18. INTRODUCTION TO VIENNA

EVERYTHING turned out very stupidly. It was rather cool in the train, and I kept the wallet containing our money and documents in my coat pocket in order to be able to get at them quickly whenever there was an inspection. When we got to the South Station in Vienna and began to carry our belongings to the baggage checkroom, I took off my coat and left it with Nina, who was guarding our bags on the platform.

As I was walking through the waiting room I accidentally bumped into a tall military figure in a black S.S. uniform, hitting the side of his jaw with my head in an extraordinarily clumsy way. I don’t remember whether I slipped or whether he got in my way, but the fact remains that the collision took place. The S.S. man was apparently a very nervous person. Without listening to my apologies he began to shout loudly, studding his almost incomprehensible tirade (I think it was in the Thuringian dialect) with many barely comprehensible curses.

He grabbed me by the arm and started to drag me somewhere, out of the crowd that had surrounded us. I could understand his irritation, because I could judge the force of our collision by the pain in my own head. But when he pushed me into a small, dark room in the station and locked the door, any sympathy I might have had for him disappeared immediately and completely.

I wanted to smoke but my cigarettes were in my overcoat, and this made me realize that I had no documents with me at all.

It’s all right, I thought. While Igor and his family are still at the station it will be easy to find them. I have nothing to fear. I have come to Vienna with a perfectly good visa and the rest of my papers are in order.

However, when I noticed that it was entirely dark outside, and I began to feel strong pangs of hunger, I became worried. I knocked on the door a few times but there was no sign from outside. Then I began to hammer at it. Finally I heard a voice say, ‘What’s the matter?’

‘I want to see the commandant.’

‘It’s too late; he isn’t here. You’ll see him tomorrow.’

‘I have to get my papers from my friends.’

‘You can get them tomorrow.’

‘But my friends will leave the station . . .’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘I want to eat.’

‘Tomorrow, damn it! I told you tomorrow; now shut up!’

Further conversation was useless. I tried to sleep, seated on a chair in the corner. After a while I succeeded.

Grey dawn appeared at the window. I was awakened by spasms of hunger and began to beat at the door again. Another voice, without opening the door, said it was too early.

‘I’ve been without food long enough,’ I yelled. ‘Can’t you give me something to eat?’

‘We don’t feed anyone here. You’ll get fed in jail. You’ll be taken there when the commandant comes.’

This was highly unpleasant. I asked the man to inform the commandant of my desire to be allowed to talk to him as soon as possible, and began to pace up and down the room.

About two hours later a tall military policeman led me to the commandant’s office.

‘What’s the matter? Why are you here?’ said the commandant.

I explained to him what had happened. He shrugged his shoulders.

‘I don’t know anything about it. No complaints have been filed with me by any S.S. men. Who are you and what are you doing at the station?’

I explained that I had just come from Serbia, and before that from Russia, and that I had to find my friends.

‘What friends? Where are your papers? Let’s see them.’

I explained to him again that my papers were in my coat, that my coat was with Nina, and that Nina, alone, or with her parents, was waiting for me now, somewhere around the station. The commandant grimaced as he listened to me. Then he began to shout, sitting up straighter and straighter as his voice grew louder, ‘Who are you trying to fool? What Nina? What parents? Obviously you’ve escaped from a camp. Damn you anyway; they’ve brought all of you here from all sides and now we Germans can’t live in peace any more on account of you. I’m sending you back to camp right away. Corporal!’

The corporal appeared and handed me over to a private, without listening to my protestations. The soldier took me by the sleeve and we went out into the square and took a trolley.

‘Where are you taking me?’ I asked. We were standing on the platform of the trolley.

‘To camp,’ the soldier answered. ‘But I don’t know why they are sending you there.’

‘I don’t know myself. The only thing I’m guilty of is that I accidentally hit an S.S. man in the face.’

‘Hey, that’s interesting. Tell me about it.’

