THE RUSSIANS
The Author Will Remain Anonymous
All of a sudden
the worst artillery fire began! One barrage after another came from the Germans,
entrenched across the
We were almost underneath it in our cellar. Every time it fired, which was in rapid succession, we thought the walls of our cellars were about to cave in from the percussion. The Karl Marx Hof sustained as much damage from the artillery as it did from the bombings. In our house the top of the roof and attic was blown away. On the 2nd floor there was a huge terrace with the apartment of Dr. Dietz and his wife. This was the roof of the library where Mama worked. This terrace received so many holes from the artillery shrapnel. The water leaked then into the library and caused lots of damage.
As we found out later many civilians, as well as Russians were killed when the artillery first started. There were still people in the street fleeing from the Russians with farm animals, horses, cows, farm wagons loaded with their most valuable belongings. Anyone caught in that inferno which raged three weeks, was killed.
The artillery fire lasted for days without a break. The guns of the Germans, and the Russians, must have been red hot, their soldiers exhausted.
We could not leave the safety of our cellar, which we often doubted how safe we really were? Of course, we only had to eat what we had before this artillery barrage started. That was very little, because you just could not get any food anymore. The supplies were stopped by the constant bombings. You can live without food for some time, but not without water. We had thought of this and had filled every available bottle with water. In three weeks, this supply started to dwindle. We did not even dare to wash our faces, brush our teeth with the precious little water that was left. How much longer was this going on? We felt like moles underneath the ground, very hungry, so hungry we all hurt. Mama got the burned sugar out, which we had brought from the bombed Haas candy factory. That burned sugar saved all our lives. No one in our cellar had any supplies of food. We were a sorry bunch of women and children, and just one lonely old man, Mr. Jelinek.
We were so used to the deafening noise, when it stopped, and it became so quiet, it “hurt” our ears! We thought it was just a time of rest, like before. The quietness lasted and lasted hour after hour. Had the Germans been defeated? Did the Russians pull back?
Mr. Jelinek, our hero, volunteered to see what was going on. He went up to his apartment on the first floor and peeked out. All he could report to us was that there were many dead people, body parts, dead animals, and pieces of wagons all over the street. He did not see any live Russians, but he did see a lot of dead ones strewn all over the street. He even told us, that he saw someone dashing out and carving a piece of meat out of a dead horse. People were starving!
At 12 years of age, I was a lanky, tall girl, with long pigtails, so was my best friend, Lizzi. We were kids, not like some twelve year olds today acting like they are eighteen.
We were bored to the teeth and wanted to get out of the cellar just for a little while. We asked if we could go to the cellar door and just stand there. This was inside our stairwell, so the adults did not see any harm in that. The truth of the matter was we had other things in mind. We were curious of what the Russians looked like. We had heard they wore fur from hat to toes, had long beards. They looked like Father Christmas?
On the 2nd floor of our stairwell there was one window still intact, had glass in it, held together with tape. All other windows had been blown out much sooner and replaced with cardboards, or wood paneling. So we made it up the stairs and were just ready to look out of that window, when several shots just whistled by us. Sharpshooters were across the street from us in the corner house. We flattened ourselves and crawled downstairs. There we were met by our hysterically crying mothers, who had heard the shots, did not see us, and thought we had been killed! I thought that day Mama was going to kiss, strangle, or beat me to death, all in one minute!
The next day, still quiet, we heard lots of boots pounding the pavement in our courtyard. Soon, the door to the stairwell upstairs flew open with a loud bang, and boots came running down the stairs to the cellar. Two Russians entered with drawn machine guns, screaming on top of their lungs:” Germanski soldata” and other stuff. Mr. Jelinek, who spoke Czech, understood what they said and wanted. They were looking for German soldiers hidden by us. He told them, there were no soldiers here, just women and children, and him.
The first two to arrive, motioned for two others to come in and guard us, while they searched the rest of the cellar. Oma’s (grandmother’s) bed was in the other part of the cellar. Each occupant of the stairwell had a cubicle for storage in the cellar as well as in the attic. They were all in a row and had a hallway before them. There we had set up our mattresses, beds. This was behind the entrance to the cellar, where we had old couches and chairs and some tables. That is where the big old ladder hung.
