Fritzl acted alone | Great evil | Sex assault conviction | Psychological damage | Graphic: house of horrors | Health implications | Factfile: 10 other kidnaps | Why Austria?

The scale of the physical scars borne by Josef Fritzl's victims was becoming apparent today as the three children he kept imprisoned for years in a cellar were reunited with their siblings.

While three of the six children to survive from Mr Fritzl's incestuous relationship with his daughter Elisabeth were brought up as part of normal Austrian society, the others lived their lives without daylight in rooms 1.7 metres (5ft 6in) high.

The Austrian authorities revealed that all the imprisoned children have emerged with defective immune systems and suffering from vitamin D deficiency.

Commentary: a society that nurtures secrets

What society would accept the probability of three children being left on the doorstep of Josef F and grant him adoption?

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• Pictures: house of horror

BACKGROUND

• Why are child abuse scandals happening in Austria?

• Analysis: damage caused may never be healed

• Brutal double-life of Josef Fritzl emerges

• Police search other Fritzl properties in Austria

Related Links

• Austria: police convinced Josef Fritzl acted alone

• Torture of the mind is gravest risk to health

Multimedia

• Video: Kampusch on Fritzl family

• Pictures: house of horror

• Comment Central: what about the neighbours?

None of them had ever seen a doctor or a dentist before their release and the oldest, at the age of 19, has already lost most of her teeth.

The height of their prison ceilings has left them each with a cramped physical posture and all three are anaemic.

One of the children is being tested to see if his sight and hearing have been impaired by 18 years of confinement

Experts said that the psychological problems resulting from being the child of an incestuous relationship – and of living in a claustrophobic bolthole – are unique.

“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,” Rotraud Perner, a psychotherapist from Vienna, said.

The details emerged as the two sets of children were allowed to meet by those now caring for them.

In a hospital room an elderly mother hugged her long-lost daughter and sisters smiled shyly at their newly discovered brothers. This was not a conventional family reunion: it was a gathering of the Fritzl clan, divided for years not by continents but by a staircase and a concrete wall.

Ignorant of each other’s existence but joined by the genes of Josef Fritzl, a 73-year-old electrical engineer, the family was reunited under the nervous gaze of Austrian psychiatrists. The fear was that the offspring of Mr Fritzl and his daughter Elisabeth would shun each other.

“But it was not like that – it was astonishing how easy and natural this first encounter was,” Berthold Kepplinger, the director of the clinic in Amstetten where the family is being treated, said.

Until this moment they had led an upstairs, downstairs existence. Upstairs, three of Mr Fritzl’s children – disguised as his grandchildren – were brought up by their strict but seemingly benevolent grandfather and his wife Rosemarie. It was a well-ordered life of sports days, karate training, music lessons and parent-teacher meetings.

Downstairs, three other children and their mother Elisabeth were confined to a three-room dungeon. The two eldest, aged 19 and 18, had never seen daylight, never been to school nor a disco; their experience of the world was channelled through a television set that was on day and night. The third child, aged 5, was barely aware that there was life outside the cell that Mr Fritzl had constructed so many decades earlier, on the pretence of making a nuclear fall-out shelter.

The two worlds collided when Mr Fritzl was arrested. The meeting between the two wings of the family took place on Sunday morning, even before DNA tests had confirmed that they were all his incestuous offspring. The eldest girl was in hospital – and remained there yesterday in an artificial coma – but the other two children, still scared of strangers and the sunshine, were greeted warmly by the three children from upstairs, aged 16, 15 and 11. “It was a genuinely happy occasion, not forced, as was the very moving meeting between Rosemarie and Elisabeth,” Doctor Kepplinger said.

Rosemarie – who is herself a mother of seven children – is 68; Elisabeth is 42. Yet doctors say that 24 years in a bunker has aged Elisabeth so that she looks almost as old as her mother. “We are looking after all of them with a large team of child and adult psychologists, therapists, neurologists, logopedists and physiotherapists,” Dr Kepplinger said. “Each of the patients is traumatised in a different way and we are giving them individual therapy.”

Of the children reared upstairs, brought up on fresh milk and used to playing in the garden, one has a heart problem that may derive from the genetic composition of her parentage. Otherwise, she and the other upstairs siblings are reported to be healthy. All were born downstairs and taken out when they were infants. The explanation offered by Mr Fritzl was that they were dumped on the doorstep by their wayward mother. One was formally adopted, the other two were classified as foster children – entitling Josef and Rosemarie Fritzl to cash benefits.

But these relatively privileged children may also have suffered psychological damage. One was a twin whose brother died three days after childbirth. The dead baby was burnt in the household incinerator by Mr Fritzl. The boy was never told that he was a twin.

During the reunion, Dr Kepplinger said, it was clear that the vocabulary of the downstairs children was very limited; they stumbled and searched for words. Their mother had taught them some reading and writing, although Elisabeth herself lost much of her childhood because of years of sexual abuse that began when she was 11, and her imprisonment from the age of 18. There were no books in the dungeon: the main education, over the years, has been the television.

It was the television that helped to liberate the children – the downstairs family spotted a broadcast appeal for anyone who could locate Elisabeth so that she could supply medical information to help doctors trying to save the life of Kerstin.

Elisabeth administered cough medicine and aspirin to her daughter before she fell unconscious. Josef had supplied no other medication.

How much did downstairs know about upstairs? Did they hear the upstairs children playing in the garden? Police believe the walls were too thick, although one of the tenants in the house now remembers hearing childlike noises from the cellar area. But Josef Fritzl had strictly forbidden any of the tenants from straying downstairs to the basement. And no one – no one – questioned the authority of the Tyrant of Amstetten.

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