The days became shorter and frost was in the air as the first powdery snow fell on the rooftops. The roads were somewhat slippery too. Marching with our backpacks, we slipped now and again on the cobbles, as we entered the old town. In the early morning hours the battalion marched from Lendorf to Klagenfurt. The route went over the long Feldkirchener road, leading to the main railway station. As we marched we took a long, last look at the Lindworm fountain. The picture-book houses with their arcades and courtyards were imprinted on our minds. Passers-by waved to us, as company after company we entered the railway station, the last ‘native’ station for us. At the station there was a lively throng. The girlfriends and sweethearts made in Lendorf, were waiting with bouquets of autumn flowers, usual for a farewell.
They stood in sharp contrast to the parents of soldiers, who lived near enough to have made the journey of farewell to their sons before they made their way to the front. Farewell parcels, containing sweet delicacies and something warm to wear, were presented by many a helpless and weeping mother, to sons who tried to comfort them with promises that they would see one another again soon. It was a moving scene.
We ‘volunteers’ from the western and north European countries did not have this problem. Our parents were too far away to travel to southern Carinthia. This moving scene came to an end, with the increasing noise of the waiting steam-engine. We had to take our seats, and settle down in one another’s trusted company. The waving girlfriends and family members disappeared in a cloud of white steam, as the train slowly pulled away to the shrill whistle of the porter.
It was to be a journey into the unknown, into a strange world. It was to be the world of war and a powerful crusade in which we were small fish. Some made themselves comfortable, lying in the luggage racks over the seats in the compartment. Soon after the departure of the train some others were speculating as to our destination. The wheels rolled over the tracks with a monotonous rhythm, so monotonous that it silenced the speculation. Few noticed the gradual change in the countryside after leaving Carinthia. We travelled slowly from the west to the east, leaving behind a friendly and magical idyll.
We passed the Wörthersee, a lake in which we had bathed, and picturesque farmhouses, where long rows of maize cobs were hanging to dry. Later in the evening, in Vienna, we crossed the Danube. Shortly after, we left behind us the Ostmark and Austria, a land then united with the Pan-German Reich. Bratislava was the next borderiess checkpoint. Not long after, we passed through the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, an unspoiled land in the middle of Europe, set between the forests of Bohemia and Tatra.
In the grey, early morning hours we reached Po land. Poorly-built shacks for houses, built upon clay or sandy soils, flashed by the window. Two years before, Poland had been the prelude and the first eastern theatre of the Second World War. Now it was the central government of the Germans. The Slavic people, from the plains between the Baltic and the Caparthian mountains, who were so often separated in the past, were now divided and mercilessly ruled in old colonial style, by both Hitler and Stalin. Krakau, i.e. Cracow, was to be our next in-between stop, en route to the Russian front. We stayed there for some weeks, for an unknown reason. At least if our officers knew, they kept it to themselves. We were found quarters in a former Polish barrack, old, uncomfortable and plagued with fleas!
Cracow, the old Polish seat of kings, was now the capital of the General Government, which in the six years of war had hardly been damaged. Poverty, however, had become rife and could not be overlooked on our trips into town. Polish prisoners of war, working for the local farmers, had much better living conditions than anyone else. Those in the Officers’ camp could study, and even further their education. Who ever believed that the lull before the storm was going to be a holiday, was very wrong. Our old lifestyle ruled our lives once more with old drills, old rules and control. Even the payment in zloty of the Polish girls, engaged in the Wehrmacht brothel, was controlled by a sergeant-major. He resided in the rooms of the former house-master and inspected our pay books, and our condoms too.
During that time our battalion was to receive a special duty, that of bodyguards, so to speak. We had to ensure the safe passage of the Fuhrer’s train as it passed through Cracow. We stood for hours on end on either side of the railway tracks, in the biting cold, with loaded carbines, waiting for the night train. The Commander-in-Chief and his staff had their quarters in two locomotives and it was our duty to save them from any planned assassination attack. Our superiors hid themselves in the darkness and randomly threw stones to check that we were awake, and that we reacted. At around midnight the rolling stock with the curious name of Amerika (from 1943 renamed the Brandenburg) with the two locomotives and two armoured anti-aircraft wagons, raced by in a white cloud of flying snow. Had he even been on the train?
Our own ‘front-express’ was on the rails again and heading in an easterly direction. Some of our master-sergeants had already been sent to the Wiking Division, which had lost many men in the fighting on the southern Russian front, in the Donets basin. We travelled alongside the river Vistula. Dams were to be seen in low-lying stretches, built against flooding. That is all that one can say for the Poles and the care of their river. It was gradually filling with sand in places, and clear to see. Two years before, many railway and pedestrian bridges across the river had been destroyed and replaced with provisional ones, built by German Army engineers.
The journey was unending and it was hours before we crossed over the San, an arm of the Vistula, and reached Lemberg. The German/Soviet demarcation-line was in that area somewhere, but there were no obvious signs of it. In fact it was very hard for us to orientate ourselves, with former state borders having disappeared in the fury of war, and former territories having been returned to the Reich. Our train had no corridor and so we had no room for movement. The compartments were small, airless and sticky. It was no wonder that we were tired and mostly disinterested in our surroundings.
The countryside through which we travelled was really no different to the eastern Polish plains. In the so-called ‘endless Soviet paradise ‘, the very thinly populated areas and colourless view offered only a lonely farmhouse now and again. It was depressing. The lights went out for the night, but for many of us sleep did not come in the darkened compartment. The continuous and monotonous sounds of the train intruded and disturbed us, making it impossible to sleep. In that twilight sleep our minds nudged the pangs of home-sickness, and a premonition or two. Innermost apprehensions came to the fore, leading to doubts as to our courage. There was nothing for it but to conquer the creeping depression, take the bull by the horns, stand by our voluntary sacrifice, and follow the dictates of our conscience.
With daybreak and our soldiers’ songs, we were our old selves again especially after our first fight with snowballs. Yet again our journey had been broken for some unknown reason. We remained for several hours in a half-destroyed railway station. Our opponents were Hungarians, but our ‘fight’ between the railway tracks with those sons of the Hungarian plains, was jovial and bloodless. Their train had been held up for some days. While we waited men who were obviously prisoners, from the look of their tattered clothes, whether Jewish or Russian being unknown to us, cleaned the compartment. They used over-large and primitive brooms, and were under the supervision of older, uniformed men. In very crude tones, they drove the prisoners to hurry. When those in our compartment were denied the crusts of bread left by us, and which we were not going to eat, it annoyed us, to the extent that one of our SS-Untersturmführer tore the overseer off a strip, for his inhuman behaviour. It was our very first experience of the fate of prisoners. Was that in store for everyone, for us too?