A7 End of the war

Narrator: Friederike Haidl, 1942 Reporter: Karin Haidl

My father was a miller. We lived next to a brook. In May 1945 the Russian army came to our region, the “Waldviertel” and occupied our region. They stole horses and other animals.

They stayed next to the brook to have water for the horses. The soldiers caught fish and my mother and my neighbor had to prepare them. The Russians broke into the house and they stole clean clothes out of the cupboards. They left their dirty ones behind.

The people had to sleep in the stable because the Russians occupied their beds. If they didn’t obbey they were shot. So everyone did what they said.

The old people stayed in the house. The girls and the women fled into the woods so that they were not raped. They also hid on the attic or in the cornfields. Some farmers even hid their horses in the woods. If somebody had left his house and the house was empty it was totally robbed. But the Russians loved children.

In the following years the Russians came to our village only now and then. My brother had to join the German forces and later was captured by the allied forces.