I'm No Monster Page 4

  Like the house in Ybbsstrasse, Austria was divided after the war. Lower Austria fell under Russian administration and remained so until 1955. Amstetten considered itself fortunate to house the regional administrative headquarters of the Red Army because the major in charge kept a relatively close eye on the men billeted there. Nevertheless, the early days of the occupation were turbulent and frightening. Virtually lawless Russian troops terrorized the countryside; there were seventy recorded cases of murder and manslaughter in Amstetten county in the second half of 1945 alone. Rape was so endemic in Kollmitzberg that a special hospital was set up to treat the syphilis and gonorrhea that inevitably resulted: More than a third of the girls and women who lived there became infected. Some women committed suicide to avoid rape; Amstetten’s register of deaths records that at 9 A.M. on May 9, 1946, “all the females living in Gorch-Fockstrasse died. A mother aged forty-five and her nineteen-year-old daughter shot themselves. The seventy-eight-year-old grandmother took her own life by hanging herself:” All the women in the family had committed suicide to avoid rape by Russian soldiers.

  The privations of wartime continued. While those in the American zone, around Linz in Upper Austria, enjoyed luxuries such as chocolate and American cigarettes, those in the Russian zone lived off what they could grow; rationing continued there until 1950. Almost as bad as the privation was the double humiliation of having lost the war and being occupied by communists. The first anniversary of the Russian occupation was celebrated by unveiling a monument to fallen Russian soldiers on the spot where a bronze bust of the Emperor Franz Joseph I had once stood. The town’s children were bemused when their park, the Schulwiese, the only patch of land not covered in dust and rubble, was renamed. From now on they were to refer to it only as Park Stalin. But gradually the town was being rebuilt by the forced labor of former Nazis. By the autumn of 1947 one of Amstetten’s schools, in Kirchenstrasse, which had been converted into a makeshift hospital during the war, had been scrubbed clean of all traces of its wartime usage and the camp beds and operating tables replaced by neat rows of desks. It was here that Josef Fritzl began his education.

  To accommodate the demands of a growing population, the school operated in two shifts. Children from the town attended in the mornings and those who lived in the surrounding countryside in the afternoons, once they had completed their chores on their parents’ farms, some of them cycling in every day, whatever the weather, from up to fifteen miles away. Josef was lucky in that he could walk to school; it took ten minutes along dusty Ybbsstrasse, past the crumbling facades of the businesses that had survived the war, past Hans Schachner’s construction firm and Johann Ekart the stove-fitter; past Anton Schillhuber’s tavern (“Come In and Enjoy Our Lovely Ball-room!”) and into the center of town and Kirchenstrasse. The school, squeezed between the St. Stephan church and the old cemetery, which was visible from the classrooms, was his refuge from his mother and the squalor and loneliness of home. It was the first semblance of stability he had known.

  In Josef’s year there were thirty-two pupils: twelve girls and twenty boys, the girls along the internal wall and then two rows of ten boys each. His teachers, Herr Kuhn and Herr Bauer, were strict but compassionate men who taught their pupils the rudiments of the classics, mathematics, and German with a view to preparing them for a future that might in some way make up for the past. Josef sat on the outer row, next to the window, and at first struggled with his work. At twelve he was two years older than the rest of the class and turning into a tall, good-looking, dark-haired boy, although one barely registered by the girls. He was the quiet one by the window, in the shabby clothes.

