Unlikely Warrior (33 page)

Back in May, when the news of the German surrender had reached us, all of the Russians had gotten drunk. But for the rest of us, nothing whatsoever had changed. We were and remained prisoners. Now, for the first time, the fact that the war was truly over began to have meaning for me. People would begin to rebuild the ruined cities. Families could live together in peace once more without the man, the father, being taken away to die in a uniform and be buried on foreign soil.

Those citizens scurrying past me, thin and pale, carrying bundles or pulling a three-wheeled baby carriage full of ancient household belongings, why weren’t they singing and dancing for joy? If I should find my family again, safe and unhurt, I was certain that that’s the way I would act.

As I crossed through the city park, I stopped to rest under a chestnut tree with a few remaining brown leaves. Soon an old man came and sat down next to me. He offered me a piece of his black bread and asked me where I had come from, and as we ate he enlightened me concerning the current political situation.

At the end of the war, Austria had been divided into four zones that were occupied by the four Allied powers: Russia, the United States, France, and Great Britain. The capital, Vienna, was also divided into four zones and was likewise under the administration of the four powers.

The Russians had become famous for dismantling everything possible and taking all they could carry back to Russia as prizes of war, whereas the Americans had introduced the Marshall Plan and brought with them every kind of help, including foodstuffs. The economic situation in the eastern portion of Austria, occupied by the Russians, was very bad, while the part of the country farther to the west, held by the Americans, was considerably better off.

I thanked the old man and continued on my way. The closer I came to the Landstrasse, following the tracks of the tramway, the worse was the devastation. Whole blocks of houses lay in ruins. My hopes of finding our house still standing were rapidly disappearing. I reached the Landstrasse, but, since it curved slightly, I still couldn’t see down the last kilometer to the place where our building should have stood. Whether because of my physical exhaustion or the tension produced by the uncertainty of what lay ahead, everything began to go around in circles, and I had to sit down in the street. I leaned against a wall, and for a short time everything went black. When I regained consciousness, a woman was kneeling next to me, trying to pour some warm tea from a thermos bottle into my mouth. Shortly thereafter, I pulled myself together in order to complete the last stretch.

I had already figured out that I should be able to see our house by the time I reached the shot-up sign of a certain shoe store. When I reached the store, I stopped and took in the wonderful sight. Our house and a few before it and beyond seemed to be whole.

I hurried forward as fast as my legs could carry me. Large holes became visible in some of the walls. The overhead trolley wires were hanging down crazily across the street, and a group of people were shoveling dirt into a bomb crater not far away. Nevertheless, our building stood there with walls and roof intact. I was almost in front of it when I first saw the marks of rifle bullets in the wall and a large hole where a window should have been.

Opening the wrought-iron gate of the fence, I crossed the forecourt, and as I climbed the steps to the entrance hall, I saw the Russian guard sitting on the old wooden trunk that had always stood on that particular spot. He got up and asked, in an unfriendly tone, “What do you want?”

In Russian, I answered, “This is the house where my family lives, or used to live, on the top floor.”

Pointing to a sign fastened to the wall next to the mailbox, the guard said, “This house is now the headquarters of the Twelfth Infantry Regiment of the Russian army. I know nothing about your family.”

I turned around and went back out to the street. A light rain had begun falling. Across the way from our house stood a former cloister that had served as a hospital since the war’s beginning. I hesitated. The mere act of making a decision was strange and almost intoxicating, it having been so long since I had entered a building as a free man to ask for information. Should I go to that building or another farther up the street?

Shyly I opened the door and entered the cloister. In the hall I encountered a brisk coming and going of nuns in nursing habits and orderlies carrying patients on stretchers. All along one wall people leaned, waiting for an empty chair. A nun who seemed to be a receptionist sat behind a desk.

Approaching her, I removed my cap and said, “Excuse me, could you please tell me whether the telephones are functioning in this city?”

She looked up, examining me from my bald-shaven head down to the overlarge, mud-encrusted shoes. In that moment I felt, for the first time, something akin to shame because of my appearance. The floor on which I stood was shiny marble, the nuns’ habits a pure and snowy white. I began to realize that it would have been much better to go to a junk store to make my inquiries, rather than a hospital full of sick people. After all, I was full of lice and bacteria.

“The phones are functioning only in a few zones of the city, mostly in the immediate surroundings. Do you have the number?”

“No, but they are in the telephone book.”

She smiled sympathetically. “We have no telephone books, and it will take a long time until they are available again.”

“Well, perhaps I can call information?” I asked, with a final hope. She simply shook her head. Thanking her, I turned away to consider what I should attempt next.

The nun had stood up from her desk and came after me, taking me by the arm. “Why don’t you sit down over there?” she said. “I’ll bring you something to eat. You look as though you could use it.”

While greedily gulping down the plate of potato goulash, I decided not to search any longer in this devastated city, but to try, somehow, to get to Mondsee, a village near Salzburg. I knew from my last correspondence with my parents that my sister had rented an upper floor in a farmhouse there to ensure her family’s safety.

The nurse told me that to the best of her knowledge, at least one train was leaving daily from the West Station. She advised me to try to catch it at Hütteldorf, on the edge of the city, since all was complete chaos at the West Station itself. What’s more, she told me, if I continued to wander around Vienna looking as I did, the authorities would most likely pick me up and put me into quarantine for at least a week. I thanked her and left, feeling much better with something in my stomach.

After a twenty-minute walk, I reached the Stadtbahn and had to wait for almost half an hour at the barrier gate until a woman gave me the twenty
Pfennige
for a tram ticket. During the trip the other passengers told me that the authorities were picking up soldiers in Hütteldorf also, confining them in quarantine for one or two weeks. From all parts of Europe the soldiers were returning, either from camps or from wherever they had found themselves when the war ended. They had been trickling slowly back to Vienna for some time now. But so far, no one had heard of any soldiers returning from Russia. As the first, I made a definite sensation, and various people wanted to squeeze all sorts of information out of me, many offering something to eat in return.

