19. AMERICAN BOMBS

THE people of Vienna had begun to be convinced that the Anglo-Americans had decided to spare the city in their flights over the Reich, but they were to be disappointed.

On September 1o I left my house and headed toward the Gorskys’ apartment. On the way there was an air-raid alarm, and all walking on the streets stopped. Thinking that this was just another one of the daily alarms we had when American planes from Italy flew over Vienna, I paid no attention and continued on my way.

Anti-aircraft guns began to fire from their emplacements at the top of the tall iron and concrete bunkers which had been built in various parts of the city during the summer. Their firing grew more intense. In the bright blue sky I could see the high-flying bombers with puffs of flak around them. There were a lot of them. Shrapnel from the flak shells began to rain on the street, and I decided to take cover in the doorway of a house.

A moment later the bombing began. The bombs fell with wild screams; the air shook with explosions. I quickly went into the house and down to the cellar. Several Austrians were huddled in the far corner, only occasionally saying anything to each other. The whole cellar trembled. An old man kept sucking on a bottle.

A bomb whistled down and burst somewhere very close. The lights went out. The roar of the plane engines was on top of us. One of the women began to have hysterics and the children started to cry. Suddenly there was a huge crash. The house shook. Dust filled the cellar, along with a few bricks which clattered down from somewhere. Almost simultaneously I heard the distant crackle of burning wood and smelled gas.

The whistle of bombs and the sound of their explosions could still be heard, but it was receding into the distance. Covering my mouth with a handkerchief, I began to make my way slowly along the cellar wall. In one corner there was a little daylight. It came from a partially blocked window and a small ventilator. I began to clear away the bricks and other debris, scratching my hands badly in my haste. The old man came over and handed me a crowbar with trembling hands. Blood was trickling down his face, mixed with dirt.

Finally I cleared a small passageway. When my face reached the ground level a wave of intense heat hit it; the house was on fire. With great difficulty I forced myself through the window and outside. Then I helped the old man crawl out. He kept calling the others who had been in the cellar with us but we could hear no answers. At that moment a few other people came up and began to widen the hole. I went on my way.

The streets along which I had passed so many times were unrecognizable. In many places there was nothing left but rubble. A few buildings were on fire. The all clear sounded and people poured out into the street.

The house which contained the ‘camp’ where my friends were living had not been damaged. Nobody was home. Looking in the mirror in their room, I noticed for the first time that I had a big abrasion on my forehead and that I was covered with dirt. After cleaning up a bit I set out for my own place.

The area where I lived was roped off by the police. After checking my documents and convincing themselves that I really lived there, they let me through.

From a distance I could see that only memories remained of the house where my room had been. All three floors had been demolished. Only a corner of the first was still standing. Apparently one bomb had made a direct hit on the house and another right in front of it. Two streetcar rails, bent by the explosion, had climbed into the window of my room.

Crawling up the rails, I managed to get inside. The ceiling had not collapsed, but everything was covered with bricks, dust, and junk. I started to try to retrieve what I could of my belongings. My suitcase, with some things in it, was under the bed, unharmed. I made a bundle of everything else in a blanket, all mixed up with dirt, and clambered back to the street with difficulty. I saw the old landlady in the crowd which had gathered there. She was sitting on a broken chair looking around with wandering eyes, her hands folded in her lap. She did not even recognize me.

It was already quite dark when I got back to the Gorskys’ place. They were horrified to see me in such shape and began to ask what had happened. I was so tired that I threw my things down in the corridor, crawled under the bed where Nina and her grandmother slept, and was asleep in an instant.

In the morning I hurried back to the part of town where I had lived to get a certificate that I had been bombed out. With this certificate you could buy certain items of clothing in the stores, but, more important, it made it easier to find a new apartment.

There were apartments available in Vienna, but they were controlled by an inspector in the Rathaus, a repulsive sort and a Nazi to the marrow of his bones. Whenever I talked to him the desire to smash his face in rose in me. My conversations with him always went something like this:

‘What do you want in Vienna anyway? Who invited you to come here?’

‘I was brought here by your countrymen,’ I would lie.

‘Oh? And why would they want to bring you here?’

‘I don’t know; you’ll have to ask them.’

‘You are, perhaps, the only Russian in Vienna?’

‘You know that I am not.’

‘And where do they live, the rest of the Russian pigs?’

‘Where they were put, in camp.’

‘And why can’t you live in camp? In what way are you better than the others?’

‘I’m not better than the others, but I happen to have the right to live outside of camp.’

‘Oh, you have the right! Well, all right, so live outside of camp. What do you want of me?’

‘I want an apartment, as I’ve told you several times.’

‘I don’t have any apartments for people like you. There are apartments in Vienna only for Germans, and not for all the garbage that has been blown in here recently. Your allies, the Americans and British, are bombing the Germans, and it would be funny if I gave apartments to Russians while Germans had to sleep under the open sky.’

‘In other words you don’t want to give me an apartment?’

‘So you’ve finally figured that out!’ the inspector would say. I would get up and leave.

Such conversations had taken place several times. Finally I realized that I could get nowhere with him and started to look around for other means of getting what I wanted. I found a way. Having penetrated to the office of the secretary of the burgomaster of Vienna, I obtained, with the help of more of that bacon and soap from Rumania, a written order that a ‘category 3’ apartment should be assigned to me. A ‘category 3’ apartment was one with serious deficiencies, one which Germans often refused.

