Horror in Amstetten and the monster named Josef Fritzl

Have you been in Amstetten? Have you heard or read the story about the so-called "monster father" named Josef Fritzl? I have been reading Neumarkter Tagblatt, a local German newspaper here in Germany since Monday about Josef Fritzl. It is always in the front page for 4 days row now. Before I begin with this horrible story let me tell you first a bit about Amstetten.

Amstetten, as you can see in the google map below is a town in Lower Austria. It is the capital of Amstetten District. Why I know this place? During my adventure last June 2007 in Austria, we passed by in Amstetten boarding a train. Me and my friend saw a lot of towns and municipalities as we rode the train from Salzburg to Vienna. That was a very long trip.
What about Josef Fritzl? As described by Neumarkter Tagblatt newspaper, he was called "The monster father" after raping more than thousand times his own daughter and locking her on their basement for 24 years? Can you imagine a life in the basement without seeing light for 24 years? Fritzl's daughter named Elizabeth was raped since she was 11 years old. She also has 7 children with her own father wherein 6 were alive and 1 was dead after some hours of giving birth. The baby was also burned in the oven by his own father and grandfather at the same time.

Can you imagine this horror? How can a father do this to his child? I know we already heard a lot of stories about children who are sexually abused by their own father. But this story is different. It is very horrible, terrible, hideous and dreadful. What else can I say? It totally shocked me and I can't fathom on my mind how can a father do that to his own child? Is he in his normal mind? What can you say about this my friends? I know I can't judge people because I don't have the right to do so. But if ever you have to ask me of the kind of sentence that Fritzl had done, I would say, he must pay for it by being sentenced to life imprisonment. I also can't say that he will be sentenced to death because I believed that only God can take away people's lives. Anyway, today if I'm not he is already sentenced to life's imprisonment. I believed that is a fair and just verdict.

Here is an excerpt of the story;

"Police spokesman Franz Polzer told CNN that 73-year-old Josef Fritzl admitted holding his daughter, Elisabeth Fritzl, 42, hostage in the windowless cell and fathering seven children by her.

"The mother had memories [of the outside world] and got used to the situation," Polzer told a press conference Monday afternoon. "The others knew nothing else."

The main question reverberating from the small Austrian town: How could a man keep his daughter locked in his basement for 24 years, where she gave birth to seven of his children while her mother and three of those children lived upstairs without an inkling of the horrors in the cellar?

Please read the rest of the story here

Lastly, I would like to offer a prayer to the victim and her children and family and to all victims of sexual abuse that they may be given the courage, determination, peace of mind and the strength to continue to face life trials and uncertainties. God bless us all!