WW2 as experinced by a child, Part 5
The war was over, we had moved into our room in the barracks; but we had no food and only the things we had been carrying with us on our flight. I don’t remember much about the next few days and how it came about; but, somehow a cardboard wall appeared that divided our room into two parts with us on one side and Bandibàcsi’s family on the other side. They had to go through our half to get to the door. There was also some simple furniture and two beds on our side, whose origins I was not aware of. There was no stove.
My memories of those first days are very hazy. I do, however, remember going to a small quarry-like excavation just outside of Grafing where my father built a fireplace from clay and stones and we cooked some potatoes. This memory stuck with me because of the mysterious metal shells of hexagonal cross-section that were strewn all over the place. They were split open and were discolored as if they had been in a fire. They were the shells of exploded incendiary devices, Phosphorous filled fire bombs like those used to burn the city of Dresden. Except for the potatoes we cooked in the quarry, I don’t have any memory of eating anything for several days after the Americans came into town. One night when my father started to dig up some potatoes in a farmer’s field he said he heard a voice whisper to him “Làszlo you are stealing”, so he put the potatoes back and came home. The next day, while walking into town he met another Hungarian man whom he knew and who told him that there was a job available at the American army washing dishes. He got the job and we had leftover food for as long as the army was in town. My father was convinced that God whispered to him that night and rewarded him with this job when he decided not to steal.
The army unit in Grafing was the elite “Rangers” and they had the best food available to the army. My father could take home anything that was left over from a meal. He even scraped off leftover food from plates and brought it home. He collected the fat that was rendered when meat or bacon was cooked and brought it home solidified in cans. We used this long after the army left, spreading it on bread in lieu of butter. There was enough food for us and the other two Hungarian families. Bandibàcsi, who was quite corpulent, was most appreciative; but, not so much so that he would refrain from chiding my father about his lack of self esteem, that an engineer would stoop so low as to wash dishes.
My father was a heavy smoker, as was almost everybody else, in those days. He would pick up cigarette stubs that the soldiers threw away, open them up and use the tobacco to roll his own cigarettes. He would bring home cigar boxes full of cigarette butts and we would sit around the table to open them and put the tobacco in a can. He even bartered, or sold, some of this tobacco to get necessities. Sometimes he would perform chores for the soldiers, such as shining their boots, and they would pay him with candy or cigarettes. These cigarettes were worth 5 Marks each. The candy was a special treat for my sister and me.
About this time my father had a local craftsman make a stove for us; it even had an oven. He paid for it with American cigarettes. For fuel we went into the surrounding forests and gathered twigs that had fallen from trees. Later on we would buy peat. As the weather got warmer we picked berries in the forest and my mother made elderberry, blueberry, raspberry and wild strawberry jam. We also gathered hazelnuts from the forest floor.
Toward the end of summer many of the Hungarian refugees started to return to Hungary. There was quite a community of them around Grafing and we knew many of them. There was a small castle, or chateau, outside Grafing (the name “Grafing” comes from the word “Graf”, or count, who lived there) where a Hungarian count was given refuge by the owner (the nobility tends to look out for each other). Somehow my father became acquainted with this count and he became very fond and protective of our family. When my father was thinking of returning to Hungary, he pleaded with him not to do it. “For the sake of the children, Làszlo, don’t do it”.
Bandibàcsi and the other Hungarian family decided to go home. They tried to persuade my father to do the same but the count’s advice prevailed. It was just as well with us. Relations between the families was getting strained. Things were gone missing in our half of the room and we suspected them of stealing. Their son, Cuci, was very odd and I never played with him. He was older and aloof. Where I had made friends with boys in the neighborhood, he never tried. We used to make fun of him and his way of reaching into his jacket to get his handkerchief to wipe his nose which was always running. “Come what may, we are going home” was the slogan of many of the Hungarian refugees and one day we watched as they piled into freight cars of the train that was to take them to Hungary. We later learned that Bandibàcsi died of starvation.
The Hungarian families that were left became very close. Dr. Rozsa György (George) was our closest friend and was a shipmate of ours when we came to America. He practiced medicine in New York and we maintained contact until his death. Zoltàn Nagy was a soldier in the Hungarian army and had many harrowing tales to tell of his experiences on the Russian front. He was quite a character and story teller. Eventually he came to America and became the owner of a tavern in New Brunswick, N.J. He visited us several times when we lived on North Wales Road. There was a young widow (Maria) and her mother whom my father took under his wing during our years in Germany. Her husband was an officer in the Hungarian army and was murdered by an American soldier after he had surrendered. She was embroiled in a legal battle seeking damages from the US government. They came to America on the next ship to sail after the one we were on. We lost contact after that. She was a teacher by profession and tutored me until I went to the local German school in Grafing.