  Over the next five years the class would remain virtually intact. The friendships that formed among these children would in many cases last through their lifetimes. Although initially introverted, Josef did begin to make friends with the other boys, who discovered in him a lightly cynical sense of humor and a talent for clever wordplay. He was known not as Josef but by its diminutives “Pepperl” and “Pepi.” His core group of friends-Karl Dunkl, Franz Cimanek, Otto Gatten bauer, and Friedrich Leimlehner—called themselves the Dunkl Gang, after Karl, at whose house in Ardaggerstrasse they would gather after school and where Karl’s mother, who ran a grocery, would supply them with treats. Karl was always trying to impress the other boys with the story of his mother’s bravery when Russian soldiers had held her at gunpoint while looters stole the shop’s entire stock and smashed every jar of Herr Dunkl’s pear jam. They played the games that boys usually play: cowboys and Indians and cops and robbers, and Josef, as at school, took on subordinate roles: He was the henchman, never the hero; the Indian but never the chief. If the boys were lucky enough to find a football—footballs were beyond the pocket of most of their parents—or when they played Ping-Pong on a rickety old table, Josef would never join in but preferred to stand by and watch.

  It was taken for granted that he was withdrawn because his mother was poor. Even the least well-off of his friends’ parents pitied him and often slipped him small gifts of bread. Any boy in his situation would have felt humiliated. Friedrich Leimlehner’s grandparents owned a farm, and when the boys went to his house they were sometimes fed luxuries such as eggs and Schmaltz, a type of lard that was delicious spread on toast. Everyone was poor, but the contrast for Josef, whose mother struggled to scrape together the money to buy basic food and fuel, was stark. He concealed his home life from his friends. Over the years of their friendship, none of his schoolmates ever entered number 40; Franz Cimanek once got as far as the entrance hall. But Maria forbade visitors, and Josef was only too glad to comply with his mother’s wishes.

  In 1948 the Russians finally released their prisoners of war, including the fathers of three of the Dunkl Gang: Karl, Friedrich, and Josef. It was an unforgettable event in the children’s lives: the day the fathers came back. Karl’s father returned, gravely ill with malaria, to find that his house had been partly appropriated by a Russian major and his servant, who were occupying the two biggest bedrooms. He felt himself rather lucky to have the senior Russian officer in Amstetten as a resident in his home. Friedrich’s father, exhausted and emaciated, weighed less than a hundred pounds on his return. As a carpenter he had been considered too valuable to the Russians to be allowed to go home and had spent the three years carrying out repairs inside the Kremlin. But at least he was now back home.

  It would have taken a very hard-hearted person indeed not to be moved by the sight of her common-law husband when he finally appeared on the doorstep of 40 Ybbsstrasse after six years away, unwashed, bedraggled, exhausted, and probably injured or sick. But he never crossed the threshold. Maria closed the door in his face. For a while he moped about the streets of Amstetten and made a number of attempts to see his son, but Maria blocked all his overtures. When, eventually, he began a relationship with another woman, this served only to vindicate his wife’s feelings of outrage and injury. Josef Fritzl had known his father only slightly in early childhood, and he unquestioningly accepted Maria’s version of events. He was the son of a feckless, weak, womanizing failure. He felt no sorrow when, in the early 1950s, his father dropped out of sight altogether.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “A Respectable Engineer”

  A school photograph of Josef Fritzl at fifteen shows a good-looking boy in a class of forty, the handsomeness of his narrow, even-featured face only slightly compromised by his protruding ears and the cheerless seriousness of his expression. His blue eyes, black in monochrome, peep somewhat desolately at the camera from beneath eyebrows that will in later years lose all their symmetry, growing so wildly askew that they seem to hint at something absurd in the depths of his nature. His mouth, too, bears no trace of what it would become: an ironic mouth with a suggestion of a joke constantly playing about its lips. At fifteen the mouth is earnest; compressed in a way that is peculiar to unhappy children whose feelings are communicated by the fiercely brave look they carry on their faces. Josef wears the blank, self-dis
ciplined air of a soldier on parade.

  The children in the photograph have been arranged in three rows and Josef, because of his height, made to stand at the back. He is a good head taller than the other boys, trussed up in a dark-coloured, high-collared, brass-buttoned coat, two years older than the rest of the class.

