A7 War experiences

Narrator: Friederike Haidl
Reporter: Patrick Haidl

I was born in 1942 and I still can recall some events from war time and the time after.
My parents had a mill run by water. Russian soldiers went along the stream and had a rest close to it. They started fishing and pulled some fish out of the water.

My mother and her neighbour had to prepare the fish they had given them.

The Russian commanders lay in the house owners´ beds and the fresh and clean clothes were looted from the wardrobes. The dirty ones were left behind in the meadows.
Some villagers escaped in fear of the Russian soldiers and so they on the other hand took advantage to plunder the houses. They loved to capture watches and other articles of value. The Russian soldiers took one of my father’s horses by force of arms and locked my father in the cellar.

My brother was in the army then. My mother sent him small parcels with dried food, but he had never received them. He had been deployed in Russia, France, England, Spain, and the Black Sea and in Germany. By the end of WW II he had been in a prison camp in Upper Austria.



People from Vienna went to our village called Plessberg to get a rucksack full of potatoes, 150 km one way. They swapped their jewels and articles of value for them. People in big cities were staving, but people in the countryside had cereals and milk.

By the end of the war many cities and blocks of flats had been destroyed by bombs. There was little food in the shops; food was rationed and only available on food stamps. Only after the war the supply of groceries slowly increased and one could get more and more in the shops.