The Hungarian count introduced us to an elderly German countess who was also living in the “castle” outside of Grafing. She took a liking to me and was interested in my learning German. To this end, she loaned me German books to read and I got my first taste of Karl May’s adventure stories. Karl May wrote 65 books of adventure and was the rage of children, much like the Harry Potter books are today. A lot of his stories take place in frontier America and are about Indians and white adventurers. My first book was “Old Shatterhand” a German adventurer with incredible strength who could kill with a blow of his bare hands. I bought a few Karl May books the last time we were in Germany and read them occasionally to practice my German. I visited the “castle” several times to pick up or return books. It was very fascinating with its three foot thick walls, mounted deer antlers along all the corridors, the courtyard surrounded by servant’s quarters. I felt like I was in the middle ages. In our 1985 trip to Europe I took my wife and younger son to see the castle; but, since it is a private residence and I didn’t know anybody who lived there then, we only got to see the outside and had a peek at the courtyard (it now had cars instead of horse drawn wagons parked there).
The sisters in the room next to ours had a thriving business servicing American soldiers. They were quite pretty and had no trouble getting customers. Their two boys, Koni (Konrad), who was my age, and the year younger Mario had a sheet hung between their bunk beds and the rest of the room and the sisters had no problem performing their services under these conditions. Needless to say the boys got an education beyond their years. Koni and I played together a lot. He had a tent where we “camped” and pretended we were adventurers or soldiers. One day he persuaded Herma Stodola, daughter of a shoemaker who lived near us, to come into our tent so he could try out what the soldiers did with his mother. I was not allowed to watch and had to leave the tent, but I peeked in through a slit. I had a crush on Herma and did not like what he was about to do, so I pulled up the tent pegs and pushed over the tent. I was no longer considered his friend and when I told my parents what he tried to do I was no longer allowed to play with him.
I believe it was in the fall when the American army left Grafing and my father was out of a job. By then we got some relief from the local authorities, I don’t know if it was money or ration tickets, but food was scarce even if you could pay for it. I used to hike to outlying farms with a small pail and ask if they could spare some milk; I know I did not pay with money. My father caught pneumonia in the fall and was told by the doctor to drink milk. The third time I visited a certain farm they said it was about time my father got better and I got no more milk there. In desperation one night my mother and I sneaked into an apple orchard and I climbed a tree to steal some apples. Suddenly the farmer appeared and we were caught. We cried and my mother pleaded with him that my father was sick and we needed something to eat. He let us go, but we got no apples. After the wheat harvest was over, we gleaned the fields for any wheat that fell on the ground. We threshed the wheat by repeatedly throwing it into a corner of our room; then we sifted out the wheat grains and ground them up for flour. We also gathered nuts from the forest floor. My mother washed our clothes in the creek, even in the middle of winter.
Sometime in the winter or spring the machine shop that was across from the gym and cattycorner from our barracks was in operation again. They seemed to have reclaimed the machines that were looted after the war. My father got a job there since they needed someone who had knowledge of electricity. They had a lathe that was directly by a window and I would stand outside looking in spending hours watching how it worked. My father got permission to use some of the machinery for personal work and he proceeded to make hot plates that he sold to American soldiers. He would travel to army bases all over Bavaria with a knapsack full of hot plates and return with cigarettes, candy, soap and other wonderful things. Since he had no money for train fare he would hop on freight trains. One day he almost got caught, which would have gotten him in big trouble, not so much for riding on a freight train, but for having black market items in his back pack. Dealing with American cigarettes was against the law.
We lived in these barracks for about two years. For the first year after the war ended I did not go to school. Only an occasional tutoring session with Marika had to be endured. As hard as times were I remember the good parts mostly. Having free time with no school or homework was great. I spent a lot of time playing in the woods that surrounded the town. I played in the creek that flowed behind the barracks. I learned to swim in the town swimming hole behind our barracks. The older boys amused themselves by retrieving ammunition that the German soldiers threw away, removing the powder and filling milk bottles with it and blowing them up with an improvised fuse. There was an abandoned shooting range nearby where the German soldiers trained. The targets were set up on the far side of a small lake. When the war ended they threw weapons and ammunition into the lake. We tied a rope to the end of a rake, threw it into the lake and pulled out machine gun belts of ammunition. There was a grate where the lake emptied into a small creek where we would insert the tip of the bullets between bars of the grate and twist them off. Then we emptied the powder into bottles or jars to be used for various fun activities. One day a boy retrieved a hand grenade, pulled the pin and threw it back into the lake. Hundreds of dead fish came floating to the surface.
Great excitement was caused one day when some boys found an auxiliary fuel tank (carried under the wings and jettisoned after they were empty) dropped by an American plane. It split into two halves which were perfect substitutes for canoes. I was crazy over boats; but, the bigger boys would not share and I never got to use them.
