A Story to Tell: Part 4

We were resting in a village side street with the main street quite busy with the fleeing Nazi army, lorries full of looted goods when suddenly a herd of some hundred cows were also driven by on foot, by a few German soldiers. We realized that they were Hungarian cows. We were very hungry and felt that we should have our share so we pushed into the herd and got some half a dozen cows into the opposite side street, opened a gate to a farm- house and drove them in and locked the gates to the great surprise of the occupants. The German herdsman never knew a thing about it and when they passed out of earshot we took two calves out through the back gate, leaving the rest of the bounty for the grateful occupants. Some of us, who were brought up in the country had some idea how to kill an animal, though none of us had any first hand experience. I got hold of one horn of the calf and the other guy the other and the third broke the calf's temple with an axe. It went down like a sack, obviously without any pain, I believe. A large bonfire was made ready to roast our prey which we shared with the people of the house who were almost as hungry as we were. We took one calf with us but it was not long before it was detached from us by our previous ally.

By this time it became quite clear that the Russians were pressing hard and often we found ourselves in the rear, perhaps less than one Km. ahead of them. Sometimes we had to stand at bay but the engagement never lasted more than a few hours. A few random rifle shots and that was it. We could see the Russians pulling the mortar launchers on leads, as if they were dogs, behind some cover. Then they lobbed their mortars at us mercilessly. This used to give us a little advantage in the race to the west. Those of our colleagues who could not stand fell out. We could do nothing for them, and I never heard any more of them. Probably they are dead. God knows. They are among those thousands who died innocently for the others. They have no marked graves, not even a wooden cross. Those who found them had to bury them. Just like we had to bury the corpses we found later on. We did not know who they were. Like us, they did not have an identity tag either. Perhaps the warm Trasdanuvian wind sometimes blows a golden ear of corn above them.

The escape still went on as we entered Austria, just 40km. over the border "our ally, the Germans" took all our equipment from us by force. That still would have been all right, because it was easier to walk without it but a few miles later they took our food reserves too and it was not easy to walk on an empty stomach.
We now had little to care about but we continued walking steadily towards the West. However "our ally" realized that we were going across their country without any work and one day they caught us. We were press-ganged to work, if we wanted to live, they said and ordered us to Amstetten railway yard. There we rebuilt the railway lines, one each way, the same two lines each day! Every morning, punctually to the minute, around 11 o'clock as I remember, a few hundred American bombers completely destroyed the railway yard and every afternoon we rebuilt it. We were billeted in a village above the town and the bombers used to fly over us. We watched every morning as our previous day's work went up in smoke and rubble and in the afternoon we found the steel rails in bits and tangled like soft spaghetti. Actually it was one of our easiest and best fed periods of the war. We got food regularly and worked only in the afternoon till dusk. The RAF made sure that there was no outdoor lighting in Austria. There were also a couple of other Hungarian companies doing the same labour force work. The wild spring weather had gone and at last we had enjoyed something, until one day we got an order again, to pack up and go towards the west, by train! The train was run by a Hungarian army engineering company that used to run the Hungarian army railways. The length of the journey was some 100kms. But I am sure we traveled about 300kms. If we went 30kms. forward, we had to come 50kms. backward, and we had to fend for ourselves whenever we stopped by a field seeded with potatoes, sugar beets or anything edible. Then we used to dig them up and boil them. Sometimes it was quite raw or just warm as we had to scramble back to the moving train with our bounty. We traveled to and fro for days. One mid-day we were queuing up at the kitchen truck when without any warning some six American Air Force Tunderbolts attacked the train. They flew very low at right angles to the train, I can still see their radial engines racing towards us and peppered us with their heavy machine guns. First they got the two anti-aircraft trucks at either end of the train, then came back for the rest of us. I was crouching behind a solid wagon wheel, shaking like a leaf as the planes came at us again. One of their bullets went through the solid iron wheel of the next axle in front of me as I was looking at it, like butter. As the planes passed I took off in their direction and ran and ran and ran into a wood and out of it. I found a lot of other men from the train had also taken to their heels. After a long quiet period when we were reasonably sure that the planes had gone we gingerly returned to our train. Not one of my company was injured, nor was our cattle truck struck.

