If you want to hide in Austria, where better than Village X? After passing through snow-crusted fields full of pear orchards, you cross the Danube by an almost secret bridge.

If you can find your way over that moat you have to traverse miles of marshland on roads where the signs seem to have been switched to cheat an invading army.

Suddenly you find yourself in front of Elisabeth Fritzl’s new home and your heart melts because it becomes clear that she has exchanged her dungeon existence, her windowless 24 years, for a kind of fortress.

It is brightly painted and has kids’ toys in the garden but it is a defensive installation. What does Ms Fritzl, 42, fear in her new existence?

Brutal double-life of Josef Fritzl emerges

How the horrifying news spread from a sleepy town in Austria throughout the rest of the world

Multimedia

• Video: Fritzl in court

• Pictures: Josef Fritzl trial

BACKGROUND

• The face in court that finally shamed Fritzl

• Fritzl incest children in 'astonishing' reunion

• Josef Fritzl is the limit, the death of hope

• Elisabeth Fritzl tells of father's cruelty

• Great evil took place in that cellar

Related Links

• Fritzl: the darker side to Austrian culture

• Fritzl 'relieved' trial is over, says prison official

• Fritzl: no investigation into official failings

Her father Josef is now safely under lock and key. The paparazzi have snatched a picture of her with one of her children but interest has waned. Claudia Bandion-Ortner, the Justice Minister, promised to tighten further Austria’s strict victim-protection laws. “We can certainly do more to work against the misdeeds of the paparazzi,” she said.

The parish priest Father J, a 52-year-old former Carmelite, says the community is one that has always had to make new beginnings.

“Throughout history there have always been terrible floods here, the latest in 1954 and 2002 and you can only guess what that means for the village’s sense of itself, of its history.”

The villagers are fiercely protective of Ms Fritzl and her children. “Fritzl - never heard of him,” says Andreas, who runs the local pub.

As we move down the few streets it gets spookier. Net curtains twitch, nobody answers the doorbell. One neighbour can be heard hushing his barking dog. There is a sense of each resident passing on the news that there are strangers in town.

The drive into Ms Fritzl’s house, her new upstairs world, is marked by a strange little pile of debris: a grinning Halloween pumpkin head and a broken wooden angel. It was her brother Harald, 46, who spotted that there was a house to rent in Village X. He had been her confidant in her adolescence before she was shoved into the dungeon.

Harald — the only member of the Fritzl clan apart from Elisabeth prepared to testify against Josef — had his own unpleasant encounters with their father. Once Josef smelt alcohol on his breath and broke his nose. Now Harald is a neighbour.

It is in her fortress that Ms Fritzl has the chance to make the transition from the dungeon in which she was confined to a normal Austrian parent. The constant in this transition is her desire to protect the children. Their birth in the cellar kept her sane. Defending her children gave her the power to fight; she was a slave but also, as a mother, an equal.

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