I arrived at the station in Hütteldorf around noon and decided to try reaching the train platform by taking a considerable detour through the freight yards, hoping in that way to avoid the officials. I crept through long rows of freight cars, and when finally I could see the platform not far away, I climbed up into a passenger coach and made myself comfortable for the night. My fellow Stadtbahn passengers had informed me that my train wouldn’t be leaving until morning, so I fell asleep immediately on the upholstered seat.

*   *   *

A few hundred people were already assembled when I got up and went over to the platform the following morning. I sat down on a wooden baggage cart to wait for the train, which arrived punctually at eight. When it groaned to a stop, several hundred prospective passengers were on hand, but the cars were already stuffed to overflowing. The determined would-be travelers yanked the doors open and tried to squeeze themselves in by force, but only a few were successful with this method. I knew I hadn’t a chance and didn’t even get up to try.

Some men who had been sitting near me earlier and knew my story tried forcing their way in, and one of them succeeded. Suddenly something completely unexpected happened. A man waved from the open bathroom window in one of the cars, at which two men who were still sitting next to me on the baggage cart stood up and seized me, one under each arm, and ran with me to the train. They lifted me up to the window while from inside others reached out to grab me and pull me through. The man who had originally been my neighbor on the baggage cart now stood next to me in the train bathroom, waving goodbye to his friends who remained behind.

END OF THE ODYSSEY

For the next hour the five of us in the bathroom took turns sitting on the toilet until enough people had left the train to create some space. Then, one by one, we found seats in the cars.

The travelers were all under way with a common purpose: to root out and buy food at the farms in the countryside. Most carried empty suitcases and backpacks. The food rations in the city were so scant that those with no opportunity to uncover something extra were always hungry.

For the farmers, money wasn’t necessarily the most desirable exchange, since there was hardly anything to purchase, so the city dwellers traded every imaginable kind of valuable for butter, bacon, potatoes, smoked meats, and flour. It was rumored that a piano was worth only one or two kilos of butter and that the farmers acquired incredible riches in this manner.

A few hours passed. I had obtained a comfortable seat, and my fellow passengers pumped me regarding my wheres and hows. After about 150 kilometers, the train halted.

“
Enns!
Everybody out. End of the line.” We had reached the demarcation line between the Russian sector and the American, and by now I had covered about a third of my journey to Mondsee.

The station at Enns was practically out of commission, and only a few cars in working condition stood on the many parallel running tracks. Entire trains consisting of burned-out skeletons lay twisted into grotesque shapes, and bomb craters yawned everywhere. I asked an official about the schedule for the westbound trains.

“There is no schedule,” he said. “Now and then the Russians let a food train through from the American side. Once in a while an empty train also returns, but no passengers are allowed.”

The sun was shining quite warmly for a late autumn day, and being utterly exhausted from the day’s exertions, I sat down on a grass-covered slope and dozed. I might have remained sitting there until evening, or even through the night, if I hadn’t noticed an old steam engine with two freight cars that kept chugging back and forth in front of me.

At first I simply watched, because it was pleasant to look at, but after a while I realized that a train was forming a few tracks away. The locomotive continued to bring more and more cars, and a train official coupled them together. The large sliding doors of the freight cars were open on both sides.

Nothing further took place for about an hour, and I had almost lost interest, when suddenly the locomotive returned and was coupled to the west end of the train. That electrified me! From my slightly elevated position on the slope, I could see that just a little distance away, all those parallel tracks eventually were reduced to just two rails, running in a straight line directly to the bridge! The river under that bridge represented the border within my own country that I must somehow conquer.

I pulled myself together and, grabbing my sack, my canteen, and the makeshift cane that had proved so helpful, hobbled as fast as I could over to the freight cars. Pushing a handcart close to the doors of one of the cars, I used it to work my way up inside. Then, patient and hopeful, I sat down in a dim corner to wait.

Mine wasn’t the waiting of a person who has made a definite plan for his day, who knows that when evening comes he will find himself in a particular place where supper and a clean bed will be waiting. My bed was wherever I happened to be when night fell, my supper a piece of bread given me by a fellow traveler and a few gulps of water from my canteen.

I knew I didn’t possess that special document that I must have in order to cross over from the Russian zone to the American, but that fact didn’t have any particular meaning for me. I was determined to get to Mondsee, no matter how many people or bureaucrats stood in my way. Even if prior to that I should be yelled at, handled roughly, or locked up in the town jail, in the end they would have to let me go.

The train started up. It hadn’t traveled a hundred meters when two women and three men with bags and backpacks jumped up and crept wordlessly into the remaining corners. The train continued to move very slowly, inching forward, until it had finally covered the distance to the bridge, where it stopped once again.

Up front I could hear Russians yelling and a general racket breaking out. They came closer. No one in our car uttered a word. Suddenly a Russian soldier with a submachine gun sprang up into our car. Yelling and swearing, he stomped from corner to corner, herding out the others. He pushed them toward the door with the barrel of his gun, and they all jumped down. Then he came to me. For a moment he stood motionless, examining me, then he asked in Russian, “What are you doing here?”

Obviously, because of my clothing and shaven head, he had taken me for a Russian. In his own tongue, which I more or less commanded, I answered, “I was released yesterday in Vienna from the Russian prisoner-of-war camp. My sister lives near Salzburg, and she is the only one who knows where my parents are.” I pulled out my discharge paper and gave it to him.

“Where have you come from?” he asked.

When I answered, “Kiev,” his eyes lit up. “Kiev? How does it look now? I lived there as a child.”