Posted on 04/30/2008 7:35:05 AM PDT by COUNTrecount
The children who were imprisoned in a cellar with their mother for their whole lives speak to each other in growls, it emerged today.
They speak normally to strangers - despite not having a wide vocabulary - but communicate in animal-like noises when alone together.
Austrian police chief Leopold Etz, 50, said: "When the media write that the children speak, this is just half-true. Among each other, they communicate with noises that are a mixture of growling and cooing.
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Astonishing: Elisabeth pictured before she disappeared and her mother, Rosemarie Read more...
Father used a government grant to build his underground prison Tenant who lived in incest house for 12 years heard knocking from sex dungeon 'but did nothing' Pictured: Incest father on 'boys holiday' to Thailand as his captives languish in his secret dungeon thousands of miles away
"If they want to say something so others understand them as well, they have to focus and really concentrate, which seems to be extremely exhausting for them."
The children all have defective immune systems and the eldest, Kerstin, 19, who is critically ill with kidney failure, has lost most of her teeth due to vitamin deficiency.
Fresh details came to light today about the family, who were kept locked up by Josef Fritzl at the family home in Amstetten, Austria.
Fritzl, 73, imprisoned his daughter Elisabeth for 24 years, repeatedly raping her and fathering her seven children, one of whom died soon after birth.
All the surviving children are suffering from vitamin D deficiency and are anaemic. Stefan, 18, is being tested to see if his sight and hearing are damaged. The low ceilings in the cellar have left the family with cramped physical posture, and Felix, five, mostly crawls rather than walks.
Dr Berthold Kepplinger, who examined the children, said they were taught some reading and writing by Elisabeth - but she had forgotten most of her education.
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Shock: A woman lights a candle during a vigil which was held in Amstetten
The family had an emotional reunion on Sunday. Elisabeth, 42, and her mother Rosemarie, 68, sobbed as they embraced. The mother told her daughter: "I am so sorry, I had no idea."
Stefan and Felix reacted to the world outside the dungeon with amazement. Felix asked: "Is that God up there?" when he saw the moon for the first time.
Mr Etz said he was very excited when he saw a cow. "He is full of joy and excitement, he slaps the air when he can't control his excitement," he said.
Felix also hums a tune to himself that police think his mother must have sung when putting him to bed.
They are also all in psychiatric care to help them come to terms with the revelation about their father, Josef, and the life he inflicted upon them.
Elisabeth gave birth to seven children in total during her time in the dungeon, one of which died three days after being born 12 years ago. Scroll down for more...
Cramped: The tiny bathroom where Elisabeth and three of her children were forced to live
Yesterday DNA tests revealed that Fritzl was the father of Elisabeth's six surviving children. He has been remanded in custody for 14 days.
Three of them - Kerstin, Stefan, and Felix - were kept locked in the dungeon with their mother.
The others - Monika, 14, Alexander, 12, and 16-year-old Lisa - were taken from the cellar by Josef and allowed to lead apparently normal lives upstairs with him and his wife.
Berthold Kepplinger, director of the psychiatric clinic where the family is being assessed, said: "The wife of the accused man clearly had no knowledge of the terrible fate of her daughter.
"The two women fell into each other's arms, and just wept bitterly, they did not want to let go of each other and just held each other.
Monster: Josef Fritzl has been remanded for 14 days "The two said they loved each other and pledged never to be separated again, with the mother saying, 'I am so sorry, I had no idea'."
Just as extraordinary was the meeting between Elisabeth's two sets of children - those who lived "upstairs" in the house and those condemned to the dungeon.
With the exception of Kerstin, who remains critically ill, all were brought together on Sunday with their mother and grandmother.
Mr Kepplinger said: "The reunion went incredibly well, they got along very well and it was far more successful than anticipated.
"It was astonishing how the grandmother and Elisabeth immediately came together. It was a very emotional scene."
He added: "As you can imagine they were all very distressed and extremely worried about meeting each other for the first time.
"The one that seemed to be the most distressed was the five-year-old, Felix.
"He would jump and start at the slightest disturbance and remained holding on to his mother the whole time."
Fritzl, who experts have said has a "power complex", reportedly told his secret family he would turn the dungeon into a gas chamber if they tried to escape.
Psychologists say that the ordeal suffered by the four at his hands would mark them indefinitely.
Bernd Prosser, a clinical psychologist told Austrian television, said: "The four will never be able to live normal lives. I am afraid it is too late for that."