They had us line up in that part of the cellar along the wall, while the other two searched. Oma said they looked underneath her bed and even lifted her comforter to see if anyone was hidden there.
The other two soldiers made it a sport to scare us women and children, and the old man, to death, by moving their loaded machine guns along us from chest to chest, and then back a little lower over our abdomen. Screaming like fiends one minute, and then laughing like crazy the other. We thought our time had come; they would shoot us any minute. Most of the women prayed, we kids cried. Poor little Trude, she had gone into one of her seizures again. Poor little girl, her nerves were shot at age nine.
Finally, what seemed like an eternity, the other two soldiers returned and they all left.
When we had gathered our wits again, we all thought how strange those Russians had looked. They were all clean shaven, so it looked, just had some mustache like thing hanging down past their chins, had slanted, very narrow eyes. Mr. Jelinek said they looked like Mongolians. He said they were Barbarians of the worst kind. In one way, they looked like what the rumors had said. They wore fur hats, fur parkas, quilted pants, and fur boots. They were very dirty and smelly.
After our ordeal with the first Russians, we breathed a sigh of relief. We were still alive, they had not killed us. Perhaps, just perhaps, they were not as bad as Mr. Jelinek said they were, and as the rumors had it?
These front line troops, the first Mongolians, were sober, very tired, exhausted, and still had a lot of territory to conquer!
The next wave of Russians, still mainly Mongolians, more rested, had time to explore. In our district, which had lots of vineyards, wineries, they found treasures of barrels and barrels of wine. The owners had hoarded them, because as the adults said, you could not buy a bottle of wine in a long time. I guess the wine was for the Nazis, and then for the Russians! I don’t know if it would have been different without the Russians drinking themselves into stupor, in what atrocities followed? They shot a hole in a barrel and drank until it was empty, shot another hole in a barrel and so on, until it was said that the floors in the wine cellars were ankle deep with spilled wine. Then, they went on a rampage of raping women, killing, and mutilating women. Their sexual appetites were insatiable! They did not care what a woman looked like, child, old woman, in between, pregnant women, no difference! In fact we heard that some preferred to bed old woman, because in their belief, bedding an old woman would give the man long life.
It was a very eerie memory from those terrible, terrible days and nights; the screaming of many voices from houses where they Russians were; screaming for help from the Commandature. As if the superiors of the soldiers cared what their soldiers did. We were the spoils of war.
Women all through history had to pay the price for their men’s wars, follies, fighting other nations and countries. If their men were the losers, the women became the “spoils of war.” to be had by the conquerors.
Mr. Jelinek, who dared to go out into the next few houses and the cellars, came back with horrifying tales. In Stairwell 88 there had been a pregnant woman and 17 Russians had raped her until she bled to death. Women had been kidnapped and brought to wine cellars to be conveniently there for the pleasures of the drunken hoards. They had been raped often until they were no more fun for the soldiers. Most of them were killed, if they had not died before. Many had been mutilated! We were horrified! They were truly Barbarians!
He also said he did not recognize many of the women, although he knew them personally. They had shaved their eye brows, had large scarves over their heads, so not one hair showed and looked like old women. This was done to look unattractive if the Russians came into their cellars. Many hid. He told us young girls to go and hide in the attic, and we did for awhile, but almost froze to death. The roof was blown off and it was bitter cold up there. So, we came down again.
Many cellars had red crosses painted on their doors, he said. The Russians were afraid of sickness, and maybe would not enter a cellar?
He told the women again, that if they had anything with a Nazi symbol on it, and the Russians were to find it, it could mean death to all of us. He had heard that they had shot people and set houses on fire when Nazi stuff was found.
What about our ration cards? There were swastikas on them! Without a ration card, you were a non-existent person; a nobody.
Our water was almost gone. All of us knew we had to go to the Tungram factory, next to our house which had a well to get water. Mama and I went through the back door of the library with our two empty pails. She carefully opened the door to see if there was any danger. A terrible stench hit our noses. It was so horrible when we got out on the street. We just gagged and gagged, although we had nothing in our stomach. A headless dead Russian soldier, all blotted up from the warm days we already had, laid there in a grotesque way on the corner of the intersection barely, 20-30 ft from us. Across the street there was already a whole line of people waiting to get in to the well to get their water. On the way back we noticed the carnage all over the place, parts of many more dead people, dead horses, and cows lying in parts all over the street. There were no Russians to be seen, of which we were very glad.
