Echoes of War

Children in bomb craters, legions of one-legged men. Why the call of the cuckoo was the most terrifying sound of WW II.

“You see something metallic, you don’t touch it”, said the man to us children at kindergarten,”It can explode. If it looks like a toy - all the worse. The Russians dropped those toys that exploded when touched and ripped children like you apart. They are still around.”

Even though I was born a quarter century after WWII, we children were instructed about the danger of unexploded bombs and booby traps that in the war killed and crippled so many children.

The Future was looking at me from the moon.

I had not known what war was, but I heard its echoes. I saw it in the countless bomb craters that still peppered many a field in the outskirts of Vienna. I played in them just as in any other playground. Where there was a bomb crater there was no unexploded bomb.

There were still many destroyed houses and abandoned areas where we should not go because we could blow ourselves up. My grand parents avoided talking about the war. What I heard was just what they said when they thought I was out of listening range.

My grandmother told the story of when she had been bombed out. I learned that this was when you came home and could not find your house any more because it was no longer there. There was just a big hole in the ground filled with rubble that once had been your possessions, your clothes, your books, your bed, your family photos, the landscape of your life.

What was Childhood back then when the bombs fell?

I remember the serenity of life back then. Everything was dead serious, serious as the dead. All of Vienna was like a giant graveyard where everyone walked around and pretended to be the living.

What did I know about war? What did I know what childhood was in a city that burned day and night and more bombs rained down every day? I didn’t know how it was when your ear drums exploded when the pressure wave of a bomb attack hit the cellar you were hiding in. What did I know when you saw your sister cry but couldn’t hear her because your ear drums were gone. How could I know that some children called themselves lucky because it had just been a bomb attack, and not an attack with fire to burn them alive.

I did not know because I never experienced it myself. But I experienced the war through the traces it had left in others.

The Burning Children haunting the Living

There were nights when liquid fire fell from the sky and burned the children and there was no protection against it. Either the fire killed them, or the heat killed them or the fire consumed all oxygen so they asphyxiated in their bomb shelters.

One story stuck to my mind. A group of children ran across the street to reach a bomb shelter while fire was falling from the bombers. The asphalt was boiling hot and soft and the children sank deep into it and got stuck in this bog of asphalt. Then the fire, phosphorus canisters that burned like napalm hit the ground. The air reached a temperature of 1000 degrees. Their flesh ignited and the children burned like candles, their little bodies black like wicks.

The lucky ones had been killed by regular bombs that took the roofs of the houses so the city would burn better.

I had cartoons, too. Children’s stories. But the burning children mingled with them. They showed right next to Bug Bunny. How could you have been a child in those days? Nine year old boys had to go to war and do battle against hardened adults with weapons that did not work.

Space Exploration was my alternative future in this century of war and slaughter

There was one sound that scared children the most. It was the sound of the cuckoo as it came from the radio. It was different cuckoo call in the forest. That was pleasant and beautiful. When the cuckoo call came out of the radio it was a danger code. Without words it said: bombers are coming to kill you. Go. Run! Hide!

How much children feared the cuckoo’s call back then. They heard and knew: an armada of bombers were coming to burn them alive. Try to hide. They will get you anyway. Your life will end before it has begun. I could not imagine what it had to be like to be a child at that time.

I walked the city and saw the facades of old buildings, still riddled with bullet holes. There were overgrown big holes in the ground. Bomb craters were expected city furniture like benches and traffic lights.

The city had been almost helpless. There were flak towers, built in the style of medieval fortresses. On top of them stood the guns that fired at the bombers I could imagine as the city lay there, the city of all these beautiful buildings and landscapes, how it lay there without protection because the the flak did not keep them away.

Twice Vienna had survived the beleaguering by the ottomans who tried to conquer it and enslave Europe. But Vienna had resisted. Vienna had been their point of return. Vienna had sent them packing. But what could you do against fire falling from the sky.

The Legions of the One-legged Men

In the streets I saw them every day, the one-legged men. They were quiet men, their looks turned inside as they moved along in their one-legged man’s stride with two crutches and one leg, two crutches and one leg, crutches, then leg, crutches, then leg, a terrifying rhythm that was the morse code of their destruction. Every day we saw six, seven, or even ten of them.

We did not count them, as we counted the Volkswagen beetles as they were parked on the roadside. How many of them would there be lined up without interruption by another make of car, an Opel or even one of those rare Mercedes? The record stood at 23.

Those one-legged men were still so present this long after the war. Now at 50, and stuck with the loss of a leg they experienced at 18 or 20 years old. The sun was shining warmly as they moved past, but their look was always to the inside as if the world was making them feel cold.

It was as if the sun were not shining for them. How often had those men asked themselves: what if? What if I had not stepped on that mine that day, what if that machine gun salvo on the Eastern front had not fragmented my leg so badly it could not be saved and had to come off with a saw. What if I had been able to get a medical orderly to pick me up, what if the Russian snipers had not prevented that and I had not lain with my leg shot to pieces for days until the Russians had been pushed back and my friends had gotten to me. By then gangrene had done its destruction and the leg had to come off with a bone saw.

And how he remembered that vibration of the saw when it cut into his bone. He would never forget it. It had been in one of those front emergency stations. It was just a table, an old dining room table in a tent and they orderly had knocked him out because they had not had any anesthetics.

When they had carried him back to their own lines and put him on the table and he had been so full of pain and fear and told them to leave him his leg? There were already three sawed-off legs lying in a heap on the ground waiting for his to be thrown on top. They would throw them out later, those legs, out on the trash heap. This had made him a one-legged man, isolated from the rest of the world and from sunshine.

That was a perspective that put a new direction on who had to hear the echoes of war.

So they walked by, those one-legged men, so quiet 35 years after the war and the war had been with them every day since in the vibration of the saw that cut into their bone and they had felt it every day they since that day, that day on the Eastern front. They went to bed one-legged and woke up from a one-legged nightmare and were still one-legged in the morning.

One-legged men had been so ubiquitous that in the hit show of the Austrian 70s “Kottan investigates” about a crazy cop in an even crazier Police department, the comrade of that detective had been a one-legged man. The actor had lost his leg in the war.

The Black Hole of War

War was in every adult I met. It was in the teacher. It was in the shoe maker. It was in the grocer, the insurance agent, the poet, the painter, the trader, the merchant… They had been in a war and had seen things they could not forget and could not talk about. They were in a war that never ended.

Nobody talked about the war even though it was still going on in their minds. They had come back from a nightmare that had swallowed up their personal lives and the sunshine and their friends without giving them anything in return.

This was not life, this was survival. And in those dark days that even faded the sunshine they heard the echo of war. It never stopped. It stood between them and their life, their humanness and the world. It was an entry into an underworld garden by what they had experienced.

How cold a child, who did not know ever hope to reach them?

The future

The future does not have to look like the past. It will look like the past if we do not decide and work to change it. When I, the child discovered the science fiction collection among the thousands of books my father I was saved. I had found a path into a future that was… promising!

Part II of this essay is about that future.