With forty others I sat on clean, dry straw in a cattle car and waited. My heart hammered even more rapidly than usual in recent months. Outside an official was yelling something unintelligible. A whistle blew; the train gave a jerk. That was the only thing that counted, the moment the train actually began to move in the direction of home. No one could now come and say, “You’re on this train by mistake. Get down. You belong to work group number 1.”
The train rumbled over the switches of the suburban station, and one of the soldiers began a song. All those pale creatures with the sunken eyes—old men, many of whom hadn’t yet reached their twenty-fifth birthdays—joined in. It seemed I heard the words “home,” “homeland,” “far away,” and “I’ll see you again” in every stanza. A few who were still standing began to hug each other and to dance around in circles until the train rattled over another switch, and everyone fell to the floor. One man kept repeating over and over, “I can’t believe it. It can’t be true.”
I rolled myself together like an embryo in one corner of the car, pulled the collar of my coat over my head, and attempted to digest in solitude the importance and implications of the situation. I would have preferred just falling asleep and waking up again in Vienna.
Before the train pulled out, one of the soldiers had figured out that we were about 1,000 kilometers away from home and should be able to make it easily in three days, because 330 kilometers a day wasn’t that much for even a slow train to accomplish. In spite of those calculations, I was reassured to catch sight of a car with a goulash cannon (field kitchen) and another, supposedly filled with food, at the end of the train next to the guards’ passenger coach.
On this trip the sliding doors were no longer locked. Depending on the time of day and the weather, we were able to leave a portion open and look out at the passing landscape. God knows there wasn’t much worth seeing, only burned-out villages and plains with already harvested fields, everything veiled in a late autumnal gray. Yet it all seemed wonderful to me, since I was already busy imagining how soon I would wander through nature, in sunshine or rain, as a free man. I would stop when and where I wished for as long as it pleased me. I would bend down to look at a flower, stretch out in a meadow, or stand on my head, and nobody in the whole world would be able to command me to do otherwise.
The clothing I was wearing was already a foretaste of my new freedom. Though shabby and oversized, it belonged to me, and in a few more days I would be able to do whatever I wanted with it. It was no longer the standard-issue hospital white underwear, from which I hadn’t even been permitted to cut the sleeves. After fourteen months of that apparel, I now had real articles of clothing on my body.
The laced boots were about four centimeters too long. Instead of shoelaces, pieces of hemp had been strung back and forth between the eyelets. I was dressed in a pair of yellowish-green military pants with knee patches, a shirt of an indefinable shade of green, and a German infantry jacket still in fairly good condition, with a sewn-on eagle and swastika. Over all that I wore a Russian military overcoat that was so long the hem dragged on the floor. It was belted around the waist with a piece of rope, and since it no longer boasted even a single button, I had pulled it together by inserting short lengths of wire through the buttonholes.
The German cap was also much too large for me, and I wore it pushed far back on my head so it wouldn’t slip over my eyes. A string over my shoulder supported the half of a potato sack in which I carried a dented and scratched tin cup, an equally battered mess kit, and an aluminum spoon. A field canteen without its original felt cover dangled from another string. The canteen cap was a gnawed-off corncob.
The first afternoon, the train stopped on a sidetrack. One of the guards walked along the train and yelled, “Four men from each car to bring the food.” We were all pretty hungry by this time, and the question of whether or when we would be given something to eat again was never far from our minds. A free man doesn’t have to think about these things as long as there is a bowl of soup and a hunk of bread nearby. The soldier, and much more so the prisoner, is always dependent on the hope that someone else will bring him something to eat, and bring it often enough for the body to continue to function properly. Again and again I had heard the soldiers swearing the same oath: “If I ever get out of this and make it home alive, I swear I’ll never be hungry again!”
The volunteers returned with a bucket full of kasha, another bucket of sweetened tea, and two loaves of bread. Chunks of meat floated in the kasha, and everyone in the car even received a good-sized portion of tobacco.
Rations continued to be plentiful the second day. The train wasn’t progressing very rapidly, since there was only one set of tracks, and we often had to wait for hours for trains coming from the other direction or to let trains more important than ours pass us from the rear.
On the third day there was no longer any meat in the kasha, and on the fourth day around sunset, we were pushed onto a sidetrack. The locomotive disappeared, and the guards took off in the direction of the little town nearby. Our car remained stationary for the next four days, and never again did we receive anything from the food car. We also received nothing to drink. The Russians had bartered all the accompanying supplies, and in the days to come, whenever we saw the guards, they were always drunk. Once one of the prisoners called out “drunken pigs” as the Russians staggered past, and one of them turned and emptied the entire magazine of his submachine gun into the side of the train, fortunately without inflicting any serious harm.
Some of us who were strong enough went out into the cold, foggy October fields to dig out cabbage stems or, if we were lucky, a potato that had been overlooked in the harvest. We dipped water from the rain puddles and cooked the cabbage-stem soup over little fires that we made from pieces of coal gathered along the tracks. We starved.
I had to distribute my energy very carefully, because my heart began beating wildly after even the slightest physical effort. Out of a feeling of solidarity, we shared whatever edible things we produced with those who were too sick to care for themselves. One of those in my car had already died; another wouldn’t be able to hold out much longer.
On the fifth day a train filled with Russian soldiers stopped on a parallel track and stayed for a few hours. Obviously on their way home, the soldiers were all in the best of spirits, singing and drinking. They began throwing us bread, half-eaten apples, and bacon rinds and had great sport watching to see how we gobbled up their leftovers or cooked them over our little fires. They relished the role of the victors, throwing their gnawed bones to the starving dogs on the losing side of the battle.
On the sixth day I was awakened at dawn by a jolt from the train as it finally began rolling again. The following week passed very, very slowly. We kept advancing short distances, but usually the train stood still. It rained most of the time, so at least we had no problems with drinking water, but the search in the fields became that much more exhausting. It wasn’t easy at all, burrowing around in the cold and muddy earth, trying to discover something edible. Above all, we didn’t dare go too far from the train, since we never knew when it might decide to depart. A state of general languor set in, and more and more of us were simply unable to go out searching for food any longer.
During the twelfth night I was awakened by a kick on the knee. “Wake up, fast!”
“What’s going on?” I grumbled, still half-asleep.
“There is a whole train filled with potatoes on a sidetrack. One of us is already on top and he’s throwing them down.”
Instantly wide-awake, I let myself down from the car onto the gravel embankment. It was very far down, and for a moment I worried about how I would manage to get back up again. Three of us pushed another prisoner up into the high, open car, and he immediately began throwing down scores of potatoes. The train’s locomotive was only four cars away, and even though the continuously escaping steam made a considerable amount of noise, we still had to be careful not to be discovered.
The night wasn’t very dark; there must have been a fairly full moon behind the clouds. We moved like phantoms, bending and gathering the potatoes into our sacks. Suddenly we heard the short blast of a whistle, and the train jolted. The two who were up top had quite a time of it, falling rather than climbing to make it down and off the car before the train picked up too much speed.
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.