A few days later, the Russians must have drummed up some old men and young boys for burial details. The dead were buried in our courtyard and in the park area. The dead Russians were buried by their own comrades, also, in our park.
Later bodies that
had been buried hastily, because there was no other way, in parks, along roads
and streets, were exhumed and buried to more proper fitting places. The dead
Russians, who lost their lives in the fight to get
Nature knows no sorrow. Carnage of war does not keep from renewing herself. After winter comes spring. Spring was visible, the few lilac bushes, still intact, were showing the start of blossoms. So were the chestnut trees which are so pretty when in bloom, with their spiky blooms, looking like burning candles. Our nice park, which had been such a pretty place to sit a spell on the park benches, was no more. It was a grave yard. Park benches had long been used for fire wood, or had been blown to pieces by the artillery fires or the bombings.
It seemed like the worst was over. There had not been any artillery fire in a few days. The Russians had stayed away from us. People started to relax a little. Everyone could not wait to get fresh air. It was beautiful out there, and warm! We kids were so restless and impatient to get out. We asked if we could at least go to the entrance door of our stairwell and look out. After some begging from Illa, Lizzi, Trude and I, we were allowed to go. Just stand there, don’t go outside.
We did that and just stood there and looked out. All of a sudden a gigantic force threw us to the ground and a deafening explosion followed. A shell had exploded very close by. I always heard when you are hit, you don’t hear it coming. Usually when the artillery went over us it made a whistling sound. Everyone took off running to the cellar. I tried, but had a stabbing pain in my left leg. I looked and a lot of blood was running out of my stocking. It hurt badly, but I hobbled as fast as I could down into the cellar.
Mama had seen the blood and immediately took my stocking down. There was a piece of shrapnel sticking in my left thigh. Thank God, we had Mrs. Reizhammer. She was a nurse or nurse’s aide, There was no way to take me to a doctor or hospital! Mama held me down, while Mrs. Reihammer dug the shrapnel out. It hurt so bad, I thought for sure I was going to pass out, but she did a great job and dug it out. She cleaned the wound and bandaged it up. I probably owe her my life, because no infection set in. I still have a hole there on my left thigh, about one inch deep.
We were all very terrible hungry. Hunger hurts like hell! You feel like all your insides are eating themselves up, a gnawing pain. We still had some of the caramel sugar left. As hungry as we were, it almost made us sick to eat any of it. That is all we had for so long.
How often I thought of the good time I had in Schlesien with Uncle and Aunt Schubert and the food! I never had to leave the table hungry. If I did, it was my own fault, like not wanting to eat the goat meat. I gladly would have eaten some of that now.
On a beautiful day, perhaps the end of April, I know it was a warm spring day. Lizzi and I sat on our stairwell entrance door with our noses buried deep in some paperback book. We were so involved we only looked up when we heard loud drunken voices hollering for: “Frau, Frau, Frau!” Drunken Russians were heading our way! We dashed into the house. I ran to Mama and told her. She said for me to get underneath Oma’s bed and she would hide in the wardrobe in the hallway. By then, since there had not been any artillery fire for quite a while, we all moved upstairs again to our apartments. We had barely time to hide, when the pounding on the door started. Our door was not locked. It would not have kept them out anyhow. Locked doors were easily opened with a machine gun salvo and only splinters of the door would remain.
This is difficult for me to tell. So many years later, a lifetime really, some events in our lives, we will never forget. They are burned deep in our brains until we die! I have some memories, horrible ones. Mercifully, not all I remember!
Above me, I heard my 73 year old Oma cry in pain: “Merciful Mother of God, let me die!” My grandmother had been a total invalid from rheumatoid arthritis. Her knees were frozen in a bent state. She could not move them anymore. She had been bedfast for several years. When the Russian had tried to rape her, he lay with all of his weight on her bent knees and tried to push her legs down, she screamed with pain, as anyone could imagine. The bed she was in sagged so much that the few bottles filled with water, underneath the bed where I laid hidden started to fall over. I was shivering with fear.