Grumbling and cursing, my old friend the inspector wrote me out a paper by which I obtained a damp and neglected apartment in a small side street near Schwarzenberg-Platz. The Gorskys and I moved there the next day. They had decided to give up their crowded little room in camp. Our apartment consisted of two rooms with a kitchen, but the best thing about it was that there we were our own bosses and did not have to take orders or kow-tow to anyone.

We saw only the people we wanted to see. A few friends from Russia used to drop in, mostly Ostarbeiter, formerly doctors and engineers. General Kramer and his friends also were regular visitors. We spent the long evenings manufacturing our trinkets or playing endless rubbers of bridge.

Vienna was bombed often, but the centre of the city was seldom hit; the bombers concentrated on the industrial suburbs. A few camps were hit, and there were casualties. There were not enough good bunkers and shelters to go around, and foreigners frequently were not allowed into them, though they would fight for entrance.

Once the police held me up on the street and made me help clean up bombed buildings, along with a group of others. There had been such press gangs around before, but I had always managed to elude them successfully. This time I was not able to do so right away.

We were taken to the area which had been hit on the previous evening, handed shovels, and instructed which parts we were supposed to clean up. Policemen stood near to make sure that we worked.

The work was dull, boring, and obviously useless. To do what they wanted not a few dozen but a few thousand people were needed, so there was no point in trying to work hard.

Suddenly another policeman ran up and whispered to our guard. We were ordered to disperse. Not understanding the reason but very happy, I ducked through a hole in the wall and, jumping from one pile of debris to another, reached the street. I heard whistles all around.

Unexpectedly I came across a group of about ten men in Red Army overcoats digging in a fairly deep hole. A group of Germans stood watching them at a respectful distance. I realized that these were Russian prisoners of war digging out an unexploded bomb. An unpleasant chill ran up my spine and I hurried away from the place.

I paused for a moment in the next street. The same policemen who had caught me earlier were standing by the wall of a half-ruined building, blocking the street and detaining anyone who tried to pass. I changed my direction and had not yet reached the corner when there was a deafening roar. I turned around. On the place where the policemen and the group of detained civilians had stood there was a column of dust. The wall had collapsed from the concussion of the bomb’s explosion and buried them under it.

There was plenty in Vienna under almost daily bombardment to amaze those of us who had come from the Soviet Union. Everything that could be repaired was repaired right away, efficiently and with no particular fuss. Streetcar traffic very rarely stopped; there were merely occasional changes in the routing. Factories continued to operate, although the effectiveness of the work was diminishing: there was serious impairment of railroad communications, causing lack of raw materials, coal, and various parts which had to be brought from a distance. But the food supply for this city of millions continued to be adequate. The unharmed streets were cleaned every morning and retained an illusion of peaceful living.

As usual, in an unchanging ritual, the honourable citizens of ‘the second Paris’ took their bearded dogs out for a walk; they crowded around the doors of streetcars in the same way, allowing others to go first in exaggerated politeness. The innumerable cafés of the city were still full from morning until night, except during air raids.

One Viennese, whom I met in a night club, said:

‘Why should it surprise you? We have nothing to fear. We didn’t start the war and we won’t lose it. We lived quietly and peacefully before the Anschluss and we’ll live the same way after the war. Vienna will be full of tourists from all parts of the world and life will be light and gay again. You are surprised at our calmness, but I assure you it is to our credit. If we began to react to Herr Goebbels’ hysteria, it would not make it easier for him and life would be more unpleasant for us. Nobody can save the Reich now, and Austria has already contributed too much to the adventures of the last few years.’

‘But what are you Austrians doing to free Austria from the Germans?’ I asked. He shrugged.

‘Why should we do anything? Isn’t there enough blood already? There are a lot of people here who have come from Germany. They are not all bad people, and it isn’t worth it to complicate the situation by individual or mass killing of such people. When the time comes, they’ll get out themselves. Take the case of Warsaw. The Red Army was already on the other side of the river. Stalin incited an uprising among the Polish nationalists underground in the city and then sat back and laughed while the Nazis destroyed both the city and the nationalists. Hitler’s a fool. If he had surrendered Warsaw to the Soviet along with the underground army of General Bor, it would have been a major victory for Germany, because your Stalin would have lost his peace and quiet and your N.K.V.D. would have had a lot of work to do. The Poles are a hotheaded people. We are calmer here.’

‘I agree with you. In general, if Hitler had arranged to leave organized anti-Communist groups of local citizens in the cities which he surrendered to the Red Army, the results might not have been bad.’

‘Perhaps, but maybe not,’ my philosopher-companion answered. ‘This way, many of these people will have a chance to get under American or British authority, while if they stayed behind they would be eliminated sooner or later. But enough of these sad subjects! How do you like that girl over there, the one in the yellow dress? Isn’t she cute?’ He stuck an old-fashioned monocle in his right eye.

Apparently his opinions were shared by most of Vienna’s citizens. Their protests against the Nazis went no further than an occasional sign chalked on a wall: ‘Down with the brown dog Hitler,’ ‘Hang Goebbels,’ ‘Long live free Austria without Nazis,’ ‘Hurry up and lose the war.’ These signs, which often appeared near streetcar stops where a lot of people always gathered, often lasted for a suspiciously long time, sometimes for three or four days. Everyone pretended not to notice them, but I saw eyes furtively reading them with obvious pleasure. The faces of these Austrians, as they were reading, would express the thought, ‘Look how brave we are!’