WW2 as experinced by a child, Part 4

Attila Salamon
Aug 24, 2017 · 8 min read

On Friday, the 6th of April, at 6 o’clock in the evening we boarded an open flatbed rail car and left Leoben. We were among many other refugees crowded together. It rained all night. My parents held my sister and me on their laps as we huddled under my father’s leather overcoat trying to stay dry. The next day we traveled all day in rain, snow, and sleet among snow covered Alps and beautiful scenery. Some of the other people on board asked my parents why they did not give their children anything to eat. When they said that they had no food they gave us some bread and sausage. This was the first meal we had in several days. Occasionally the train stopped and everyone would take the opportunity to run into the adjacent woods to relieve themselves.

At one point the train was stopped due to an air raid. We were in a deep canyon with steep heavily wooded sides. We saw dive bombers overhead; but, luckily they did not spot us. They were P38’s, as I later found out. I was petrified with fear and wanted desperately for the train to quickly go into the tunnel that was just ahead; but, we just sat there like sitting ducks. I was told that if we moved we would be more likely to be spotted. We later found out that another train carrying refugees a few days later on the same line was attacked and almost everyone was killed. It was dubbed the “ Bischoffshofen Death Train”.

Shortly after passing through the tunnel, we arrived at Bischoffshofen in the afternoon, then onto Salzburg where we arrived at 10PM. There were no facilities for refugees at the station. Somehow we wound up at the air raid shelter of the bombed-out Hotel Europa a short distance from the railroad station. The shelter was unheated and abandoned. We were so tired that we slept on the bare floor with my parents sitting and holding me and my sister in their laps. The next day, Sunday the 8th of April, we begged some bread and sausage from people and explored the shelter in more detail. We found a room with wooden benches on which we slept for the rest of our stay in Salzburg. On Monday we begged and got some soup for lunch and supper at a restaurant. On Tuesday we traded some flour that we had packed for some bread. The hotel was a bombed out shell and there were trenches dug around it with concrete slabs covering portions of the trench. It seemed like a labyrinth to me and I amused myself with exploring the trenches, which were connected to the main shelter and the hotel. Some people came and wanted us evicted since we were trespassing. My father went to some office and got a permit to stay there; but, it was becoming very uncomfortable as people were watching us constantly with suspicion.

There were several air raids while we were in Salzburg. When the sirens sounded the whole city, us included, ran to the caves carved into the side of the hill upon which the famous Salzburg fortress is built. We ran across the bridge over the river then a short distance to the foot of the mountain. We sighed with relief when we were safe inside the caves. The section we were in ran parallel to the side of the mountain and there were occasional openings from which we could see the city below us. At the time I was under the impression that these caves were part of the salt mines after which Salzburg is named (salz = salt). In 1988, when we visited Salzburg, I looked in vain for traces of the salt mine; however, there was a convent hewn into the side of the mountain, which could very well have been the caves that I remembered. The Hotel Europa is now a modern building bearing no resemblance to what it used to be.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, the 11th of April, our baggage, such as it was, arrived from Leoben and we made arrangements to have it shipped on to Munich. Next morning, at 5 AM, we boarded the train to Bavaria being very glad to get out of the unfriendly atmosphere of Salzburg. In the afternoon, at the village of Stephanskirchen, we had to get off the train as the tracks ahead had been damaged by a recent air raid. For several hours we sat in a meadow near the train station while several air raid alerts were sounded. Eventually a bus arrived and took the passengers to Rosenheim. Here, at the railroad station, we were met by some nice, understanding people, totally different from Austria, who gave us soup and bread. The soup was tasty and hot and warmed our spirits as well as our bodies. We later learned that after we left, the Hotel Europa had a direct hit and the shelter where we were staying was totally destroyed.

We hung around the station waiting room for what seemed like ages. I remember the scene vividly. It was a Victorian style station with ornate iron work and glass sides and dome. However all the glass was gone, shattered by bomb blasts, and most of the ironwork was twisted and deformed. Bomb craters, twisted rails and bullet holes from strafing dive bombers were everywhere. There were only a few tracks that were usable. Looking at all this damage made us very nervous and we were very anxious to get out of there. We originally planned to go to Munich; but, looking at all this damage we decided that staying away from a large city was advisable. So we decided to get off the train at the first small village. At 7 PM we boarded a crowded train with all our baggage, my sister and I sitting on our parent’s laps. The Rosenheim station took a direct hit hours after we had left.

