Elisabeth Fritzi -- Austria's System Latest Victim or Just Her Father's?

This news story shocked and disgusted me. Curiously, however, I devour every little detail I could get from it. It's a humiliating morbid curiosity that I probably share with everyone who has read and followed this gruesome story.

My memory of my father while growing up were good ones. He would usually wake us up on Sundays in such ungodly hour -- 4 in the morning -- to go to Church with him. My sister and I were really pissed off. We would be nodding our heads off, trying not to sleep while the priests drone on and one about some sins that we didn't even know of at that time.

By the time the one-hour mass is over, my sister and I would be completely awake and we would walk to town with our father to buy bread.

I remember my father tugging my hair whenever I would have migraines and he would tell me stories until I would fall asleep.

Those are good memories, huh? This is probably I almost vomited when I read the story of Elisabeth Fritzi in Austria. The daughter who was repeatedly raped and locked in the cellar by her monster father.

Elisabeth Fritzl, 42, was raped repeatedly since being lured into the dungeon built below the family home in a small Austrian town. Police said she had been "broken" by the experience.

Josef Fritzl, 73, admitted to police that all the children were his.

Three of them - Kerstin, 19, Stefan, 18, and Felix, five - were held captive with their mother in a series of windowless rooms and never saw the sunlight until they were freed on Saturday.

Incredibly, three others, Alexander, 12, Monika, 14, and Lisa, 16, were raised in the home by Fritzl and his wife. They were adopted by the couple and went to school, leading apparently normal lives.

The other child, a twin, died shortly after birth and the body burned by Fritzl in a boiler. Detectives today revealed details of the complex of rooms where Elisabeth was held since August 1984.

The three children kept prisoner with her were born there and are thought to have spent their entire lives underground.

I followed this story and I am still following it. As much as it horrifies me, I seem to be morbidly curious. It haunts me. I cannot believe how such evil could possibly exists.

People are saying that this story is the shadow of the Swastika.

The truth is that, for Austria, the Nazi era is a can of stinking worms that the country has fought for more than half a century to keep the lid on.

While Germany has largely overcome the darkest pages of its history by laying them bare, apologising and facing up to the past in order to build a new future, Austria never underwent this catharsis.

The result is that the whole of modern Austria is in denial about its recent past; its national identity has been founded on a tissue of lies and wishful thinking.

There is a disturbing parallel between the way respectable Austrians choose to bury the truth about the country's Nazi history and the manner in which the apparently respectable Fritzl covered up his monstrous behaviour in the cellar.

Perhaps. That author calls it Austria's institutionalized schizophrenia. You could blame it on the system. You could blame it on the society that perhaps gave Fritzi the Nazi way of thinking. But I believe, in the end, he is completely accountable for his actions.

He is a man with half humanity or perhaps with no humanity at all. I have heard of incest. Our region is flooded with reports of incest and it horrifies me, but nothing has practically made me vomit as much as this one.

Austria's highest penalty for crimes like this is 15-year imprisonment. 15 years?! He does not deserve that kind of mercy. The appropriate punishment is 24 years, locked in a 5'6" cellar with no one to talk to. This does not even answer for the repeated rapes or the murder of one of the children.

I have never embraced my daughter as tightly as I did after I heard this story.

If you're wondering if the mother knew about it, she said she didn't. I doubt it though. I think she was just too scared to do anything about it. I don't know if she was a coward, a broken woman or an evil woman like her husband.