I related what had happened. He looked thoughtful.

‘Did they ask you where you were from and what your name was?’

‘I told the commandant where I was from, but I wasn’t asked what my name was. Why?’

‘Well, I’m supposed to take you to a very bad camp.’

‘Why are you taking me there then?’

‘Because I’m a soldier and I have my orders.’

At this point I began to try to convince him that he would be an even better soldier if he let me go, and that after all it was the S.S. man’s fault that he had crashed into me.

‘The hell with the S.S. man; he got what was coming to him. But I have to give the commandant a receipt from the camp proving that they accepted you.’

‘Isn’t there some camp that’s better and closer?’ I asked in a low tone. He looked at me thoughtfully, ‘Maybe that’s a way out. I can always say I took you there by mistake. And probably the commandant won’t bother to check on it. All right. Let’s get out here and take another streetcar.’

Presently we arrived at a group of wooden barracks, surrounded by barbed wire, with two soldiers on guard at the entrance. My ‘escort’ went into the small orderly room and came out a few minutes later holding a piece of paper.

‘You stay here. Good luck to you. Goodbye,’ he said.

A man in civilian clothes, probably a Pole judging from the few words he exchanged with another man that we passed, led me to one of the barracks. It was equipped with two decks of wooden shelves and smelled of bedbugs. There was almost no one there. I lay down on the mattressless, blanketless cot which was pointed out to me, and tried to sleep.

It was dark when I was awakened by the sound of many voices. Again I felt the pangs of acute hunger. This was the second day without food. I struck up a conversation with the people in the barracks, who turned out to be Ukrainian workers deported to Germany a year before. They told me where the mess hall was and I hurried over.

The dark and filthy dining hall was crowded with people trying to get to a large pot from which a brown liquid was being doled out. When I received my share I asked about bread but was told that bread was given out only once a day, in the morning, and that one had to work somewhere to be eligible for it. However, bread was also available if I had money.

I had some money sewed into my trousers; the money for our immediate expenses was in my overcoat pocket, somewhere with Nina. I rushed to the latrine, ripped the lining from part of my trousers, and got out 100 marks. I gave them to the man who had offered to sell me bread. He looked the bills over and said, ‘That money is no good here. Those are occupation marks, not German; they aren’t worth as much. If you want I’ll give you 25 real marks for that.’

‘All right, but hurry up,’ I said, tortured with hunger. He gave me 25 German marks for my 100, and for 5 of my new marks I received two pounds of bread.

Feeling a little stronger, I went back to the barracks. In conversation with my fellow prisoners I learned that all of them worked in a big factory not far from camp, and that this camp was considered a very bad one, one of the worst in Vienna.

Some sort of camp official entered the barracks shouting, ‘Any newcomers here?’

I did not make a sound. There were no other new men in the barracks. After the official had left, the man next to me asked, ‘Don’t you want to register? Don’t forget that you won’t get any bread unless you work.’

‘Bread is only of secondary interest to me. Tell me, do they send you to work under guard?’

‘No, but they check on attendance at the factory. If anyone is absent, they inform the camp, and he is docked a month’s pay and gets a smaller bread ration.’

‘What kind of pay do you get?’

‘Up to 20 marks a month.’

This was more than modest, and I thought that I could well do without it.

‘When do you go to work?’ I asked my neighbour.

‘At 6.30 a.m. Work starts at 7. At noon we have a break for lunch, which is brought from the camp. From one o’clock we keep on working until 6.30. That’s a total of ten and a half hours. By 7 p.m. we are back in camp.’

‘Do they let you go to town?’

‘Yes, on Sundays. But you have to have this badge on your chest.’ He showed me a jacket on which there was a piece of white cloth with the word OST printed on it in blue.

‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

‘It means we are Ostarbeiter, workers brought in from the east. If you want, I can give you a badge like that; I have several of them. That way you won’t have to go to the camp office.’

‘Thank you, I wish you would give me one.’

