If the place where we were working was close enough, we visited abandoned foresters’ houses. In their gardens, wild and overgrown with weeds, there were sometimes berries and green fruit. It was unbelievable how good that tasted when we were short of everything. After the monotonous diet, low in vitamins, that we had had for two years, it was invigorating to feel the effect of those ‘shots’ of vitamins. In the houses everything made of wood, doors, lintels, windows, stairs, everything flammable had been destroyed, or torn out and taken away. It had been done by the Russians and the civilian population, scanty numbers of whom had settled near and further away.
Boris had another two surprises for us. One particularly sultry June day, on the drive home he had the Russian driver make a detour that took us past a little pond. It was an incomparable joy and pleasure that we had long done without when he let us take off our sweaty old clothes and go into the water. He too allowed himself the pleasure of bathing, without paying any attention to his rifle while he was doing so.
The second surprise was quite different. One lunch break he took us, without saying anything about it beforehand, to a forester’s house about a kilometre away from where we were working. The red brick building, still clean, at first looked to be in no way different to the other houses and farms that we had seen in the district. Shell splinters had left deep gashes in the walls. The garden was growing rampantly in luxurious green. Boris’s destination was a store not far from the house. We went down into the half-buried vegetable cellar by a few steps. It was roofed by a brick vault. The wooden door, pushed outwards, lay on the ground in front of the entrance, in the middle of it there was a sharply jagged hole. Anxiously we went in and peered into the dark interior. We could see the dull gleam of steel helmets.
It was a day sultry with the threat of thunder. Outside it had become weirdly dark. There were black clouds in the sky over us, pushing themselves together into a huge pile. Then there was a gust of wind and lightning flashed luridly. After it came a huge thunderclap and from the clouds burst streams of water. The raindrops crashed into the ground and exploded like little bombs. We fled into the cellar. Carefully and curiously our eyes got used to the darkness and we could look about us in the room.
On the floor men were lying soldiers, stiff and motionless. They were dead, but looked as if they were still alive. They had not decomposed, but had only dried out, in full equipment. The scanty military, half-civilian clothing showed that they had been men from the Volkssturm. Some had artificial limbs. They were invalids from the First World War. But they were lying there, 2, 4, 6, 10, 20 altogether. What had happened?
They may have had a kind of command post in the cellar. Probably the bunker, at that time in the winter of 1945, after they had stood guard in the cold, was where they had got warm again. The door of the cellar had been facing in the direction of the enemy. Obviously that had not bothered them, perhaps because they did not know of the danger. Perhaps they knew but did not take account of it. Perhaps it was all the same to them if only they could find a little warmth, shelter, concealment, even if that had been deceptive. Their attacker’s shell, which may have come from a tank, had hit the door and burst through it. No doubt it exploded on impact. The massive blast of the explosion had suddenly and painlessly killed all the men in there.
The event was two years in the past. In the meantime we had been weaned away from death. That evening, depressed by what we had seen, we drove back into the camp crouching on the high laden tractor. Along part of the way we could see the last rays of the sun in the west transfiguring the image of the town of Insterburg. It lay on the other side of the valley. The tower of the Lutheran Church stood on a hill, towering up alone. Was the Prussian eagle that had once adorned it, still sitting on the top of the church spire?
But physical work in the forest commando, which in a certain sense had made me ‘free’ and had contributed towards my regaining my self-confidence, was soon at an end. It seemed as if the Austrians among the prisoners of war would soon be released. In July something actually happened that pointed in this direction. Even the Russian camp personnel appeared to be remarkably busy. The captain with the German name Enter, and the dreaded sergeant major from the MVD, often stayed in the camp. They came from the successor organisation to the feared GPU, and following Stalin’s example, mostly worked at night. Accordingly they were pale in appearance and spread fear about them.
We Austrians were kitted out with fresh clothes. By this I mean that we received new field grey tunics with Navy buttons, and trousers from clothing stocks of the former coastal artillery. It was almost painful when I had to take my leave of the three-year-old tunic in which I could still see the holes made the last time I had been wounded. In addition there were two sets of underwear of Red Army pattern. They were vests and underpants made out of thin linen, provided with laces to tie them on, the vest on the chest at the front and the underpants above the knees. The Austrians were supposed to be assembled in Tilsit, the former border town of the Reich, which by then was called Sowjetsk, hopefully the last station of our existence as prisoners.
14
January-September 1947: Freedom – aged 23 years
In 1939 the town on the Memel had been home to 58,000 inhabitants. Then it had been completely deserted by Germans and only a few Russians had settled there. We came across the wide town square. There was a memorial to Max von Schenkendorf, the poet who wrote the song Die Wacht am Rhein, a son of the town. Here too was a pulp factory that had belonged to the Feldmühle concern. But we did not think that we would be set to work again, because it had been said that we were actually going home. No fighting had obviously taken place around the town. Even the barracks in which we were quartered was intact, but indescribably bug-ridden. The nights were sheer torture. On the walls there were spots of blood in abundance, the remnants of bugs, gorged full of blood that had been squashed to death. We tried to counter the scourge by moving our bunks away from the walls, but of course it was in vain. Faces and hands, the parts of the body that during the night were not covered, the vermin could gain access. We were studded by lumps left by the bites. Some could count themselves fortunate whose blood did not attract the bugs that supposedly only went for ‘sweet’ blood.
There in the Tilsit camp, the great brick barracks from imperial times, I had once again met and got to know, other Austrians. From Georgenburg I already knew Franzl Reisegger. He was born in 1914, a master-shoemaker from Ranshofen near Braunau am Inn, who also worked as the camp cobbler. Franzl had married young. But with his first post he learnt that the child conceived on his last leave, his wedding leave, had died after it had been born. I became friends with Franzl because we were to be released to the same place, Branau am Inn. It was the same with Othmar Hadaier. He was born in 1926, and from Ranshofen. However, I did not have as close a friendship as I had with Reisegger.
After we were released I often met with both of them. Othmar, who still had to complete his degree, lives as a tax adviser in Ried in the Inn district, Franzl in Ranshofen. I became a close acquaintance, if not a friend, of the Protestant pastor Ernst Hildebrandt. He was some 10 to 15 years older, and had also been a Leutnant. He had managed until then to hold on to his New Testament and occasionally I was able to borrow it from him. But the religious discussions to which it had prompted me did not come about. The exertions of our work left us too tired.