Word: amstetten
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Ever since Josef Fritzl, the authoritarian patriarch of a sprawling family in the north Austrian town of Amstetten, was discovered to have imprisoned his daughter as a sex slave in a cellar for 24 years and fathered seven children with her, Austria has been locked in an emotional debate over what could cause such a crime. Some have claimed Fritzl's sadism to be a vestige of Nazism's moral corruption, others that the psychological strain of living for years under the threat of nuclear destruction was to blame...
...hard to imagine more ill-fated births than those of Kerstin, Stefan and Felix Fritzl. In 1984, their father, Josef, the authoritarian patriarch of an already sprawling Austrian family, locked his teenage daughter Elisabeth into a converted nuclear shelter underneath his house in the town of Amstetten so he could rape her at will. His incestuous abuse led to the birth of seven children, three of whom he kept imprisoned underground with their mother. Until April 26, when Austrian authorities discovered Fritzl's lair, reality for those children stretched no further than their dank, windowless confines, their mother's memories...
...abducted as a 10-year-old and because she was periodically allowed out during her captivity; the Fritzls were kept imprisoned without reprieve. "Time went by very slowly [in the cellar], and we want to maintain this slow pace for them," says Dr. Berthold Kepplinger, the director of the Amstetten clinic where the family is being treated...
...Stefan Fritzl, 18, and his little brother Felix, 5, are getting used to sunlight. After spending their entire lives imprisoned in a cramped, windowless cellar deep underground along with their mother, Elisabeth, they are now being cared for in a special wing of a clinic near Amstetten, Austria. Doctors say the boys and their mother are extremely pale. Their older sister Kerstin, 19, is in the hospital and very ill because of the terrible privations she suffered living in the dungeon created by Elisabeth's father. It was there that he fathered seven children with his own daughter...
Kerstin is fighting for her life. She has been sedated and is on a respirator and is undergoing dialysis. Doctors say she is in a critical but stable condition. Doctors have not specified what she is suffering from. Her admission to a hospital in Amstetten was the trigger that led to the unraveling of Josef Fritzl's double life. The fate of her family came to light after doctors, mystified by her ailment, publicly appealed for her mother to come forward because they needed her medical history. Josef and Elisabeth were then seized by police near the hospital. (See photos...