A8 The pipe

Narrator: Ferdinand Haidl
Reporter: Verena Wanko

We lived in Plessberg. On Palm Sunday of the year 1945 the children of our village and I went from Kautzen to Plessberg.

Suddenly we heard some planes above us, they were bombers. After some minutes we heard a whistling and then a terrible explosion. We thought that the planes had dropped a bomb onto Waidhofen, our district town. Later we found out that the bomb had exploded in the fields. Years later you could see the place where the bomb had exploded between a building (todays Bittner company site) and Kainraths, a small village near Waidhofen.

One day two or three Russians came to our house. They had a bike with a damaged tyre. They told my father to repair the bike. They gave him a pipe for it, but my father didn’t smoke.
Some days later he found out that the Russians had taken the pipe from an older man in the village. My father told the man that he had got a pipe from the Russians. He showed him the pipe, and the man said, “Yes, this is mine!”

The man was so happy that tears were running down his face.