  During those first couple of years at the school in Kirchenstrasse, Josef had changed very little. He remained withdrawn and unsure of himself: Nobody except for the headmaster, Josef Freihammer, expected him to do much more than languish at the bottom of the class. Freihammer was only twenty- seven at the time, and in the eyes of many of his students, his youth and unorthodox teaching methods somewhat undermined his authority. He taught German alongside his other duties and never resorted to the harsh, disciplinarian tactics then common in the teaching profession. He well understood the profound effect on his pupils of their recently turbulent family lives; he knew how poverty and, in many cases, fatherlessness had taken their toll on their self-esteem.

  Had it not been for Freihammer, Josef might never have overcome the intellectual deprivation of his childhood but gone on to scratch out a living, much as his mother had done, in badly paid jobs in local farms or inns. But the headmaster recognized that what Josef Fritzl lacked in schooling he could make up for with brains, and so he encouraged him, with after-school classes and fatherly talks, to “work hard and make something of yourself.” Freihammer saw that the boy was more than averagely bright, that his aptitude for math was particularly striking. And with his headmaster’s encouragement he soon began to show signs of academic promise.

  Other things about him began to change, most noticeably his appearance. Shortly after his fifteenth birthday, as if having suddenly become aware of his own poverty, he started to tie his shoelaces properly, paid attention to the state of his fingernails, and generally did whatever he could to ward off the pitying glances of his school friends’ parents, which, in his teenage pride, he no longer felt capable of tolerating. The most dramatic outward manifestation of this new, more confident Josef was what he had done to his light-brown, naturally straight hair: One day he appeared in class with a Schmalzlocke, the lightly pompadoured, brilliantined style that was then popular. To his friends this was a turning point, a decisive gesture. The old, slow Pepperl had gone.

  Amstetten in the late 1940s and early 1950s was hardly a haven for young people. Nevertheless, teenage life still held its promise, and by 1950 Josef’s class in the school in Kirchenstrasse was alive with adolescent energy.

  The boys all fell helplessly in love with Franzciska Woll, whose coal-black hair and even, pale features, previously unnoticed by the boys in school, now made her the class beauty; Karl Dunkl’s cheerful good humor began to draw admiring glances from the girls. But it was pretty much still unthinkable in this still strongly conservative and Catholic part of the world for a young woman to be out on her own, an attitude strongly reinforced by the continuing Russian military presence in the region. The occupation had resulted in a good number of rapes, hospitalizations, and even murders of young women. (The young Karl Dunkl had been deeply shocked when his neighbour, Cilli Brandstötter, was shot in the back and killed, trying to flee a group of Russian soldiers.) And as a consequence, the freedoms the young women of Amstetten had enjoyed in childhood became forbidden: no more sunbathing on the grassy banks of the Ybbs or splashing about in the town’s nineteenth-century wooden swimming pool. Throughout their early teens, wherever they went, the girls of the school in Kirchenstrasse were closely chaperoned by an anxious parent. “You’ll only escape your father on your wedding day,” the old joke went.

  Because access to girls was so difficult, the question of how to get one alone obsessed the boys. What little they could find out about sex, they learned in the Baumann, Amstetten’s cinema. Not from Casablanca or the Hans Moser adaptations of famous novels that were regularly screened there—these were almost impossible to get into owing to their “18” certificate—but from Schleichendes Gift (Creeping Poison), a government-sponsored sex-education film and morality tale. Absent or dead husbands and the now semipermanent presence of foreign troops in the country had led to a rapid increase in sexually transmitted diseases. And the poster alone—painted in lurid acid colours, it depicted a large serpent coiled around an attractive, naked, young starlet, her arms outstretched in terror—was enough to cause a sensation among the young Amstettners. Repeat visits to the film were made by many members of the teenage audience, who considered the parts where the amateur cast demonstrated exactly how these sinister-sounding afflictions might be passed on to be both informative and wildly erotic.