I pinned the OST badge to my jacket with a safety pin.

‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘will they assign me a bed?’

‘Yes, but you’ll have to register first.’

I decided to sleep on the boards.

The next morning I got up with all the others and washed at a tap outside the barracks. I shaved with a razor borrowed from one of my neighbours and went out to work with the others.

I looked around, trying to print the locality on my memory. I wrote down the names of the streets we passed in my notebook. When we got near the factory gates I separated myself from the column and began to walk along the pavement alone. Nobody paid any special attention to me. Apparently here every man was responsible only for his own actions.

After walking a few paces, I took the prominent OST badge off my jacket and entered a small tobacco shop. They refused to sell me any cigarettes without a ration card, so I bought a map of Vienna and went on walking.

I stopped at a small square to sit down on a bench and study the city plan. I was quite far from the centre of the city. My problem was to locate my friends. It was not easy to do. I didn’t dare go back to the station for fear of meeting the commandant or the S.S. man. Without any concrete plans, I located a streetcar line and took a car going toward the centre. Getting off at the last stop, I found myself at the Ring, on Schwarzenberg-Platz. I entered a small café and asked for a cup of coffee and a telephone book, in which I looked up the address of the Russian Club. Then, for a small consideration, I was given the privilege of using the telephone. I began to call up every hotel in the city, one by one, asking each one whether my friends might be among the guests. This pastime took all the morning. Everywhere I got the same answer: nobody by that description had checked in recently.

After that I began to explore the city. Vienna appealed to me greatly. The houses were attractive. The wide streets were clean, orderly, and had many trees. The people were dressed neatly, in a somewhat old-fashioned manner. Not many uniforms were in evidence. I noticed how well groomed even the dogs were. Men as well as women walked with them on leashes.

All the cafés were full and I was amazed how many people of working age did not seem to be working. One might think that it was peacetime, that Germany was not losing her conquered territories, and if it had not been for occasional wounded soldiers it would have been easy to forget about the war altogether.

I bought a paper and went into a café. The news from the front was not good for the Germans. Fighting was in progress in the Carpathians, on Rumanian territory, in Poland, in the Balkans, and in Italy. I went on calling up hotels, but still without success.

Hunger began to bother me again. My attempts to have dinner at a restaurant were not very successful. With the exception of some sort of potato paste and coffee, everything was sold on ration cards, of which I had none.

I set out for the Russian Club. On the door of the club there were two notices. The first announced that the club was open only once a week, from 7 p.m. to 11. That day was five days off. The second sign declared that this was a club for the OLD emigration. The word ‘OLD’ was underlined twice.

It was already late and I hurried back toward camp. I was on time. Just as I reached the gates of the factory the workers began coming out. Pinning on my OST badge, I mingled with the crowd.

The next day I continued my search. It was hard to imagine that anything had happened to my friends. We all had excellent documents and enough money. All of us spoke German, and Vienna seemed too peaceful a city to contain many unforeseen unpleasant occurrences.

I was afraid to go to the police for information without my own documents in my possession. The incident at the station had made me extremely cautious. But the camp was not an alluring place. I had no desire to stay there with the other Ostarbeiter.

On the third day, sitting in a small café on Schwarzenberg-Platz after my ‘dinner’, I began to talk to the proprietor, a fat Viennese with light blond hair, resembling an albino’s. I asked him cautiously where foreigners arriving in the city usually stayed. He brought the telephone book over and crossed out a large number of hotels where foreigners could not stay. He advised me to pronounce the names of the people I was looking for with great clarity.

Once again I sat down with the telephone and after an hour and a half of endless conversations I received an answer from a small hotel not far from the Prater which made my heart leap with joy, ‘Yes, they are here. They checked in two days ago.’

I was certain that I had called up this hotel earlier, but I did not want to lose any time speculating about it. I set out for the other end of the city, having asked the proprietor of the restaurant for directions how to get there.

