PROLOGUE (continued)
I got to the hotel, rang the bell, and after a lot of questions by the porter, who came down from his bed in his underwear, I was admitted into the hotel. Yes, George was still in the hotel, so were his other friends. Yes, he had a bed for me, Mr Shillinger had arranged it. It was on the first floor, room 11, next to Mr Shillinger's room.
I went upstairs alone, dropped my luggage in my room and knocked on George's door. "Enter" and I did. George was in bed, smiling. His other two friends were also in their bed, they were also smiling. There was a man sitting at the table and he introduced himself as the member of the political police. He was also smiling. I cannot now remember for sure, but I think I was the only one who was devoid of all smiles.
At that stage how was I to know that being arrested was all that funny?
Shillinger or Peter Kardos and the others had to be lunatics to play such a stupid practical joke on me. But it was not a joke, although even I had to agree afterwards that it was funny. Two days earlier George and his mates had been raided by the police and they were searched for currency. It was obvious that their reason for being in a border town was to sneak across the border, but even in Hungary intentions were difficult to prove. The police found nothing, but my friends were arrested just the same and taken to the lockup.
However there was insufficient space in the jail and they were sent back to the hotel under escort and under arrest. The poor little sleepy cop, for whom they bought food in the dining room guarded them during the night, while another detective was guarding them during the day.
When I arrived I was immediately searched in my room, but held my actual US dollar greenbacks folded up in my hand, while the detective was going through my belongings. Afterwards the detective went back to the larger room and sat at the table guarding the three who were enjoying the sleep of the innocent.
Next day the detectives were withdrawn but we were told to stay in the hotel under house arrest. We did, but then suddenly more detectives descended on us and searched us for currency and gold, - two commodities we were not supposed to have. Nothing was found on us, we were getting cleverer and luckier all the time. Just the same, we were ordered to report in the afternoon at Police HQ, and as we approached it, I saw a person I knew and he was wearing the uniform of a high ranking police office. He was the son of Father's agent in Szombathely and I did not realise that he was in the police when Father gave me his address.
I told him our story, hoping that he can help and he told me that while he is in charge of the Police for the whole town, he has no connection with the political police. However, he told me that we should not worry, the worse that could happen to us was 3 months in the cooler.
That evening I collected all the gold and the currency we possessed and took them to my Police Captain mate, who offered to mind them for us. I also enjoyed a very good dinner cooked by his maid, who used to be the maid in the sanatorium where I was in 1943. Small world!
Next day we were approached by a local contact who told us that if we could be at a certain place at 11 p.m. we would be taken across the border for $20 each. So I climbed the first floor window of our hotel-prison, climbed down the pipes and went back to my Captain for our valuables and, with my pocket full of goodies such as sovereigns, jewels and dollar notes, set off for the meeting place, to which my friends would also come with our luggage. They arrived in the darkness, clattering along with the push cart they had pinched from the hotel. The noise, in the quiet of the curfew was deafening.
Suddenly, there were shouts and shots to be heard. Our contact came running and told us to scatter, because Russian Military Police had shot at the Russians, who were to take us across the border. We ran back to the safety of the hotel, where we were greeted by several of our detective friends, who once again went through all our belongings and had us stripped to locate our goodies. How we managed to hide them? With sleight of hand, but as we had everything we possessed on us, things were rather more difficult this time round.
The detectives told us that next day we were to be sent back to Budapest, because the police in Szombathely were fed up with us. Indeed they came to collect us at about 5 p.m. next day, walked us to the station and kept watch over us while we waited for the train to depart for Budapest. While they were watching some of us, the others were unloading our luggage on the other side of the train and hiding it. When the train finally left, we waved to the cops and before the train could gather speed, jumped off on the other side and hid until a decent interval had elapsed; then we walked out of the station.
We were fed up about our sojourn in Szombathely and we were becoming desperate. We have decided that this time we would simply engage a taxi, ask the driver to drive us to the border and walk across. To hell with all the rumours and the dangers of crossing a well guarded border. However as we left the station, a fellow walked up to us and asked us if we want to go to Austria for $20. We said yes and expected him to disclose that he was a detective and arrest us. Instead he led us into the yard of a nearby house where stood a Russian truck and around it some 30 people waiting to be driven to Austria.
Eventually enough people assembled and we paid $10 each to the driver and another $10 each to one of our own representatives. The man organising the whole affair, told us that he is a courier, who goes across the border two or three times every week and that it is all very simple, yet he asked us solemnly that under no circumstance should we move or cry out, even if we were shot at. We got into the truck, were covered by tarpaulin, then hay was loaded on top and we were soon off.
The trip was less than comfortable. There were over 30 people in the truck, together with their luggage and the way they could fit us in would have been cramped for sardines. There was no air under the tarpaulin and the hay and we were exhausted by the time the truck started on its shaking journey.
Half an hour later we stopped. We must have been at the border, because we heard our Russian driver speak in Russian and we also heard the Austrian Guards speak in German. After another 15 - 20 minutes the truck halted again and we disembarked. We were jubilant, there were people who kissed the ground and others who were hugging each other. Our courier received the second half of the money, warned us to be quiet until we saw the light come on in the peasant house, he pointed out in the distance and suggested that some German speakers approach the peasant for directions.
We waited till 4 a.m. and then decided to awaken the farmer. We had a woman with us who was ready to have her baby any minute, and she started to have pains, so we wanted to move off quickly. George Shillinger and I started off towards the house practicing in German what we shall say. In answer to our knocking the farmer came to the window and didn't understand a word of our German. How could he, we were still in Hungary! We had been taken for a ride and had paid for a round trip from Hungary to Hungary.