The second September in Grafing found me going to the local German school. I had a 12 by 9 inch slate, a pointed slate stick to write with, and a sponge for erasing. I carried these to school in a backpack with the sponge dangling outside the pack on a string so my homework would not accidentally be erased. Due to a shortage of teachers and facilities, the school day was divided into two shifts with one set of students going in the morning and the other in the afternoon for six days a week. So, even after my year and a half hiatus from school, I only had to go half time and had lots of time for play and exploration. The following year we went for full days but on alternated days, so I still had a lot of free time.
Kids in Grafing (and probably Germany in general) were brutal. Bullying was the way of life, with second graders boasting how they could beat up first graders, third graders saying the same about second graders, and so forth. When my mother would send me to the store for something I had to peek around every corner to make sure there weren’t any bigger kids around that might beat me up.
Skiing was the big thing in winter. At first I had no skis since we could not afford to buy them so I tied pieces of boards to my shoes and shuffled around on them pretending I was cross country skiing. Then somebody gave us an old pair of skis and I was in heaven. The skis were much too big for me so I was quite clumsy with them but I did not care and willingly endured the jeers of other kids. Later on, when my father found a job as janitor at an army base in Landshut (I think that was the name of the town), we could afford a sled and skates for me. The skates were the kind that you fastened onto your regular shoes.
During our first winter in Grafing the whole family had to go to Munich for some official business. Two things about this trip are indelibly etched into my memory. The first was the amount of destruction due to the bombing. Although the rails had been repaired and trains were running normally, the railroad station was a wreck with piles of debris and bullet holes from strafings everywhere. When we stepped out onto the street the scene was even worse. There was not a house standing, piles of rubble everywhere, an occasional wall, half destroyed. The streets were barely passable with piles of brick everywhere. The second thing I remember is being very, very cold; colder than I had been ever in my life. Puddles of melted snow were everywhere and my shoes were full of holes. My socks were wet, my toes had lost feeling. We were all shivering for what seemed like hours waiting for a trolley.
For heat we had only the cooking stove in our room. The walls and floor of the barracks were not insulated and we had to wear our winter clothes even in our room. We wrapped rags around our feet, over our shoes, because the floor was so cold. In the fall the Ebersberger forest was made available for anybody to take trees that had fallen or were cut down by the foresters. Cutting down any tree yourself was strictly forbidden. We spent a whole day gathering trees, trimming off the small branches and dragging them to a place where the farmer we had hired to cart them home would pick them up. The Ebersberger forest was about four or five miles from Grafing and it was a long and exhausting day by the time we got the wood home. Then my father had to saw the trees into logs small enough to fit into our stove. We had to stack them in the room vacated by Bandibàcsi’s family, on the far side of the cardboard wall. This had to be done quickly before someone would steal the wood. Besides this fuel, peat was available but it cost money.
About a year after we moved into the barracks an entrepreneur opened a shop in another section of the building making gift items carved out of wood, such as salad spoons with ornately carved handles. I used to watch thru a window how skilled craftsmen carved intricate patterns in just a few minutes. They had a storage area in the back that was not very secure and one night I stole a sheet of wood veneer and some quarter inch thick boards of nice soft wood. I had been very interested in model building but could not find the materials (kits were nonexistent). Here I found what I needed to build a model of a sailing ship. I used the quarter inch thick wood to make the keel and ribs and the veneer to form the skin. It was about three feet long and had three masts. I made the sails out of scraps of cloth. The project was completed after we moved out of the barracks and when tested on a small lake was found to leak like a sieve and be top heavy. The problem was solved by putting ballast in the form of stones in the bottom of the ship and embedding them in molten wax; which, when it hardened, also sealed most of the leaks.
After the army left Grafing, my father lost his source of cigarette stubs, and any cigarettes he got in trade for his hot plates were too precious for him to smoke. So he planted tobacco in a little plot just below the window of our room. He tended the plants with great care all summer and we had a nice harvest of tobacco. After the leaves were cured and dried we all chipped in with shreading the leaves and rolling them into cigarettes. Next year, just as he was getting ready for the harvest, we woke up one morning to find all the plants pulled out by the roots.
Sometime during our second year in the barracks my father got a job as janitor at a US army base near Landshut. Beside his regular duties, for which he got paid in German Marks, he would do special chores for the soldiers like polishing their shoes, waxing the floor of their quarters, etc. They called him “pop” even though he was only 41 years old. They would pay him with cigarettes, candy, soap and other necessities which were very hard to get on the open market. For five days a week he and some coworkers lived with a German family near the base. On weekends he would take the train to Grafing to be with us. He would arrive with his knapsack full of goodies, like Santa on Christmas. I would walk to the station to meet him.
About this time the far end of the barracks were being torn down and construction was starting on new housing. We had to move.
Continued in part 6
