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April 30, 2008
Posted: 253 GMT
AMSTETTEN, Austria — “We want to show the world that not all Amstetteners are bad people,” Christian Dunkl says as he lights a candle in the pouring rain. About 200 people came to a candlelight vigil in the evening to show solidarity with the victims of what Austrians officials say is one of the worst crimes in their country’s history. Amstetten, a small town in Western Austria remains in shock after police discovered a local man, 73-year old Josef Fritzl was holding his own daughter as a sex slave in a dungeon underneath his house for 24 years. Elizabeth is now 42 years old and she claims her father raped and beat her on many occasions during her ordeal. Fathering seven children with her, one of which died shortly after birth and whose body Fritzl has admitted he burned in a furnace in the house.Gertrude Baumgarten can’t conceal her outrage. “I only have a small pension,” she tells me as we are sitting in her kitchen, “but I would spend my money to see him hang on a rope.” Gertrude worked in the same company as Fritzl in Amstetten, but she says she almost never talked to him and never wanted to be in his presence. “He had such an arrogant posture,” she says, “I just never wanted to be close to him.” But Gertrude was close to Fritzl’s wife Rosemarie, who authorities say, never knew her husband was hiding their daughter in the cellar and sexually abusing her. “Rosemarie was always a sweet person,” she says, “she did not know what was going on, she said her daughter had run away from home.” Fritzl took three of the six surviving children away from their mother, his daughter, and told his wife, Elizabeth, the alleged runaway had left them at the doorstep because she could not take care of them. Gertrude Baumgarten recalls the first time Rosemarie told her about finding a child. “She said Elizabeth had probably had the baby with a cult member and couldn’t take care of if, and then she said: “What can we do, we have to take care of the child.” Verena Huber, a 14-year-old high school student, went to school with one of the children raised by Josef and Rosemarie Fritzl. Verena says 12-year-old Alexander seemed to have no clue about what was going on. “He always told us his mother was dead,” she says, but describes Alexander as a happy and “normal” child. Most people in Amstetten say that although Josef Fritzl was reclusive, there was never a reason to believe something was amiss. Karl Dallinger is in the Amstetten fire brigade. He says two of the children, Monika and Alexander, participated in the brigade’s “youth days,” where young people learn the basics of fighting fires and First-aid. “They were both always willing to learn,” he says now, adding, “they were good kids, they seemed to be happy kids.” And he adds their grandmother often came to fire brigade events with her grandchildren even helping to cook spaghetti there. By almost all accounts, the Fritzl family was a normal part of the Amstetten community. That, it seems, is what most shocks people in this western Austrian town. Posted by: CNN Correspondent, Frederick Pleitgen |
 
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never knowing anything but a tiny room with no window… never being able to do anything. Simply… never being. It is chilling. My heart grieves for what they have lost. Thier childhood, thier happiness, thier lives.