A few days later we were still repairing the railway where we had been shot-up, and wondering why the morning air-raid had not arrived when someone spread the news that there was a radio announcement that the war had ended and gave out the temporary zone borders of the occupying armies. We found ourselves just inside the Russian zone with no Soviet troops about, some 15 kms. from the American zone on the other side of the river Enns. As we did not much care to give ourselves up to the Russians, we man-handled the trucks into one long train, fired up the nearest locomotive and steamed ahead to the American Zone. We met the Americans, relaxing in the sun on the side of the railway cutting on the eastern side of the still intact railway bridge, presumably waiting for the Russians. They asked if we had any guns, cameras and that sort of thing. But soon they found that we had nothing, absolutely nothing at all! They allowed the whole train to cross the river Enns into the American Zone. We were most puzzled by their continuous chewing and thought they must have developed a new type of some highly efficient regurgitating military eating system, called, "chewing-gum" that had no meaning at all in Hungarian!

We were there for two weeks. The Americans were very friendly, quite different from what we were used to. They supplied us with food, medicine and allowed us freedom. They were even more pleased than us that the war was over. I think we were too exhausted and after so many adventures we could not believe it. They kept on saying " alles caput ...alles caput, we can all go home now!" Not very far away was the first German transport depot with a few hundred lorries and cars. Most of them were not empty. Their former drivers had stolen so much that they could not carry away their bounty when they fled on hearing that Germany had lost the war. Unarmed German solders were streaming towards their homes, off the roads in the fields and footpaths of the countryside. There were huge lorries full of various tins of jam, butter, fruit, meat, cheese some three feet diameter, cigarettes, clothes, everything that we could imagine. How delighted we were when we discovered this camp! Some lucky boys took big tins and when they opened them they found a ham! I rushed back for one of these and when I opened it back at the camp I found cooked tomatoes!

The May weather in Austria was warm and sunny. The GIs allowed me to take the boys for a drive some evenings around the country side.
I think it was on such a drive when we came across what looked like a hay-cart but this time it was loaded high with nude bodies strewn over the cart with skinny arms, legs and just bony faces with shaven heads sticking out as if they were branches of trees from the forest for fire wood. The driver walked beside the cart with his whip and the reins in his hand.

In the mornings we had to work for a few hours cleaning and repairing the railway shunting yard and its vicinity. After that we went to the little brook which flowed beside our track to clean ourselves and our belongings. The cleaning went on for hours. Nearly every day we boiled our underwear, socks, coats and most of us put our haversack in boiling water too. Some hundreds of buckets of water were poured daily in the trucks, for we wanted to get rid of our tiny but constant company (lice) at last. Unfortunately we could not change our clothes and so the only effective disinfectant was the boiling water which was not fully successful. But we made a great harvest of our personal small enemies!

One day three very emancipated Hungarian men staggered to us. They came from the nearby concentration camp of Mauthausen that we certainly did not know about. They were just skin and bones, reminding us of the hay-cart . We offered to share our tinned food with them. Two of them ate very slowly and very little but one could not contain himself and in spite of the others' warning he dived into the tinned chicken recklessly. The poor fellow died in front of our eyes within half an hour with a GI first aid soldier in attendance. The shock of the rich food killed him.