The hotel bore the proud name of Europa, but was a small building, three stories high, probably about 200 years old, located on a narrow side street.

The desk clerk told me what room to go to. Once again I was with my friends! They had all been terribly frightened at my long absence. For two days they had kept watch at the station, hoping that I would appear. They could not imagine what had happened to me. It never entered their heads to look for me in the station kommandatura, but this was probably a good thing. The commandant might have remembered the whole incident and decided to make sure that I was really in the punitive camp.

The Gorskys were living in the hotel illegally. They had not as yet registered with the police, and as a result they had to pay exactly twice the normal rate for their room. I arranged with the clerk to live in the same room, for a little additional rent.

Igor told me that on the black market, at the Prater, he had been offered half the face value for his occupation marks. Although this was more than I had received at the camp, it was still not enough. A number of problems now faced us. We had to change our money into real Reichmarks, get ration cards, register with the police, and settle the question of work. The law required all foreigners (as Igor had already learned) to work wherever the Arbeitsamt ordered them to. This was a very unappealing prospect. Neither of us wanted to work ten hours a day for the Germans in some factory and receive only trifles for pay.

I solved our money-changing problem the next day. I went to several banks where occupation marks were being changed, but only in limited quantities, 50 marks a person. I noticed that the tellers made no record of the transaction, and therefore I assumed that there was no check or control on the money-changing process. In a small savings bank on the Prater I made friends with the teller, a middle-aged Viennese who turned out to have a fierce hatred for all Germans from Germany.

I met him after he was through at his office, and the slab of bacon and two pieces of Rumanian soap that I gave him enabled us to find a common language fairly quickly. As a result he changed all our marks into real ones at the normal rate, one to one, reserving for himself a small commission of 2 per cent.

A solution was also found for the ration card problem. I learned that foreigners arriving in Vienna could draw ration cards for a month without going to work. Naturally this privilege was not extended to the Ostarbeiter. Since Zina had a paper which certified that she was an invalid (this was a fiction she had bought in Kiev for a small price) and since her mother was over sixty, we only had to worry about ration cards for Igor and me.

It was not long before Igor got a job, through the Arbeitsamt, as a draftsman at a radio factory, at 300 marks a month. I temporarily remained in the ranks of the unemployed, buying ration cards on the black market. Igor’s factory gave him a small room in a camp, about five feet by ten, but this camp did not in the least resemble the one where I had spent my first days in Vienna. It was for certain foreign workers – Frenchmen, Dutchmen, and Greeks, whose working conditions were a great deal better than those of the Ostarbeiter. Since there was obviously no space for me in Igor’s room, I rented an inexpensive furnished room. The old landlady was frightened when she first found out that I was a Russian. In her opinion all Russians were barbarians whose sole nourishment was derived from the flesh of babes in arms. However, with the help of the all-powerful bacon and soap, I managed to get on the good side of her fairly rapidly.

We told the police that we were White emigrants from Serbia. They pretended to believe us and registered us as such. But in order to get passports it was necessary to go to the Gestapo and present our genuine documents.

The elderly, one-legged Gestapo Kriminalrat studied our pile of papers carefully for a long time, shaking his head slowly. Finally he said, ‘You are not foreigner visitors at all; you are just plain, ordinary Ostarbeiter, and you’ll have to live in camp. Only Russians who left Russia before 1939 and have documents to prove it are considered foreigners.’

‘But wait,’ I objected. ‘We are not Ostarbeiter. We came to Vienna of our own free will; nobody forced us to leave Russia . . .’

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ said the Kriminalrat, but not angrily. ‘Nobody forced any of your countrymen to go to Germany; every last one of them has come here of his own free will.’

‘Yes, yes, that’s right, I’m sorry,’ I hastened to agree. ‘But we were travelling by individual decision and we even received official visas from the German Minister in Belgrade.’

