Ok, what’s up with Austria?

One of my most vivid dreams from childhood was this one where I was kidnapped and held captive in a tree outside my grandparents’ house.  I couldn’t contact them in anyway, but I could see them coming and going.  The frustration and rage were unbearable.  Even after more than 20 years, the nightmare is still fresh and vivid when I recall it.

In the past few years there’s been at least 3 cases of children or women and their children locked up underground for years.  The latest case is of a woman, 42 years old, that had spent over half her life locked in her father’s basement, forced to bear his children.  She hadn’t seen the sun for over 20 years.  3 of her children had never had.

It’s a terrifying concept.  Yet, it’s sort of becoming Austria’s version of a school shooting.

Something of this magnitude is almost incomprehensible in its number of victims and the range of their pain.   What point does the human soul just give up hope?  After being repeatedly assaulted, having a child die, having to give up children, watching your other children suffer in captivity, knowing freedom was only inches away, how do you go on without shutting down?

Yet there might be others like these children and women still locked away.  It boggles the mind.