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Disbelief: Media satellite trucks from around the world surround Fritzl's property yesterday
Chief Inspector Etz was the first police officer to set eyes on the frightened Stefan and Felix. He said: "They both looked terrified and were terribly pale.
"They were taken upstairs from the underground bunker and appeared overawed by the daylight they had never experienced before.
"The real world was completely alien to them."
A hospital spokesman said: "All sides have had a lot to come to terms with - to accept that just two floors below members of their family were hidden away and that their grandfather is also their father.
"The stories they were raised with - that the mother had joined a bizarre sect and abandoned them at birth - have also been exposed as lies."
The shocking story emerged at the weekend after Kerstin fell into a coma and Fritzl took her to hospital. Doctors grew grew suspicious and called police, who rescued the family on Saturday night.
Last night villagers in Amstetten, which lies 74 miles west of the Austrian capital Vienna, held a caddle-light vigil for the family.
This story really gets to me. How incredibly sad. I cannot fathom how a person could be so cruel. What a horrible, horrible thing to do.
It’s not cruelity. It’s evil. I can not read it all. I think that when normal people are confronted with evil, they cannot look at it straight on. In a way, it is similar to how the Bible describes how we cannot look straight on at the goodness of God. It’s too blinding. Evil is the same in a way but instead of being blinding, it’s repulsive. Our minds cannot not accept it or comprehend it. Those who say there is no evil or good in the world, that everything is relative, are dead wrong. There are people who can do tremendous acts of bravery out of love and goodness just as there are those who commit horrendous evil due to hate or indifference. There is nothing relative about any of it.
I don’t get how he could include the four children upstairs and the wife knew nothing about anything...
Yet, as a nation we sat idly by as sadistic madmen did essentially the same thing to hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. Then we allow a large, loud segment of our population to bemoan the fact that we have deposed, or are in the process of deposing the very same madmen.
One is heartbreaking, One million is a statistic.
Water and Top Ramen - nothing else. He'd miss his jaunts to the beaches and laying in the sun = he deserves no human contact of any kind - or daylight - for the rest of his evil life.Good God - if he had died at any time - that dungeon would have become a tomb...it should now become his - the ultimate "House Arrest"
I know what you mean. Where did she think these babies kept coming from?
Three of them - Kerstin, Stefan, and Felix - were kept locked in the dungeon with their mother.
The others - Monika, 14, Alexander, 12, and 16-year-old Lisa - were taken from the cellar by Josef and allowed to lead apparently normal lives upstairs with him and his wife.
So do they have the death penalty in that country?
well said. Evil too perverse to speak of or look at straight on. Yet God’s grace and mercy will abound for these precious souls whose lives have been forever impacted by the horrors they have been endured.
The depravity of the human soul is mind-boggling.
You really think the three upstairs led a “normal life”? Surely he raped all the girls throughout their lives as well. Surely this will be revealed soon enough.
And his wife? He picked her because of her mental, emotional psychological limitations indeed. She is as much a victim as the others. No one in their right mind would not have suspected from day one about the horrors in the basement. The wife should not be legally liable, but she was likely as much his prisoner in other ways as the children and grandchildren were.
Are you 'series'? It's Europe fer crying out loud!
I think his cover story was that their mother lived with some crazy religious cult and occasionally showed up and left a baby.
twins and other siblings who spend great amounts of time together have been known to do this, or at least a variation of it.
They can invent their own communication language.
I remember when Ronald Reagan passed away, a political cartoonist drew a cartoon of Reagan in Heaven saying he can now remember Nancy, his children, everything. It made me think. If we do get there, will we look like ourselves here? Or will we look like what God wants us to be? When the captives get to heaven - I cannot comprehend a compassionate God not allowing them into Heaven - will they be able to communicate without growls?
Believe it or not, the most this man can get in that insane nation is 20 years.
He is 73, so he’ll probably die in prison.
I was thinking the same thing, but he also took one of the boys upstairs. And I’m trying to imagine the set-up because it’s difficult for me to understand how Elizabeth could’ve been imprisoned at 19. She was not little then, probably not even physically. It’s possible that he’d been raping her even before he imprisoned her, and I know that a hurt mind can make one very vulnerable, but I think a lot of women would concur that if someone, even our pervert fathers, were to attempt to take us to a dungeon, one of us would be terribly hurt (maybe even to death) in the fight that ensued.
God help her and her children.
Something ain't right here. Where did the wife think the creep got the kids from?
She had siblings. She was 11 when he started to rape her. This article is much more interesting/descriptive.
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