I was jerked from underneath the bed, and I was underneath him in one motion! I don’t remember what he looked like, but I never ever will forget the terrible smell he had!! A rank smell of dirt, unwashed clothes, sweat, garlic, grease, and drenched in sour smelling booze! He had me pinned underneath him, and he was so heavy! I knew I was going to get sick, felt the vomit rise in my throat. He bit me very hard in my ear and I screamed, then on my chest, I was sure he was killing me. I could not breathe! My chest hurt! I was fighting for air! I heard Mama screaming. Oma was sobbing but so faint. I felt like I was diving into water. All noises were muffled. It was like diving deeper and deeper into murky water, and I was floating into darkness.
When I came to, Mama was crying hysterically, “He killed her, she is dead!” She said I had been out for quite a while. She thought I was dead. I don’t know what made me pass out. At times I had very erratic heart beat and, when I exerted myself, I could not breathe and had chest pains. This was from the high fever I had with rheumatic fever two years prior. Did he choke me? Was it the fear of dying? I guess all of this, most likely. I don’t know. Mercifully, I was spared some of the terrible ordeal in that I had lost consciousness. There had been two of them in our apartment. When Mama heard Oma cry with terrible pain, she jumped out of her hiding place, right in front of the other Russian. They had been savages, and so drunk. I had bite marks on my ear, on my breast, and other places on my body. Mama did not say what the other one had done to her, but she was crying and crying. Oma was inconsolable. It was her fault, if she would have kept quiet, she was an old woman, she was ready to die. Why had she cried? She worked herself into such a state; we thought she would not see the next day. How this sweet person stood all the pain and sorrow I don’t know. I don’t see how she lived a few more months after all that she had to endure.
Being raped is a
horrifying experience for any woman, which leaves you with a rage for what
happened and a deep hatred. I hated all Russians for a long time. But, I also
learned years later what the Germans had done when in
At age twelve I was completely uninformed of what happens between man and woman, how a baby is made. I know this sounds unreal to today’s people, but we had very old-fashioned mothers, who had old-fashioned mothers before them. Somehow the subject was too shameful to talk about until the daughter became older and more mature.
All of us girls in
the cellar were told that the Russians would do us great harm, even kill us.
But, what exactly they would do to girls and women was left out. I had one
period in Schlesien.
After the rape, Mama tried to explain what had happened to me. With lots and lots of crying, she explained about the birds and the bees. I thought then, if this would be like this how to get a baby, I never would let a man near me! I hurt so very bad from the bite wounds and where I had been torn.
Being raped, was not the worst thing that could happen to women in those agonizing days with the drunken Russian hordes descending on us. The fear of having contacted syphilis, or other venereal diseases was worse. It was said that the Russians were highly infected with them, also the fear of unwanted pregnancies.
As Mama and I talked many years later, not many pregnancies happened because we all were so terribly malnourished. The women had no more periods.
I remember this time and time again, until I wanted to scream, Mama would ask me if I had a “rash down there”, which would have been the first sign of infection for syphilis. We were amongst the luckier ones, no infection.
There were lots of suicides, women and girls that had become infected with syphilis. In 1945, an incurable disease!
Women did not talk of the rapes. I guess it was just another horrible thing to endure to survive. I don’t know if Mama ever told Papa when he returned home from the Army. I kind of doubt it. She felt so shameful about it, as if it had been her fault. I did not feel the same. I felt such anger! I felt if another one would come near me, I would try to kill him! I hated Russians!
Many years later
my sister, Erika, and I started talking about 1945. She said what she had to
endure on the long way back from
Soon Russians started coming with big trucks carrying large containers with soup. They signaled for people to come and bring container for the soup. We ran and got a pot. The soup looked everything but appetizing. It seemed like an inch thick layer of red fat, this was fat and red pepper. The soup was mainly lukewarm water, with a few things swimming in it, like pieces of potatoes, and other stuff. If you are starving, you eat whatever is available. We went home. Oma said she did not want any soup. That most likely saved her life. Mama and I, with many other people, got deathly sick from eating this soup. We had diarrhea of the worst kind, until blood went off in the stool.
The Russians came with big trucks also giving out hard, moldy bread, and beans and peas that were so wormy you had to soak them in soda for hours, for the worms to come out. I don’t know if it was a joke or the truth, but it was said, that some people preferred to leave the worms in the beans, that was MEAT! People are truly ingenious even in the worst of times. Pretty soon all kinds of recipes were told of how to cook those beans and peas in a different way. You even could roast the beans and it tasted better than the ERSATZ coffee!