  But even at fifteen, Josef was almost invisible to the girls, and he expressed no interest in them, either; despite his looks, his age, his height, his newly discovered intelligence—all of which another, more confident boy might have turned to his advantage—Josef was distinguished among his peers only as a boy skilled at fixing things: Bored at home, he had taken to making small repairs on the house, a pastime at which he had begun to exhibit noticeable skill. He was turning into a driven young man, a hard worker with his head in his books who seemed more preoccupied with his studies than with going out. Nor did the now-widening gap between Josef and his core group of friends repair itself as opportunities for socializing multiplied. When the Paradisl Garten, which boasted the town’s first concrete dance floor, or the Neues Tanzcafe (whose dance floor was made of glass), or later, the Nibelungen Hof, whose ultraviolet lights drew crowds from neighbouring towns, opened their doors, his classmates would go and dance to Benny Goodman or Glenn Miller tunes reworked as traditional waltzes, or Schlager, a type of easy-listening music that had become popular across Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. But Josef stayed at home, oblivious to the light orchestral tunes of the Mantovani Band and the sugary love songs of Vico Torriani. He was frequently alone, barely drank, never danced, and spent most of his time inside the house in Ybbsstrasse.

  His relationship with his mother was also changing. Maria hated to see her son grow up. Despite limiting his freedom as best she could, she was helpless to stifle the keen interest that he now showed in his studies, an interest she knew was largely generated by the knowledge that a career would give him the independence he needed to assert himself against her. And not only was he now physically much stronger than her (and she knew it was only a matter of time before he would begin to defend himself against her attacks), but she began to sense in him a growing embarrassment about her. And it was true that for the first time in his life Josef had begun to regard his mother with a feeling other than anxiety. He was old enough to recognize that she constituted a frightening sight, dressed in all kinds of weather in her incongruous gypsy style of filthy headscarf and rubber boots, her left eye obscured by a rag she would press to her face, and he had grown to dread the rare occasions when she would leave the house to shuffle about the streets of Amstetten mumbling to herself incoherently for everyone to see.

  He was fifteen when he finally turned on her. Josef hit his mother on the side of the head with a punch so violent that it sent her reeling across the kitchen. For a few seconds she had lain sprawled on the floor, shrieking terribly. And things changed after that. His mother began to be afraid of him, and he realized he had great power over her. It was, by the standards of how he had been used to living in number 40, a quite astonishing transgression.

  Not long after that, he began to exhibit other forms of unusual behavior. He would never remember how it was that, late one evening, not long after the incident with his mother, he had found himself drawn to the ground-floor bedroom window of one of his neighbours. Barely open a crack, the window was lined on the inside by a thick, unevenly hung curtain. And somehow he had ended up crouching beneath the sill, just waiting there, listening. For many minutes he stayed there, straining to hear, and at last he caught a fragment of the private murmurings of what he knew, from an announcement in the Births, Marriages, and Deaths section of the Anzeiger, to be a recently
married couple. He hoped, but for lack of experience couldn’t be sure, that what he was overhearing was sex. But after that there wasn’t a window in Amstetten that didn’t seem to present itself as an opportunity for lurking and spying.

  He became a talented snoop, familiarizing himself with the habits of his neighbours, making it his business to know just what time someone was undressing for bed, when so-and-so was most likely to have her weekly bath (the clattering of a tin pan being filled with water in the kitchen was the clue). Most of all he liked to watch women in their own homes, cozy, tidy homes with lit fires and comfortable furniture, places where he might have liked to live himself.

  In the early 1950s the Schlemmer Gasthof had became a magnet for young Amstettners, a fact that could be attributed not to a dance floor or a jukebox—it had neither—but to its position in the heart of the Amstetten woods.

  Josef liked to find a hiding place among the shadows of beeches and oaks, a lookout post where he would wait for the swish of a petticoat or the click-clack of heels—in those days skirts were nipped in at the waist and flouncy, and girls tottered along on heels that were pencil-thin—on the stone path that signaled the approach of a young woman.