We got off the train at the Markt Grafing station. I don’t know if it was the first stop after Rosenheim; or, why we chose to get off there. It was late at night and the waiting room was deserted. My sister and I slept on a bench while my parents slept sitting on our luggage. During the night there was a huge air raid on Munich. The windows shook, but we were so tired that we slept through it,

Next morning, Friday the 13th, we had breakfast at the station’s restaurant. My parents enjoyed a cup of coffee, a rare treat. The people were nice and friendly and the restaurant was sparkling clean. It was like suddenly being in a different world untouched by the war. We were three families that had left Leoben together. We had been through a lot; but now we felt that our wanderings were finally coming to an end. After breakfast the three men went to Grafing, about a mile from the railroad station, to see what accommodations could be found. The mayor was very nice and got us a place in the community gym, which was being used as a shelter for refugees. We got lunch at a nice restaurant without ration tickets, the first good meal in weeks, and then we borrowed a little cart for our luggage and walked to town.

Our three families were assigned 9 beds. They were simple wooden beds with straw stuffed mattresses and pillows. We were in a large unheated room, the gym, with at least a hundred other people. The ceiling was very high and had many large lights. During the day, with the lights on and the body heat of all these people it was fairly comfortable; but, at night when the lights were turned off it got very cold so we requested that the lights be left on. It was three weeks since we slept in an actual bed, so in spite of the cold and the lights being on, we had never slept so good in all our lives.

The community gym, where we were staying, was a new modern building at the edge of the town of Markt Grafing, a town of 5000 people. The designation “Markt” has since been dropped. It was an archaic designation for towns having open markets where farmers would bring their produce. There was a soccer field behind the gym and it was fronted by an open area of about 50 by 100 yards in size. Across from the gym a long one story building housed a machine shop of some sort. To the left, as you exited the gym, and at the extreme end of this open area, was a wooden one story barracks used as a storage building by the “Hitler Jugend” (Hitler Youth). About a half dozen private homes were situated to the left and beyond the barracks, and beyond these was the town swimming “pool” where I later learned to swim. It can’t rightly be called a pool since it was not concrete lined; it was merely dug out of the gravely ground.

A few days after arriving in Grafing, the American army was approaching. I saw a squadron of about twenty or thirty SS storm troopers carrying machine guns going past the gym and toward the outskirts of town. They were to defend us from the American “invaders”. Apparently they didn’t do a good job because we heard no firing and we later found their abandoned fox holes, weapons and uniforms. SS troopers were shot on sight, so they threw away their uniforms and tried to blend in as civilians. Months later, after the war was over and we played and explored the woods around Grafing we found the grave of an executed SS trooper, an SS helmet hung above the cross over his grave. There were also mysterious persons hiding in the woods. We found abandoned camp sites and shelters they had built, and there were all kinds of stories told by children of strange people they had seen. I’m sure these were former SS trying not to be found.

The next day a white flag appeared in a window of every building as the American army marched and drove into town. I remember being very nervous and scared not knowing what they would do to us. We heard so many stories of atrocities committed by Russian troops, and we had no idea of how the Americans would behave. Next day we cautiously walked to the center of town where, in the town square, they had built a large bonfire into which all the confiscated weapons were thrown. American soldiers stood around, largely ignoring us civilians. Gradually my fears subsided, they didn’t seem to be mean. One soldier was eating a large pear. He took a few bites and threw the rest in the street. Some boys rushed to pick it up and fought over it. O how my mouth watered at the thought of taking a bite of that pear.

We witnessed a lot of looting during the next few days. I saw people carting large lathes and other machines from the machine shop across the way on horse drawn flatbed wagons. The barracks housing the Hitler Jugend warehouse was totally ransacked. One person was carrying a large sheet of shoe sole leather that was almost as big as his arm span and he could hardy keep hold of it. The only thing left in this approximately 50 by 50 yard size warehouse was the propaganda material of the Hitler Jugend.

With the barracks now being empty and us looking for a more permanent place to stay, we moved into three rooms at one end of the building. I don’t know if we merely squatted, or if we got permission from someone. This end of the barracks was apparently an office area. There was a hallway as you entered from the outside with a toilet on the right and three rooms, one after the other, on the left. The first room was already occupied by a pair of Italian sisters and the two sons of one of them. We had the second, and largest, room which we shared with Bandi Bàcsi’s family.The other couple who fled with us, and whose name I don’t remember, had the last room. We all shared the single toilet; at least there was running water. There was one other small room with its own entrance that was occupied by a pair of older sisters and a small dog.

And so begins our four year stay in Grafing. See Part 5.

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Attila Salamon

Written by

I am a retired engineer. I was born in 1937 in Budapest, Hungary and lived through the second world war. I want to write about my experiences during the war.

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