Word: stefan
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...hard to imagine more ill-fated births than those of Kerstin, Stefan and Felix Fritzl. In 1984, their father, Josef, the authoritarian patriarch of an already sprawling Austrian family, locked his teenage daughter Elisabeth into a converted nuclear shelter underneath his house in the town of Amstetten so he could rape her at will. His incestuous abuse led to the birth of seven children, three of whom he kept imprisoned underground with their mother. Until April 26, when Austrian authorities discovered Fritzl's lair, reality for those children stretched no further than their dank, windowless confines, their mother's memories...
...From this subterranean realm, Felix, 5, Stefan, 18, and Kerstin, 19, have now come blinking into the world. While Austria recoils in horror at the crime that produced the children, and grapples with how it remained undiscovered for so long, the Fritzls have a more basic challenge ahead of them: survival. Can children constrained to such a stunted sphere adjust to the world's cacophony? And what can modern science and medicine do to help...
...condition of the oldest child, Kerstin, demonstrates the physical insults of a life so confined. Ravaged by an unidentified infection, she is currently in a medically induced coma. There have been reports that, despite her youth, many of her teeth are missing. Stefan has fared somewhat better, although his skin, like that of his siblings, is ghostly pale. Life in a warren of narrow corridors and low ceilings has damaged the spatial orientation of Stefan and Felix, and there may be more serious consequences for all three: health experts say a chronic lack of sunlight and exercise can leave children...
...boys knew the world only through television and the little that their mother remembered. And so now, Stefan Fritzl, 18, and his little brother Felix, 5, are getting used to sunlight. After spending their entire lives imprisoned in a cramped, windowless cellar deep underground along with their mother, Elisabeth, they are now being cared for in a special wing of a clinic near Amstetten, Austria. Doctors say the boys and their mother are extremely pale. Their older sister Kerstin, 19, is in the hospital and very ill because of the terrible privations she suffered living in the dungeon created...
...Stefan and Felix are also getting to know the rest of their family. The clinic is caring for Elisabeth's three children who were taken to live upstairs when they were babies, Lisa, 15, Monica, 14, and Alexander, 12, as well her mother Rosemarie. The family had what officials described as "an astonishing reunion" at the clinic last Sunday. "They are talking to each other. They have so much to say to each other," Kepplinger said. He said he had the impression that they were feeling as well as possible given the circumstances. Beginning 24 years ago Josef Fritzl, after...