AUSTRIA:AUSTRIAN WOMAN Elisabeth Fritzl, imprisoned by her father for 24 years, made an "extraordinary effort" to make life as normal as possible for her children in their cellar prison, doctors have said.
Police in Amstetten said yesterday that Josef Fritzl spent years planning his imprisonment of Elisabeth in an underground cell. He took no chances, hiding the chamber behind eight locked doors, some hidden and two sealed with electronic combination locks, including a 500kg reinforced door of steel and concrete.
A week after escaping the prison, Elisabeth Fritzl and her children are being kept away from media at a clinic in Amstetten.
"She really made an extraordinary effort and tried, as much as possible, to give the children a regular daily routine," said Dr Berthold Kepplinger, head of the Amstetten clinic. "The time passed very slowly for her."
Dr Kepplinger said Elisabeth was aware of the health consequences of raising children without daylight, and made her father supply a special UV lamp and vitamin D drinks.
She and her youngest son, five- year-old Felix, are showing signs of sensitivity to daylight and have been given protective glasses.
Clinic staff report that the family is "slowly growing together". A week ago, Elisabeth and two children from the cellar met her three children who grew up with Josef and Rosemarie Fritzl, with no knowledge of their mother or siblings.
Despite the extraordinary circumstances, the family is establishing a new normality in their clinic apartment.
"Elisabeth prepares breakfast and dinner with her mother every day and treats herself to an afternoon nap," said Dr Kepplinger. Felix is "becoming ever more lively, full of jokes and very open to contact".
As a team of 15 doctors and psychologists treat the family, investigators continue to uncover the secrets of the damp cellar beneath Ybbsstrasse 40.
Police say the hidden chamber was not located under the garden, as previously thought, but in a forgotten cellar of the apartment building, built in 1890.
Yesterday police found a second door into the chamber, through a utility shaft.
"It's like something from Harry Potter, you have to press it for it to open," said Franz Polzer, head of the criminal investigations unit in Lower Austria province. He still believes Fritzl acted alone.