How I Found the Future

Part I: The echoes of war, children in bomb craters, legions of one-legged men, the call of the cuckoo: why the future can look better than the past.

“You see something metallic, you don’t touch it”, said the man who instructed us children at kindergarten,”It can explode any time. 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. I only heard about it and saw its echoes. I saw it in the countless bomb craters in the area of Vienna where and I played in them and they were more normal to me than a playground. I saw it in the many destroyed houses that still existed and abandoned areas where we should not go because we could blow ourselves up. I heard it in the brief comments of my grand parents. Brief, because they avoided talking about the war. What I heard was just what they said when they thought I was out of listening range.

My grandmother once mentioned when she had been bombed out. I learned that this was when where your house had been was now a hole in the ground, filled with rubble that once had been your possessions, your clothes, your books, your bed, your family photos.

What was Childhood back then when the bombs fell?

I remember the serenity of the society 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 what it was when your ear drums exploded by 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.

And still it affected me and everyone who grew up with me.

The Burning Children haunting the Living

There were nights when liquid fire that fell from the sky and burned all children and there was no shelter against it. One story stuck to my mind. A group of children tried to run across the street to reach a bomb shelter while fire was already falling from the sky. They never reached it. The asphalt was boiling hot and soft and they sank into it, got stuck in it and were still there in the middle of the street when the phosphorus canisters fell like napalm. The air reached a temperature of 1000 degrees. At this temperature human flesh ignites. And the children burned like candles, their little bodies were the wicks of fire on the altar of this evil. The other children died, too, when their bomb shelters became 400 degrees hot and all oxygen was burned by the phosphorus. Nobody knows if they first burned to death or asphyxiated. None of them survived. White phosphorus, hite Christmas, during the Christmas attacks. The lucky ones got their present: they would asphyxiate before the burned.

I had cartoons, too. Tom and Jerry. Some little pig that did silly things and sang out of tune. Lassie and Daktari. But the burning children mingled with them. They showed up everywhere. How it had to have been to be a child in those days. When nine year old boys, my age, had to go to war and fight against battle hardened adults with weapons that did not work.

Far above the trouble on Earth I new future was developing

And then there had been most terrifying sound of all, one that every child feared. It came out of the radio. It was different when you heard the cuckoo call in the forest. It was pleasant and beautiful. When the cuckoo call came out of the radio it was a danger code. Without words it said: someone was coming to kill you. How children feared the cuckoo’s call back then. You heard it you knew that thousands of bombers were coming to kill you. An armada to burn you alive. Go and hide. Go and find something. And be lucky, because they are coming for you because they want you to die. To burn alive. To end your life before it has begun. I could not imagine e 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 and bomb craters were everywhere. I could imagine as the city lay there, the city of all these beautiful landscapes, how it lay there without protection. Twice it had survived the beleaguering by the ottomans who tried to put Europe into their muslim empire. But Vienna had been their last stop. Vienna had sent them back, packing. But against the terrifying fire from the sky that burned you alive, what chance was here? Was it all over?

In the streets I saw them every day, I saw these one-legged men, quiet men, their looks turned inside in their one-legged man’s stride with two crutches and one leg, two crutches and one leg, crutches, then leg, crutches, then leg, that terrifying rhythm that was the morse code of their destruction. Every day we saw five or six 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 before another car, an Opel or even one of those rare Mercedes would interrupt their sequence? The record stood at 23.

The Legions of One-legged Men

Those one-legged men, so long after the war, now 50, and stuck with the loss of a leg they experienced at 18 or 20. The sun was shining warmly as they moved past, but their look was always to the inside. 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 his leg so badly it could not be saved and had to come off with a saw. What if he had been able to get a medical orderly to pick him up, what if the Russian snipers had not prevented that and he had not lain with his leg shot to pieces and when the Russians had been pushed back and his friends had gotten to him gangrene had already done its destruction and the leg had to come off with a bone saw. And how he remembered that vibration of the saw that went through his whole body when they cut his leg off. He would never forget it. It had been in one of those front emergency stations, just a table and when they put him on that old dining room table 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 it out later, his legs and the legs of the others that had been hit, as if it were garbage, and garbage it was once it had been sawn off him and 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 30 years after the war, 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 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, the nightmare continuing into their waking.

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: everyone I met who was older; the shoe maker, the grocer, the insurance agent, the poet, the painter, the trader, the merchant… they all had been in that war and had seen so much and could not talk about it. Nobody talked about the war. It was as if it did not exist. As if someone had made it up for the pleasure of torture. There was just this black hole of nothing in the past that had swallowed up their lives and it still took the sunshine out of this world. The days were so full of shadows then. Those who had seen what they had seen could not be joyful any more, and we, the children, who saw them, could not be, either as it would have been a sacrilege to laugh in all that grief and suffering.

The echo of the war had made so many of them deaf to the music of the present. It was as if the detonations of the bombs had taken away their hearing for good. They could not hear the sunshine, the joy, us children. They were removed by that barrier of their personal terror. I would not have known how to reach out to them because I did not know what they had gone through. I only heard the terrifying echo of war and I could not understand it. But it filled every cell of my mind.

The future

The future does not have to look like the past. It will look like the past if we do not make a conscious attempt to go into a very direction. When me, the child discovered the science fiction collection among the thousands of books my father had I was saved. I had found a path into a future that was… just so promising!

Part II, arriving in a few days, will go into the good future ahead and what to do to not let the past capture the future.