend, Andrea Schmidt. He chose “one of the funny ones,” with a photograph of two mating rhinoceroses on the front:
Dear friends,
By the time you get this postcard, I will already be at home. The weather’s lovely and I’m as brown as a coconut and already on the rhinoceros. Food’s good, lots of entertainment and action, three bars in the hotel across the road, two discos. Impossible to be bored here.
Looking forward to seeing you again, Sepp.
As an afterthought Josef had added, in English, the words “bush baby,” a slang term for a woman’s pubic hair, suggesting that his interest in traveling all the way to Kenya extended beyond his wish to familiarize himself with the local wildlife. Because he hadn’t gotten around to finding a stamp in Africa, the card had arrived at Paul’s house in Bavaria several weeks later bearing an Austrian postmark.
Elisabeth’s children had given her reason to live. And she would later say that the only way she had been able to cope throughout the terrible twenty-four years of her captivity was to survive for their sakes. Elisabeth’s role as a mother was seriously compromised, not only by the physical restrictions of the cellar but by the dangers that living there entailed. While Josef was away in Kenya, her health began to deteriorate in ways that sometimes made it difficult for her to function. She was just thirty-one, but she began to exhibit the health problems of a woman many years older. At times like these she missed her family even more; she wished she did not feel so sick all the time. She also had the problem of explaining to her children the reality of their situation. Josef would often come down to the cellar with news of the things Lisa, Monika, and the rest of the family were doing in the outside world. At Elisabeth’s request he also started bringing down photographs of the family: vacation photos and happy scenes that made it plain to the children he was forcing to live in the cellar that theirs was not a normal family life, whatever their father chose to tell them or wanted to believe. And over time they, too, would evolve their own double lives: the life they led when their father was there, and the other life that existed only when he was not. Playing along with his fantasy; humoring him; sitting with him silently at dinner, which was always an ordeal as he would lose his temper at the slightest thing: If one of the children didn‘t, in his opinion, hold a spoon properly or wasn’t sitting straight enough, he would retaliate so violently it was hard for the children not to cry. Behind her father’s back Elisabeth would always remind her children of the true facts of their incarceration. She insisted on that, because it was important for her that they understood reality and realized that what was going on down there was not normal—that there was another world, not only the horrible, bad one.
Sixty-one when he sold the house at Mondsee, Josef was approaching an age when many men begin to look forward to retirement. But he showed no signs of slowing down. He was still an unusually energetic man who, it was often said, could have passed for someone twenty years younger, and he had set about looking for new ways to occupy himself. In the late 1990s he established a clothing company selling women’s underwear, but after that venture proved unprofitable there was a lull in his business activities, which he would not resume with any real vigour until 2002.
In between there were fishing trips; several new, never-to-be-completed additions to the house; and another vacation. In 1998 he again traveled with Paul Höra to Pattaya, this time with Andrea accompanying them. Paul, who had by then bought himself a video camera, doesn’t just remember his friend’s relaxed and jocular composure throughout the trip, he has the footage to prove it: Josef, tanned and laughing uproariously at some private joke, his belly bulging over a tiny pair of swimming briefs; Josef lying on Pattaya beach, being massaged by a local man; and Josef tearing into an enormous loin of pork in a German-style restaurant. The three of them were gone for four weeks, and Paul still can’t believe how his best friend could have managed to idle away his time in such apparent high spirits knowing what he did about what was going on at home. “Look at him laughing. He’s laughing,” Paul will still say incredulously when he watches the vacation tape. “What was he thinking? What was going on inside his head?” In one shot Andrea, who was filming at the time, takes in the interior of a clothes shop. The lens lingers over a table full of T-shirts, then zooms in inquisitively on the far corner of the shop, where Josef can be seen asking a member of staff to show him one of the pretty red party dresses on display. A few seconds later the film ends. Josef, having suddenly become aware of being watched, had shouted at Andrea to switch off the camera. Paul recalls, “He was really quite angry, saying, ‘Nobody needs to see that,’ and I was saying ‘We’re only filming the goods here, Sepp. Relax, I can cut it out. What are you buying that for anyway?’ It was obvious that the dress was far too small for Rosemarie; it would never have fitted her, and that’s when Sepp said that it wasn’t for Rosemarie but for his ‘girlfriend.’ Well, we weren’t about to argue. What business is it of ours if he has a girlfriend? That sort of thing happens in plenty of families.” Paul, knowing what he does today, adds, “It’s as if he had convinced himself that Elisabeth really was in that cult and that the woman in the cellar was his girlfriend. That’s who the dress must have been for: Elisabeth.”
