KEY POINTS:
It's one of those haunting stories that get imprinted in your mind.
In 1835 Harriet Jacobs, a runaway American slave, climbed into a crawl space in the roof above her grandmother's house in a desperate attempt to flee her owner, a violent man who had been obsessed with
her sexually. Little did she know at that moment of temporary sanctuary that she would live in that black, airless, coffin-like space for the next seven years of her life.
At one end, the roof space was a metre high but then sloped down to a height that didn't allow her to turn without hitting her shoulder. Underneath where she lay, she listened to her two children growing up - without her, season after season.
Years after finding her freedom, she wrote in what can only be described as unimaginable understatement: "I heard the voices of my children. There was joy and there was sadness in the sound. It made my tears flow. How I longed to speak to them! I was eager to look on their faces; but there was no hole, no crack, through which I could peep. This continued darkness was oppressive. It seemed horrible to sit or lie in a cramped position day after day, without one gleam of light. Yet I would have chosen this than my lot as a slave."
Eventually, she found a way to carve a small viewing hole so she could see the outside world.
Even decades after first reading her story, the image that has always stayed in my head is of her eye peering through the thumb-length slot, waiting for her unsuspecting children to move into a place where she could see them in the yard, year upon year. Living a sentence of dark silence above her children was better than never seeing them again.
When Elisabeth Fritzl's story of enduring 24 years of horrific imprisonment and abuse by her father first surfaced, I thought of Harriet Jacobs. Elisabeth would be alone in a small room for the first four years of her life underground, except for the times when her father came down to rape her.
In what is surely one of the most macabre complaints against press imbalance ever made, her jailer, Josef Fritzl, claimed last week that he was a victim of a one-sided media campaign. He called the coverage "unfair and entirely one-dimensional".
He comforted us all with: "I am no monster. I could have killed all of them and no one would have known. No one would ever have found out about it."
The difference between Harriet Jacobs and Elisabeth Fritzl is that Harriet's imprisonment was still a twisted personal freedom within slavery's societal jail. Harriet had a choice, and she had hope - the hope of leaving her self-exile for freedom one day.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of all for Elisabeth Fritzl is that "of all those [Josef] Fritzl damaged, she was the only one to know she was a victim", forensic psychiatrist Dr Guntram Knecht told the Guardian.
We understand solitary confinement and torture in war. But this story is different. This is us. It's the engineer with seven kids that you always see on the bus to work. It's the frozen-in-time school picture of an 11-year-old girl we may have known in maths who is now a grey-haired woman that can't be seen publicly for her own protection.
This is the story of a mother - one with children she would watch grow up imprisoned in her arms, and others that were torn from them.
When Elisabeth Fritzl finally convinced her father to save her desperately ill oldest daughter by taking 19-year-old Kerstin to hospital, she hid a note in the girl's pocket for the staff to find. Her first communication with anyone outside her dungeon in 24 years would be a cry for help - for her daughter.
Saying nothing about herself, Elisabeth explained that Kerstin had been given aspirin and cough syrup, then pleaded, "Please, please help her. Kerstin is really terrified of other people. She was never in hospital."
It took nine years from the day the slave Harriet Jacobs first went into hiding until she was able to hold her children in her arms again. She would be hunted for 17 years before she was bought for US$300 ($390) by a friend and finally set free.
Twenty-four years of abuse have probably broken Elisabeth Fritzl. But even with the obscenity of all she has endured, there was one astounding, humbling, timeless strength left intact - that of a mother.
The last line she wrote was for her child: "Kerstin, please stay strong until we see each other again".
I hope your Mother's Day was a good one.