Armin Scheiderbauer: Adventures in My Youth

It had been wishful thinking that we would not any longer be assigned to work in Tilsit. First of all there was a sawmill, in which the officers’ brigade had to work. For a week, Willi Cellbrot and I stacked five metre-long beams. It was hard work and demanded all our strength. But we managed well, and I can still see our muscular upper bodies. Apparently ‘sweet on us’ was the 20 year old Russian girl Veronica, who worked in the office of the sawmill. She was a pretty girl, who looked at us half mistrustfully, half pleased, when she was checking whether we had fulfilled the Schto prozent, i.e. the hundred per cent of the prescribed norm. After our work stacking planks we were detailed to work on lathes. I worked on one with which I made chair legs and chair backs, and also the frames of the seats that were later filled in with plywood. The work involved a certain craftsmanship or even sense of taste, needed to ensure that uneven parts were avoided. Of course you had to take care not to get too near the electrically driven blades. I learned to take a certain pride in my work. It was not just unskilled work but already skilled work, which pleased me more than the other kind.

Other kinds of work to which we were assigned were unloading small freighters that brought timber for pulp and paper production from Finland or Sweden. We unloaded railway trains that brought coal, no doubt from the Upper Silesian coalfield. While unloading those trains, we discovered one day a wagon bearing the inscription Österreich . We felt that to be not only a greeting from our native land, but another good omen that our return home, even if it was obviously to be drawn-out, might be soon. Unloading the charcoal and the coal demanded all our strength.

With coal, the norm for the 10-hour working day was, for two men, to unload a wagon of 20 tons. Whether you finished in time depended upon the kind of coal. It had sometimes been cut in large pieces that you could only get hold of with your bare hands. It could be relatively easily pushed out of the wagon. The work was also easy when the coal was in small pieces about the size of an egg. Then you could get a reasonable pile on the big shovel. The most unpleasant and the most unpopular work was when the coal was in medium-sized pieces, about the size of a cobblestone. Then it was difficult to get several of the pieces on your shovel or to throw or push them individually out of the wagon by hand.

But the hardest work was in the factory boiler house. There, work went on non-stop in three shifts and our brigade had to take over the night shift for a week. We had to shovel the coal with which the several furnaces were heated. It went into tippers and we pushed them to the furnaces. That was a very hard kind of work that not only called for strength, but also cost a lot of sweat. But, like the images of the forest commando, I recall the scenes from Tilsit, especially those from the night shift in the factory, before my mind’s eye. It still fascinates me today to see the dark figures, their faces wet with sweat, in front of the bright flames of the furnace. I can still also remember the tiredness and exhaustion that set in towards morning and that everyone could feel as they marched back to the camp. Yet how releasing and healthful the sleep was, on the bright day after the night shift and before the next one.

At that time I thought that I had recovered my strength, that I was fit and that I had nothing more to fear from my last wound and its consequences to the lining of my lungs and my ribs. But one day I suddenly got quite a high fever and I was brought into the barracks’ sick bay. I had, it was ascertained, contracted malaria tertiana , which also occurs in temperate zones, where the attack of fever follows a fever free day. I must have been infected by a mosquito of the genus anopheles in the East Prussian woods in the forest commando. That explanation was consistent with the one to six week incubation period. I was not the only one who was treated in the sick bay for malaria tertiana . The sick bay was equipped to provide the proper treatment, because it had atebrin. After about a fortnight, I believe, the illness was cured. In the sick bay I had been cared for by a Brother of Mercy from Vienna, by the name of Maly. (I chanced to meet him years later near to his hospital in the Second District of Vienna, wearing the religious habit of his order.)

The high fever of over 40 degrees, affected me every other day and of course brought with it renewed debility. For the next few days, the last in Tilsit, I was no longer capable of work. In the sick bay Willi Cellbrot, who during that last year had become my closest comrade, visited me after work. Once he brought well-nigh a miracle, a fresh hen’s egg that he mixed up with my sugar ration. In doing that he gave me an indescribable pleasure such as I had not experienced for years.

It was the beginning of September! We set off from Tilsit. The journey was partly made in open wagons without sides. I had the bad luck of sitting on one of those wagons which only consisted of a platform. Everyone who sat on it was blackened by soot from the steam from the locomotive. It took hours and hours for the men who had been affected in that way to get their uniforms even half way clean. In Georgenburg there was a great process of registration, parading and frisking. We were called by name several times. When our surnames were called out we had to answer, Russian fashion, with our Christian name and that of our father. To the guttural shout ‘Scheiderbauer’, I replied loud and clear, ‘Armin Anton’.

No one doubted any longer that those whose names were being shouted out were going damoy, home! Those who remained behind looked wistful. I could not refrain from sadness. I was particularly sorry for Dr Deckwitz and Alfred Tunzer. From July, Deckwitz had been working on a version of Fidelio that could have been produced without female parts. A camp choir assembled for a short time under the direction of Kurt Forst had been practising the ‘Prisoners’ Chorus’. Oh, welche Lust, oh, welche Lust, in freier Luft zu leben. ‘Oh what joy, Oh what joy, to live in free air’ I had sung. Even years later, when I was at home with my parents, I had played variations on the theme on the piano. Because of that chorus I had taken my girlfriends to the Theater an der Wien to see Fidelio when I was a student. The emotion it raised in me was something that for years never left me.

During the last great process of ‘frisking’, every prisoner had to spread out his possessions in front of him. The Russian guards and the officers of the MVD carried out a precise check of what everyone possessed. In the case of Oskar Stockhammer, the camp clerk, they discovered his pay book that he had held on to until then. He was separated from us. I can still see him today, pale as wax and bereft of all hope, sitting staring into space. (Later he became a police inspector in Salzburg. When we used to meet, we always thought of those 20 sad hours.) But he was then allowed to rejoin the column.

When we at last formed up to march out of the camp, the camp band had taken up position beside the barbed wire at the gate. Marches were not part of their repertoire, and to play a march would no doubt have been out of place. So they played the American popular song whose German title was Wochenend und Sonnenschein . The ‘wing’ man on the bass drum was a certain Paul Padurek. He looked like a Sicilian, but was a homespun Saxton from Grimmitschau in the Vogtland. When we were already far beyond the camp fence, on the march to the station, the jaunty notes of the song kept reverberating within me.

It was inconceivable that this captivity, after two and a half years, was to come to an end. Many could simply not believe it. I was exceptionally sceptical. Indeed the feeling had begun to set in that I could not have stood it for one day longer. However, I knew that none of us, if we had had to stay behind, could have done anything about it. There had been the constant uncertainty about what was going to happen to us, and what the future would bring. If we had possessed the fatalism characteristic of the Russians, then camp life might have been tolerable. But we could think of many things that could have been improved. Still, no one knew whether our journey was really taking us home or whether some developments in world politics, of which nobody knew, might not influence our fate. The orders over the camp loudspeaker and the daily playing of the martial Soviet anthem in the evening at 10pm would, it was clear, not have been missed by any of us. But would the journey really be taking us home?