When Shillinger and I returned to the group they were not amused. We told them that we were about 5 kilometres away from the border so we decided to walk towards it, whatever the risks. We set out and walked and walked. The pregnant lady did not. She was carried.
After a while we approached a farmer working in a field. Leaning on his hand hoe, he told us that we were still in Hungary but we should follow him. We did and he walked us across the first of the ten borders we had to cross and handed us over to his colleague in Austria. They were both from the Hagannah, the underground Jewish army of Palestine, who were stationed all round that area to lead the people across the border. Not just their people either, - they helped anyone who was trying to cross the border.
From then on we were in their hands. We were taken into a farm shed, fed, given false papers to legalise our being in the Soviet Zone of Austria, put on a bus and sent into Vienna (Border No. 2). There we were fed, given a different set of false papers, put on a special tram and sent into the US Zone of Vienna (3), where we were billeted in the Rothchild Hospital, the famous assembly point for refugees from the East.
For the next three days we enjoyed the sights of the US Zone of Vienna. The signs of war, the devastation and the great shortage of almost anything was all round us, but so was the famous spirit of the Viennese. The coffee houses were full with people, yet there was no coffee to be bought, the bier gardens resounded with Strauss in spite of the fact that their beer was less intoxicating than the Danube.
Early one morning about 400 people from the Rothchild Hospital boarded specially rented trams and we were taken in to the Soviet Zone of Vienna (4), to a station where the train was waiting for us. It was back to cattle trucks, but we knew that at the end of the trip freedom and fortune awaits us. We made ourselves comfortable in the trucks in case we will be traveling for weeks. We also made the interesting discovery that the US Army personnel guarding the train and us, all spoke Jiddish much more fluently than English, suggesting that perhaps they were sent from Palestine rather than from the USA, to look after the Jews of Eastern Europe on their way to freedom.
Our train crossed from Vienna into the Russian Zone of Austria (5), then the US Zone of Austria (6), at which time the Russians checked the papers of every person on the train and interrogated some. Next we stopped for a night just outside the former concentration camp at Mauthausen, and next day we arrived to be billeted in a former SS Barracks in Salzburg. We were allowed to visit the sights and our train left next day to cross into the French Zone of Austria (7), the French Zone of Germany (8), the British Zone (9) and finally the American Zone of Germany.
It was not the most direct route, but the organisation needed to overcome the problems caused by the Russians and the many Occupational Zone regulations and the fact that the British were trying to keep prospective Jewish infiltration of illegal migrants away from Palestine, was most impressive.
We wanted to go to Munich, where three of my relations were already in the Funk Kaserne. When our train arrived to Augsburg, we jumped train and traveled to Munich under our own steam. At the Railway Station of Munich we engaged a porter to take our luggage and lead us to a public bath-house for a long needed bath. We asked the porter if we should pay him with money or if he would prefer some cigarettes. He choose the latter, so we gave him a box of 100 Hungarian cigarettes, which pleased him. Later we found out that in the crazy, cigarette based German values our tip to him was equivalent to 3 months' wages.
After our bath, we decided to eat. We sold some cigarettes to a member of the milling black marketers outside the Hauptbahnhof, parked our luggage and walked towards the center of the city, through the bomb damaged streets. 13 months after the war finished, the pavements and roadways were cleared, but few were the houses which were not damaged and the badly damaged buildings were just heaps of rubble.
There were some shops open, but almost nothing useful to buy. Some of the food shops had long queues outside and we finally found one shop which we could enter without waiting in a long line. It was obvious that this food shop had little to offer. We noticed that they had a few withered black bread rolls and wanted to buy some. However, to our surprise, we should have had food ration cards even for a single one of those little dried out dumplings.
Seeing our disbelief, which turned into terror at the thought that we will starve in Munich, the shop keeper gave us a roll each and sold us a little portion of some indescribable muck, masquerading under the highfalutin name of "Lebensmittel Marken Freie Brot Schmiermittel" (i.e. Food Ration Card Free Bread Spread), which, in spite of its exciting sounding name was ground soya beans, made spreadable with the use of some chemical. Certainly not very nourishing, but we were most grateful for the kindness we experienced from this member of the hated Master Race.
Lets make no mistakes, we despised and hated the Germans at this stage of our lives, for what they have done to us and the rest of the World. We noticed that there were almost no Germans who admitted that they were Nazis, there were no Germans who admitted that they screamed themselves hoarse at the Nazi Rallies before and during the war. We made no difference between one German and another, in our view they were all guilty. It has taken us quite a few weeks living in Germany before we realised that some were innocent and many months before we realised that some were actually disapproving what Hitler and the Nazis stood for but had as little chance to influence events as we had in Hungary.
After our repast we got on a tram, which meant hanging onto the handles on the steps of the speeding tram and working your way into the inside as people disembarked along the way. We had a long trip to the outskirts of München to the Funk Kaserne, once occupied by the Radio and Radar specialists of the German Wehrmacht, now the home of some 10,000 DP's.
The gates were guarded by uniformed DP's from Yugoslavia and we were not admitted. After some delay and with considerable difficulty we sent word to our relations inside and they managed to smuggle us in. As we walked through the main square of the camp, we recognised some people we knew. They were from the train we had left in Augsburg, and had we stayed with them we would have arrived there hours ago with a great deal less effort and would have made it into the Kaserne legitimately. It would have meant DP Status, ration cards, pocket money from US charities, etc. and a palliace to sleep on in a dormitory.
Anyway, we arrived to the US Zone of Germany.
The next task was to get out of there as quickly as possible.