‘Visas, visas,’ the old man mumbled, ‘I don’t give a damn about visas. The devil knows what I’m going to do with you.’

He began to study our documents again. At that moment Zina’s head appeared around my shoulder. She gave me a sign with her eyes to move aside. Then she placed a small package on the Kriminalrat’s lap. My heart stood still. I was sure it was more of that soap and bacon from Bucharest, and I waited for an explosion. I went over to the wall and began to inspect a map of Vienna with great interest.

‘What’s this?’ asked the old man severely.

Zina said something in a low voice. The intonations of her voice were very seductive and convincing. I heard the rustle of wrapping paper and the old man’s soft coughing.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘what the hell? Leave all your papers here and come back in a week.’

We thanked him and left. I scolded Zina for slipping a bribe to such an important official, trying to explain that it might have ended in a catastrophe, but she merely laughed.

A week later we were told that we could apply officially for a passport, and a month after that we all received brand new passports enabling us to live in Germany with no great risk of ending up behind barbed wire. Our ‘citizenship’ was described as ‘unsettled, formerly U.S.S.R.’

Thank God, I thought, for that word ‘formerly’.

The time went by. We got to know Vienna fairly well and we became very fond of the city. We had enough to eat, especially in the first days when it was still possible to draw our famous Marschverpflegung at the railroad station. Later when we had become too well known at these soldiers’ ration points, we were forced to give up this source of supply with a heavy heart.

The local police questioned me several times as to the reason I was not working. I made various excuses, but I felt that my freedom would soon be over and that I would have to go to work in some factory. This is what would have happened if it had not been for a lucky break.

We had become acquainted with several of the White Russians living in the city. One was a very pleasant young count who was working in the local propaganda department. Being fluent in several European languages he was employed in translating articles for the German-controlled Balkan press. He had good connections, and when I told him about my difficulties in finding a decent job he said:

‘That’s easy. I can fix you up. Are you registered in the Arbeitsamt? No? Well, go and register, but tell them you are a journalist by profession and that the propaganda section has requested you to work for them.’

‘But I don’t want to work in the propaganda department!’

‘Don’t worry, you won’t. Just tell them that so they’ll call me up and I can confirm it.’

‘But won’t they send me to some other place?’

‘No. Journalists, writers, artists, and actors, as members of free professions, are not subject to the labour mobilization. I’m well acquainted with these laws. But to avoid trouble you must have some sort of work certificate, and I’ll get one for you.’

Everything worked out smoothly. I reported myself as a professional journalist with great aplomb and haughtiness. They did not even bother to check on the telephone and issued me a paper stating that I was to work for Count Reder. He in turn procured for me a document which stated that I was ‘affiliated with the propaganda department’. On the basis of this paper I began to draw regular ration cards, and the police duly noted in my passport that I was a journalist by profession.

Only one other problem remained: money. Our capital was melting away; Igor’s pay was small. Of course the prices of rationed food were low, and there was almost enough to live on in the rations. In this respect the Germans were extremely efficient. The size of the rations was much smaller than in the Soviet Union, but there 95 per cent of the food rations were never given out to the population, which received only bread. In Vienna all the food which was announced at the beginning of the month was either distributed or replaced by an item of equal food value. Of course, it may be pointed out that most of this food was taken from Russia by the Germans. Still the fact remains that when Russia was in possession of all her food we saw very little of it; we had to come all the way to Germany to get it.

During the summer our little group began to make some real money at last. Having studied the situation, we decided there was a good market for cheap jewellery here. We found brass and various stones of all possible colours in Vienna shops and began to spend our evenings in the manufacture of earrings and necklaces. Viennese Fräuleins, who had been starved for such ornaments ever since the government had forbidden the manufacture of luxury goods, purchased our trinkets willingly. Later we made contacts with several stores, which bought our products in large quantities and sold them out in the villages.