On the early morning of 17th May some boys woke me up. They had decided to start going home on foot and to start straight away. When I jumped out of my truck a crowd of about a hundred were ready to go. An old soldier gave me a piece of red cloth and he also told us about the friendly Russians. Anyway the war was over and we could not care less about the Russians. We thought they would not mind us going home. We believed they would treat us like the GIs treated us, who very readily furnished us with official papers, signed by a general, which supposedly gave us free passage to our homes. We reached the river Enns at Enns town, where we crossed the bridge and entered the Russian zone. We kept going as fast as we could. The Russian soldiers waved and let us go so we thought we were getting on with them. Of course they were all right! They had plundered a few thousand people and they were full up with valuable things. Three or four wrist watches on each arm and limb, a dozen other watches and pockets full of various rings and gems would give satisfaction to anyone. As we left the first bunch of Russians, other Russian soldiers we met gradually took more and more of our meagre things we had on us. So after 24 hours we had nothing at all. They even took our boots that looked too good for us. We arrived at the first Russian traffic controller with his red flags, who did not allow us to carry on towards Budapest but directed us towards a smaller road in a south-western direction. We showed our American passes which they promptly took away and tore up. We attempted not to accept his direction, so he blew his whistle and some 10 Russians armed with machine guns at the ready, shouting "Davay.. Davay.." and pointing towards the South-Westerly direction. We went their way... - to a very large enclosed field probably the grounds of a large estate. The Russians were collecting everybody who happened to be on the roads, women, old people, children, those who managed to survive the concentration camp, in fact any one who came from the Western zones. There must have been some six or seven thousand people, some had been there already for a few days. Luckily we did not stay there for long, because it was a blind alley where they collected us and it was already full of people when we arrived. We only had standing place in the road so they had to move us somewhere. Before we started they searched us once more.
Anybody on the roads, even locals were thrown among us. I recall a finely dressed young woman in her mid 20s appeared among us, staggering, with blackened eyes in a very weak state. We helped her along and it turned out that she has been taken away, raped by some 15 Red soldiers and she was hoping to get home by walking with us some 15 kms. east wards. I think she made it.
After five days' march suddenly the guards stopped us and ordered us to get into groups of a hundred. They got rid of cripples, the sick, the injured, the old, the women and the children roughly below 12. They took the rest of us into a real prisoners' of war camp. This place was near St. Polten. The house and the grounds must have belonged to a rich and noble Austrian count, with a huge old mansion and a good dozen other buildings. All these with a few acres, were surrounded by guards and a wire fence. About twelve thousand prisoners were crammed in. The rain kept on pouring down for a whole week. A few days before I had lost contact with the boys of my company with whom I had started out. I wandered about to see if I could find someone whom I knew. After some hours of lonely search some one shouted:-
"Curly - come here!"
There were three boys, one who had just broken a leg, from my company huddled under their coats, from the rain, who had arrived in the camp three days before, even though they left the American zone a day after me. They had had time to think it out and when I met them they had already decided that a small group would have a better chance to keep low so they would escape that very night under the cover of the incessant rain. So when darkness came we left the camp, without a Good-bye. God knows how long we groveled in the rain and mud under the wires, when finally the lead boy stood up and ran towards where we expected some carts and horses. We had got there safely and immediately we selected the best five horses and two good carts. We found some twenty Hungarian women there and they asked if they could join us. We said "yes but we are starting right now!" One woman whose husband was in the camp, another with a six week old baby and a third who was expecting a baby very soon were ready to start straight away with us. We loaded the two carts with provisions from the other carts for us, 4 boys, 3 women, and one baby and the five horses, two to pull each cart and a spare one. We whipped them and cut into the darkness by guessing the direction toward the Hungarian frontier. Although we were over the most difficult part of our task, the excitement still did not leave us. We drove the horses very hard and we covered a fair distance through Austria that I knew well from my geography lessons. I never thought that it would replace a map! Early the next morning we were some 60 kms. away from the camp. We hid in a little copse during the day and we travelled during the night. The only close shave we had was when one night three armed red soldiers stopped us, investigated us, but satisfied themselves by only relieving us of our spare horse. We always avoided the main roads and towns. But we could not avoid Vienna and one morning we arrived in its suburbs. During the night somehow we lost touch with the other cart, never to hear of it again. It carried most of the provisions, two boys, one with the broken leg and the mother and her baby. The third small woman in her late 30s turned out to be a rather aggressive type. I think she was a survivor of a concentration camp. We found an old gentleman who offered to guide us through the back streets of the city for a kg. of cooking fat! We left Vienna safely and we were only one day away from the Hungarian frontier. We thought we could cross the border the next day. However, the baby who had not seen this world yet, did not agree and less than three hours into the journey from the frontier, announced herself.

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