Unlikely Warrior

by Georg Rauch

  The next day someone discovered a fast and easy way of making the potatoes edible. A friendly stoker offered to hang the potatoes, strung on a length of wire, in the locomotive fire for a few minutes. When he threw them down to us, they were burned to a crisp but at least cooked through.

  At long last we reached Marmarossziget, the border city between Hungary and Russia. Soldiers in Hungarian uniforms and women with Red Cross bands on their arms were waiting on the platform. When they realized in what poor condition many of us were, they brought stretchers and carried the weakest to the front of the train station. From there they transported us in trucks to a school. We were duly marveled at by the local populace, and we learned that ours was the first transport of eastern prisoners of war to come through that point. The locals became almost hysterical when they found out that there were at least fifty Hungarians in our shipment, men who couldn’t be officially released, however, until they got to Budapest.

  That evening we ate an incredibly good-tasting pea soup with bacon pieces and white bread with milk. I hadn’t tasted milk for fifteen months. We slept on clean straw sacks, and the next morning, after being served bread and milk once more, we were taken back to the train station and loaded into a train with passenger coaches, the kind with compartments and upholstered seats. It was an experience, just using real flush toilets again after such a long time. As the train began moving and we sat on those upholstered seats with our skinny legs dangling down, most of us wished we were back on the straw in the cattle car, where we could stretch out and sleep. We were so weak that normal sitting was in itself too much of an effort.

  After a while someone magically produced a razor with a dull blade and scraped off his three-week-old beard, using the bathroom mirror. It was a rather bloody business, especially without shaving cream. Others came and sharpened the tired blade on the inside of a water glass. I was amazed to see how important it was for many to arrive home freshly shaven. Without beards, the white skin of their sunken cheeks and the skeletal form of their heads could be seen much more clearly.

  My parents, if they still exist, wouldn’t even notice the condition of my beard, I thought. And if they no longer existed? What would I do then? Where would I go? I had seen soldiers at the front who were happy to return to battle when their furloughs were over because, instead of their family homes, they had found only an enormous pile of rubble. The closer I came to the Austrian border, the more I worried that I might have survived the war while the rest of my family had been reduced to nothing in a giant bomb crater. After all, our house stood not far from a train station, and I had heard many times that the air attacks were especially concentrated on industrial areas and railway centers.

  On our way through Hungary we passed many pretty villages and small cities that seemed not to have suffered from the events of the war. People in colorful costumes were working in the fields. Suddenly the train stopped in the station of a small town. When we leaned out the windows, we saw an almost surrealistic picture: a railway platform decorated with flags and colored paper, and hundreds of men, women, and children in their Sunday best. Bread, sausage, cheese, and sweet rolls were arranged on long tables. There were large kettles full of soup and goulash, bottles of wine, and schnapps. It was all for us. Someone had found out that the first prisoner transport from Russia was coming through the town, and that there were also Hungarians on board.

  The men staggered out of the coaches and began stuffing themselves with these wonders, washing everything down with wine. It was a real festival, and there was even a group of Gypsy musicians. But when the train took off again, it soon became very obvious that the nice people of the village hadn’t done the home-comers such a good turn after all. It wasn’t long until one after the other leaned out the window to regurgitate everything he had consumed. Their stomachs were no longer able to handle such large amounts of food, especially the fat and alcohol. I had eaten only a little bit of soup with some white bread and had stuck a biscuit in my pocket to nibble on in the hours to come. Thus, I was spared the ill effects of the fiesta.

  We reached Budapest during the night, and there the Hungarians and Czechs were separated from the rest of us. A train with just two cars brought the little group of Austrians to Marchegg, the Austrian border station. It was about 2:00 a.m. Three faint lamps swung in the wind and rain, barely illuminating the tracks and the two little station buildings.

  A train official in a rubber raincoat with a red-white-red band around his arm came to where we stood next to the coaches and said, in heavy Austrian dialect, “I am a representative of the Austrian government, and I welcome you in its name. I have been given the privilege of bringing you to Vienna, and I hope we will be able to put a special train together tonight. Meanwhile will you please go over to that building, and I’ll call you when everything is ready.”

  After years in foreign lands, these were the first words I heard spoken by a free countryman. I felt my throat tighten.

  At 5:00 a.m. we reached Vienna. In a house next to the bombed-out North Station, each of the forty-five homecoming soldiers received a piece of paper, as small and almost as thin as a cigarette paper, with a few faint words in Russian, our name in Cyrillic letters, and a rubber stamp. It was our discharge paper from the Russian war imprisonment. Each of us could now go wherever he wished. We were free.

  VIENNA

  I stood shivering in front of the ruins of the train station on that dark morning in late October. A few electric streetlamps faintly illuminated the giant piles of rubble around me. Those heaps of bricks and cement had once been five-story houses, typical Viennese apartment buildings constructed at the turn of the nineteenth century. A few of the houses, or parts of them, were still standing, enough to give a general idea of where the streets used to run. Shadows wrapped in old winter coats hurried past me with rapid footsteps.

  I turned down a path trodden between the ruins toward a corner where a streetlamp glowed and sat there on a block of granite while I attempted to order my thoughts. From now on I was completely responsible for myself. To reach our home on the Landstrasse—presuming it was still standing—I would have to cover a distance of six or seven kilometers, as nearly as I could judge. That had still been my parents’ address on the last letter I had received before being captured, but that was more than fifteen months previous.

  When I looked around me at the devastated lunar landscape near the North Station and thought of how our home lay only five blocks from the South Station, I felt a heavy, fearful chill. Could I even cover that distance on foot? I wasn’t certain. After all, I was just a hundred-pound bag of bones with a heart that beat much too quickly, and I had next to no energy in reserve.

  Daylight was breaking now. After questioning a man about the general direction of the Danube Canal, I set off. I pulled a piece of wood from the rubble and used it as a cane to give me a little more support. People approaching on the street regarded me with a mixture of curiosity and horror. A group of women, made brave by their numbers, stopped and asked from where I had come. When I told them “from Russia,” one of the women pulled a photograph of a young soldier in German uniform from her bag and asked whether by chance I might ever have seen him.

  Half an hour later I reached the Danube Canal, and as I stepped onto a temporary bridge, I saw a company of Russian soldiers marching toward me. For a panicky moment I thought I would have to jump over the side into the water so as not to be taken prisoner again. The war is over. It’s past. I had to keep repeating that to myself. For six months my country has been at peace. The shooting is over, and never again can I be taken prisoner.

  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 fathe
r, 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 w
hich 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.