We earned from 1,500 to 2,000 marks a month and were able to buy clothes gradually, as well as to supplement our diet on the black market. Of course we ran some risk of getting into trouble with the authorities because of our illegal activities, but the Germans had not been able to institute a real control over the country. The black market was forbidden, but in the Vienna amusement park on the Prater a large crowd of black marketeers would gather every Sunday. Most of them were foreigners, Ostarbeiter included, but one could often see local citizens trying to barter a few cigarettes or a little bacon for bread and ration cards. In the big camps, especially in the Greek ones, there was a real bazaar on Sundays. You could buy good suits, new shoes, and many other things which were not available in Vienna’s stores. There were occasional police raids but not many people were caught. Specially placed sentries usually managed to signal the approach of the police and people had a chance to run off.

Meanwhile, events were moving in the world. When the news of the Allied landings in Normandy and the subsequent defeats of the Germans in France came through, it became obvious that the end of the war was not far off. The only chance for German success would have been the use of the mysterious and terrible weapon which Goebbels and other German leaders mentioned many times. But only orthodox Nazis believed it should be used. Most people thought that such a weapon would call forth retaliations on a vast scale in the form of even greater bombardment of German cities by British and American aviation.

Secret weapon or not, Germany was not being spared. We had air-raid alarms every day, but the planes usually flew on farther to bomb Berlin and the industrial targets of the western and central provinces. Austria and Czechoslovakia, so far, were not bombed as much. There had not been a single raid on Vienna. Of the other Austrian cities, Graz, Linz, Krems, and Wiener Neustadt were hit the hardest.

At the end of the summer General Kramer and the entire staff of the Russian House in Belgrade came to Vienna. The only things they managed to bring with them were the famous Petersburg treasure and a few items from their museum. Everything else, including the enormous library, fell into the hands of Tito and the troops of the Red Army which took the city. A small number of White emigrants who either could not or would not flee to Germany stayed in Belgrade. Reports of merciless treatment of all those who helped the Germans in any way, and of the relatives of the men in General Steiffon’s Russian Corps, which was retreating into Croatia, came through the front lines to us in Vienna.

Our Belgrade friends arrived in Vienna very different from what they had been at home. They were no longer in the least uppity. The general himself, his wife, and several friends moved into a large hotel in the centre of Vienna. In the evenings a Russian company would gather there, play bridge, and talk over the latest news, which was becoming less and less favourable to the Germans.

In this hotel I met several famous White generals, heroes of the Civil War in Russia. Some of them wore Russian uniforms; others were in civilian clothes. They were inactive and spent their time on their personal affairs, although they did occasionally see various highly placed Germans.

By this time the Russians, under German sponsorship of course, had created several military commands. In northern Italy was Ataman Damanov’s Cossack group, fighting against the partisans of the Italian resistance movement. In Croatia, in addition to General Steiffon’s Russian Corps, the First Cossack Division of the German General Pandwitz was stationed, operating against Tito. In addition, various national legions were included in the German Army: Georgian, Kalmuk, and Tartar. Finally there was the Ukrainian S.S. Division, made up of volunteers from Galicia.

All these forces were connected with their national centres in Germany, which were inimical to each other and all hostile to General Vlasov. This German policy was formulated under the direct supervision of Rosenberg, Minister of the Eastern Provinces (although there were no longer any eastern provinces), who was trying to split the Russian anti-Bolshevik forces as much as possible. Why he wanted to do this no one could figure out. Such a policy might have made some sense at the time of the German victories in the east, when the dismemberment of Russia was part of the German plan, but it was senseless in 1944 when the Third Reich was on the brink of destruction.

Many people condemned the attitude of the Germans toward the Russian anti-Bolshevik movement on the grounds that if the Germans had immediately taken steps to create a free Russia, they could have acquired a loyal and powerful ally for themselves in the east and the outcome of the war would have been quite different. I did not agree with them: the Germans and a free Russia, liberated by them, were two irreconcilable things. In order to do that they would have had to stop being Germans.