Living under Rosemarie’s guardianship as they did, Lisa, Monika, and Alexander were progressing well at the local school. They were healthy and, although they were never the best students, they were to become proficient, especially in music, with Monika and Alexander taking up the trumpet, Lisa the flute. Alexander, particularly, would grow to be an outgoing and cheeky little boy, the “class clown,” a Game Boy and Nintendo “addict” like many of his classmates. Michaela Bernhard, the mother of Alexander’s best friend from school, was among the mothers who would sometimes leave their children in Rosemarie’s care at the house in Ybbsstrasse, where they would splash around in the outdoor pool of a summer afternoon. Frau Bernhard would remember that most of the other mothers felt both pity for and solidarity with Rosemarie, who was judged to have been very badly treated by her daughter who had landed these three children on her. She remembers: “Rosemarie was always very engaged with the children, always organizing parties, working with the voluntary fire brigade who would put together events for the kids, cooking at school or preparing confetti and that kind of thing.” Rosemarie, she says, was also viewed in the community as a perfect example of “a good Catholic woman,” “family-oriented,” and “devoted” to her foster children, and on good terms with both her local priest and the school’s religious education teacher. A keen volunteer, she belonged to the group of Tisch-Mütter, mothers who would entertain groups of children preparing for their first communion at their houses, where together they would bake bread, make candles, and come to grips with the basics of the Catholic faith. Frau Bernhard still believes that Rosemarie couldn’t have possibly known about her husband’s abduction of Elisabeth, primarily because she seemed to be “a very naive woman” but also because “it would have taken nerves of steel to have all those parents coming in and out of the house if you knew what was going on in the cellar right underneath them.” Although the Fritzls came from an era when domestic violence was all too commonly accepted as the lot of a married woman, Frau Bernhard never detected in Rosemarie the signs of an abused spouse. Indeed, like many other parents, she had been impressed at Josef’s engagement with the children. Not that he helped much around the house—a husband’s nonparticipation in the rearing of children was nothing unusual even in the marriages of Frau Bernhard’s generation—but Jo
sef was often seen driving Lisa, Monika, and Alexander to school in his beaten-up old black Mercedes, and on his arrival at the school gates in Allersdorf he would meet the approving glances of the teachers; bringing up these three foster children, he would explain, called for particular vigilance from their grandparents: “I have to be careful in case those people from the cult come to get them.”
Although there was no denying that Rosemarie made an excellent foster mother, for Josef one of the unforeseen drawbacks of having his wife raise the children he had conceived with Elisabeth was the attachment they would later develop to their grandmother. He would later say that he had never felt sufficiently loved by the children he had with his wife and that his “downstairs children” had always been much more forthcoming in their affections. But this state of affairs always seemed to change once the children were allowed up into the house and permitted the same degree of freedom as other boys and girls, with the result that, after a year or two, they, too, seemed to “desert” Josef. Alexander, for example, who had long been Josef’s favourite child, now became, in his father’s view, an “Oma-Burli,” a “Granny’s boy,” clinging to Rosemarie’s apron strings and ceasing to lavish on his “grandfather” what he considered the right degree of affection. And so when, a week and a half before Christmas Day 2002, Elisabeth gave birth for a seventh, and final, time in the cellar of Ybbsstrasse, and the resulting child turned out to be a boy, Josef was overjoyed.
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