One day we heard loud marching music coming from a loudspeaker on a truck driving along Heiligenstaedter Strasse. It was May the 8th, 1945. The day the war ended! How we found out was by the Russians. In very broken German someone said over the loudspeaker: “Germans dead, Russians victors!”
People cheered, of course, many tears flowed that finally this terrible, terrible war, was over. Six horrible years it had lasted. So many had lost their sons, fathers, husbands in this war; lost their homes, and many family members in the bombings.
The Russians sure celebrated with lots of shooting that evening and all night. They sent tons of streamer rockets up that illuminate the sky. It was almost as light as in day time. We were very afraid what the celebration of theirs would bring to us. But, thanks to God, we were left alone.
Other “spoils of war” for the Russian was anything and everything that could be taken! In particular, they were fascinated by wrist watches. No only the first combat troops, but the later ones, the occupation troops, as well. The latter ones were mostly Caucasians. They seemed to have all come from very primitive areas. They never must have been exposed to inside plumbing, radios, clocks, cameras. The list could go on and on. Russians were often seen with having wrist watches from the wrist to elbow, to shoulder, on both arms. I guess they had no place to store their loot?
With time into the spring and early summer, life became more peaceful. Still, some of the Russian soldiers took it upon themselves, to “visit” houses and apartments, looking for the non existent Germanski soldata. The main purpose to loot! Anything that caught their fancy was theirs to take! The power of a loaded machine gun, overrode any argument!
Oma had gone to her apartment with Pepitante. It was early one morning. Mama already had her bedding on the window to air out, as is the habit in European countries. I was still asleep on my couch, which served as my bed. Mama said to me afterwards, someone pounded on the door and there stood a Russian on his “mission” again! He came into our bedroom, saw that I was in bed sleeping, and just stood there. I woke up from being stared at. The next thing that happened, I was out of bed and out of the window in my nightgown! We lived in the Parterre, which could be considered the first floor. It was high enough that I could have broken bones from that jump! Mama had been rooted to the spot, fearful what would happen. She said then, he just pointed at his head signaling “Crazy! “
During the day it was safe again to go most places. Mama said to me one day, “Why don’t you see how Lintschitante is?” She lived in the Karl Marx Hof also, and had her very old mother-in-law to take care of. This was inside the courtyard and I jumped at the chance. Lintschitante had worked for many years at the Bensdorp Chocolate factory. The workers there would get a bar of chocolate once in a while for a bonus. She always saved them for us kids. For special reasons she would give us a little piece of the precious chocolate. Otherwise, chocolate would have been added to the list of many food things I never knew until much later in my teen years.
When I got closer
to where she lived, I saw a bunch of Russian soldiers around a guy working on a
motorcycle. I almost turned around then and ran back home. But, she was there
also, the big Russian lady with the deep voice. She was a neighbor of my aunt.
I don’t recall the whole story, but I think she had been a singer, dancer, or
such, and somehow met her husband, a Viennese, and from then on lived in
My aunt came then and looked out the window and I went up to see her. Sure enough, she figured this a special reason and I got my piece of chocolate.
A lot of stories were told after the war about the Russians, how uncivilized they had been and what silly stuff they had been doing. I had a school friend, who had been bombed out. Her mother and she had been assigned a room in a fancy Villa in Nussdorf. They lived there in the one room. The rest of the house was occupied by the owners. When the Russians came, they threw the owners out, but left my friend and her mother stay. Mainly it was Russian female soldiers, the infamous “Flintenweiber”, or gun women. They were usually pretty stout women, with large bosoms. Their pistol belt started right underneath their boobs. They were extremely savage fighters, worse than their male counterparts.
My friend told me she heard loud words, cussing, and looked at what was going on. One of those women was in the bathroom and had been cleaning fish in the toilet bowl. Somehow she must have hit the handle and the toilet flushed, the fish was gone and the bowl ran over with you know what a mess. I guess that house must have been on well water for the toilet to flush. We had no water for a long time.
One night, it was so warm we dared to keep the window open some and had the Venetian blinds drawn, when we heard raucous, loud singing on the street. Mama and I peeked out to see what was going on.
