I felt a profound sense of sadness today, after having an absolutely wonderful day in the delightful town of Graz. We were able to get tickets to a concert tonight as part of the summer festival season. It is almost the last concert of the season. The opera and all the concert venues in town are closed until September or October, but festivals are happening everywhere, and the tickets are affordable. We were entirely inappropriately attired for the event. The Austrians were dressed their best, but we had been seeing sights all day in the 32 degree humid weather. We got seats in almost the last row, and tried to blend into the scenery without being noticed. The programme was all Beethoven piano sonatas by Markus Schirmer and was called ‘Der Sturm’. It was marvelous. But I started reflecting on the stories I have been hearing from my father, from his parents and his cousins and his aunts and uncles, and the incredible tragic experience they carry with them.
I remember my grandfather Jakob, a proud but modest man at the same time. He was the son of an Anton, a landowner in Backi Brestovac;jakob was the mayor of the town and had political aspirations. My father had expected to return to Backi Brestovac and follow in his father’s footsteps. As a 20 year old, he was only interested in completing his studies. Instead, he was drafted into the army and sent off to the Eastern front. My grandfather was drafted later in the war, and ended up in a Russian POW camp. When dysentery spread through the camp, the Russians left in fear of being infected. Jakob was able to find his way to Hungary to stay with family friends who nursed him back to health. He had been on his way back to Backi Brestovac, but was advised at the border that going to his home was dangerous. How he found his way to his family is a miracle. My father left his American POW camp to find his family in Upper Austria. When he arrived,, he found his mother very ill and in the hospital with an infection. The doctors did not know how to use the Penicillin that my father was able to procure to save her. The penicillin was diluted and so she lost her finger, her lower leg and part of her skull. When my father went to Graz to study, he was able to arrange for his father to work as a maintenance man at the British military establishment, so he was able to move with my grandmother and my great grandmother Eva.
My grandfather, who had lived in a grand home, a leader in his community, never hesitated to work as a janitor, a maintenance man, both in Graz and later in Dietlingen Germany. My grandmother, once the matriarch of the community, adjusted to her prosthesis and supported her husband and her children. My father’s brother Tony, spent ten years in a POW camp in Hungary, and likely survived because he was very good at fixing things and always had a job at the camp. He finally moved to Germany to join his family after losing years of his life.
My father focused on his studies in Graz, and spent every free moment listening to music. He heard concerts in the Burgarten, at the music halls all over town. He has always loved his music. He could no longer play the violin after being injured in the war, but studied musicology and went to Salzburg each summer to study. Hearing the concert today had me thinking of the role of music in his life, perhaps the activity he loved most of all.
This journey has been so much about loss. I have known the general story and most of the details all my life, but traveling to the places that were so important to my father, has brought depth to his story. I hope I understand better what his former life was, what he lost, how he survived.
Graz was healing for my father, for us. He insisted today that we go to the Arsenal museum, a massive collection of medieval armaments. There were arsenals in every town in the middle ages, so that when attacked, the townspeople could be armed and ready to defend the town and the castle. The armoury in Graz has been perfectly preserved, and is the largest collection there is. We walked through the medieval part of the city, and admired the houses and courtyards of the palaces. We trekked back to the university to find the music hall in Mozartgasse where my father listened to music most regularly. We drove out to Schloss Eggenberg, which is just outside the city, and took a tour through the state apartments. Maria Theresia had stayed for a week at the schloss, and her bed is the only one that was not destroyed in the Second World War. The rooms are well preserved, because the castle was left undisturbed for 150 years, after the last Eggenberg had ho children and the family died out. The best part of the schloss were the peacocks, who were screeching and displaying their feathers for us.
We went on a wild goose chase looking for the street where my father lived with his parents. He had given us the name Krottendorfergasse, so we went to the town of Krottendorf, which was far south of Graz on narrow country roads near a monastery, St Ulrich in Wassen. It was clearly not the right place, since my father had a 20 minute ride to the university from his house. Later, we learned that there was a Krottendorfergasse closer to the city and we will check it out tomorrow. Meanwhile, we had a lovely view of Styrian countryside.
We rushed back to Graz to get to the concert with no time to eat or change our clothes, but the concert was well worth it, and we reminded ourselves that our father would have made sure to be a the concert too. We are guided each step of the way by the question; ‘What would our father do?’, which helps us focus on our journey. Otherwise we would be pulled in too many directions; there is so much to see, so much we have missed and must return to visit next time.
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