There came a giant of a man, a Russian, drunker than a skunk, wearing the biggest old-timer of an alarm clock around his neck, next to his machine gun. He was hanging on to a much smaller woman, equally as “soused” as he was. They were singing some song and weaving and swaying all over the street. When they came into our view, we noticed she was the rag woman. A woman that had a little hand wagon, like we did, and always had come around asking for “rags, paper, tin and such”. To me, at age twelve, she was an old woman. Anyone over 30 was old.
They sure were making enough noise to wake the neighborhood. But, it got even worse. All of a sudden there was this “clang, clang, clang” of the old-timer alarm clock, a museum’s specimen, going off!. This giant of a man jerked the clock, which had hung on something from his neck and threw it as far as he could throw it. The next thing that happened he fired into the direction of the alarm clock and emptied his machine gun. The rag woman took off running. He just stood there for a while and then weaved on and left our view. We still could hear him singing again for quite a while.
Pretty late in the
spring, Mama said if we are going to have anything to eat in the garden, we
just must go to a nursery. There was one not too far from us on Grinzinger Strasse. So we set out
on real nice warm day and walked uphill on Grinzinger
Strasse until we were almost at the
He led us to a large room, where there was a desk, several chairs, a large couch, filing cabinets and such. I guess it must have been the school principle’s office at one time. Everything in it was absolutely filthy! The windows were so smeared with soot, one could not look out. It seemed there was soot all over the furniture.
Mama signaled to the Russian with what I am to clean? He left and brought back the most gorgeous, softest, monogrammed towels, a whole stack of them, hand towels, bath towels, and 2 Persian runners. Another soldier brought a big pail of hot water. In the pail was something floating, it was the biggest piece of soap and a kernseife, which was used for washing clothes before the age of the wash machines. According to Mama, this kind of soap had been a thing of the past and it was precious. She only hoped she could keep a little piece of it? It almost killed Mama but we had to use those beautiful towels to clean with. I washed the window with a hand towel and dried it with another hand towel, had to rinse it several times to get all the soot off. Then we washed the furniture off and dried it with a bath towel. Mama then tackled the immense dirty, filthy floor, caked with mud and tobacco juice. There was a large picture of Stalin in a glass frame and we even gave him a once over, he was very dirty also.
The Russian stood there the whole time to watch what we were doing. I guess our work met his satisfaction. Mama had to ask for new pails of hot water a couple of times, which the other soldier brought.
When we were done, Mama signaled with her hands, what to do with the cleaning utensils? He made a “flying motion” which we interpreted as throwing the stuff away. Mama already had held her breath, thinking if she were to keep those towels, how she would try to get them cleaned again. He also said to keep the soap. This kind of soap was as rare as anything else to find in those days, and a true treasure!
We started to leave, but he signaled us again to wait. After a while he came back with a bag full of potatoes, some onions and carrots. He gave them smilingly to us. Mama almost cried, that was enough to feed us for a week!
I must mention that the Russians were known to have little to eat as well. Mostly they lived on fatty soup and dark bread.
This shows, after all there are good people as well as bad, anywhere. This Russian soldier, perhaps an NCO, had a heart! He knew how starved we were. Also that what he had given us we appreciated so much.
Mr. Jelinek, our faithful informer, was our “newspaper.” As an
old man, he moved about anywhere he wanted to go. He could talk with the
Russians. He told us, that he had seen the oddest way of fishing. The Russians
sure were crazy! He had been to the
Coming back to our
dear old man, he also said that he had noticed that women were at the
Mama had been itching to go to the garden to see if everything was still there. It was also the only place where we could wash ourselves.
Can you try to imagine how you would feel if you were not able to wash yourself, your hair for weeks? That is what we had to do. Water had to be hauled at the risk of getting killed, if you stuck your nose outside during the artillery barrages. We had nothing to heat water with, no gas and no electric. In the garden there were two big barrels of water that had been buried half way into the ground. Mama said even if the hydrant had no water, we could use this water in the barrels to wash ourselves. We went into the little garden house, stripped and scrubbed ourselves, washed our hair in cold water with the harsh Kernseife. When we finally thought we had scrubbed all the dirt of us, and rinsed, we felt like we were reborn! Then put on freshly washed clothes, it was heaven!
We then planted our pole beans and the pumpkin seeds, which is all we could plant that year. The nursery we had wanted to go to, had been abandoned, no one there.
One day, late in
the summer, what a happy day! Erika came home. She was as skinny, if not
more so, than we were, dead tired, weary and wanted nothing but to sleep. She
did that for a couple of days. Her feet were nothing but blisters. The clothes
she had on were in tatters, shoes torn. She had walked from Upper Bavaria back
to
In 1945, Erika was 21, I was 12, but we were almost the same height and size. She had a slightly bigger foot than I.
What to do about clothes for Erika? She could not wear Mama’s clothes, because Mama always said she was thankful to God, that he had made her little. Otherwise we would have seen to it that she had to run around naked.
When I cam back from Schlesien, good old Rosa, had given me some of her things, she had outgrown, even some bras, a couple of dresses, nothing fancy, a skirt, a jumper, and a couple of blouses. Immediately, they all became Erika’s property! Thanks God we had shoes for her. That was big sister! Believe me I reminded her of those clothes many years later, when I wanted to borrow some of her clothes. She would then always say, “What to you mean, ‘those rags you had? You said that to make me mad." Typical sibling rivalry!
After Erika had
gotten several days of rest, she wanted to get a job. Where, there were no
jobs? She got in contact with some of her friends. They were in the same
position. Everyone had to find some kind of job that at least would provide
food as payment. From somewhere they heard that the Russian Navy, who patrolled
the
Nobody was interested in a job that paid money. Money was worthless in those days shortly after the war! Everything was still very chaotic. No transportation, no streetcars were running yet, nor trains.
It was getting to be fall and we kids were wondering would there be school? We soon heard that our middle school teachers were looking for any kid that would want to help clean up the school. The Russians had just departed from it. Lizzi and I volunteered and in all my days I have never seen such bedlam, such messes! The science room stunk so badly because in a pile were laying the specimen that had been in bottles filled with some form of spirits of alcohol.. The containers had been emptied by the Russians and they had been drinking this form of alcohol, I guess. Our teachers wondered how many went blind or died from drinking that. The toilets were the cleanest place in the whole school. Not, that they could have been used, because there was no water. What had been used for toilets was on each floor one room. In that room in corners there were feces a foot high, and it was impossible for us to clean it. Those rooms were sealed and I guess much later disinfected, white washed, or whatever. There must have been several aspiring army artists, showing off what their stuff was in painting murals on walls, on blackboards. It usually was all gory stuff, war scenes. They had painted with oil paints, so there was no way to wash it off.
I don’t know if the same spirit would be among today’s kids, but I remember every day more showed up and wanted to help clean the school. I only know if it would not have been for our dedicated teachers, mostly elderly men and women, we probably would not have had school until 1946 or even later. All of us kids were just happy to be kids again, not having to live in cellars, anymore. School was what we wanted just to be amongst our peers again!
We wore rag-a-muffin style wooden shoes held together with elastic. Everything was either too small or too big on us. You were “in” if you had a good pair of shoes, you were the envy of the class and probably of the teachers as well.
We had hardly any paper to write on. Pencils, pens, school books? A thing of the past! The Russians probably had burned all of them. We learned by remembering again, by repeating everything again and again. When it got real cold in the winter, there was no heat and school had to close again.
After the
Americans came, the Russians moved across the
During those ten
years of occupation when riding streetcars, Russian soldiers would also be
riding the streetcars. The soldiers must have had only one change of uniforms.
Usually, they were not very clean, they were smelly and the Austrians avoided
any close contact. It was at times comical. If the streetcar was getting full,
everyone, getting on immediately sought the Austrians. The Russians were left
by themselves. People still remembered the times when the Russians were full of
lice. In a way, those Russian soldiers of the post war area were to be pitied.
They were still very much disliked. They had practically no contact with the
Austrians, because they were not allowed to go places as they pleased. When
there was a bunch of them on a streetcar, they were on a sightseeing tour. They
came from the north of
The horrible experience we had at the hands of the Russian troops will always remain in my mind. Just thinking about it, causes my blood pressure to go up! Still, many years have gone by. I have matured and learned that hating someone only hurts me.