Refuge

Another eventful day, our first on the road. Our initial destination was the centre of Munich, in search of the Apple store, to buy a super expensive plug in for my computer (it had shredded the night before!). The bonus was a stop at the Marienplatz to look at the glockenspiel and to remember all the times I came to Munich with my mother and sisters to shop when we were children. So many of the stores and neon signs from my  childhood memories appeared unchanged. The streets seemed tighter though, and I was challenged when having to drive in reverse for long stretches. I was thankful to have two navigators to  guide me. 

We left Munich later than planned, and drove the smaller roads to  Braunau am Inn, just over the border in Austria. The rural roads in Bavaria are lovely, with quaint little villages with onion cupola’d churches dotting the countryside. Everything was green and bursting with life and energy. I was hesitant about stopping at Braunau, begin infamous as the birthplace of Hitler, but I was tired and wanted to eat and to rest. I had not slept well after an overstimulating day yesterday. We parked on the main street near the church, and Tara happened to grab some brochures from the Tourist office. One brochure was packed with information about he Danube Swabians who had settled in Braunau, and there happened to be a museum in the town. We found it closed, and walked further to look at the church nearby, and then just on a whim decided to go back, asked the neighboring museum clerk to call for a tour at the Donauswabian 'Heimatmuseum', and waited 15 minutes for an older couple to arrive and be our tour guides through the two room museum. We were stunned at the wealth of information in the museum. The husband, who was from a small town where the Danube and the Theis rivers meet, had left the Batschka with his family in 1944, but his wife, who was 11 when her family left the town of India, also in the Batschka, unfortunately returned some months later, and by then, the old and young were interred in camps, the worst being ‘Gakowo’, where 60,000 were ultimately starved to death. She described how her grandmother died  sleeping right next to her, and each morning, the dead were left outside the doors of the houses to be picked up and buried in mass graves. It was the coldest winter in decades and the bodies froze to death through the night and had to be thrown into the wagons to be transferred to be buried. The crosses from the graveyards were used to cook soup with; I imagine the wood was added to the fire. Horrifying images. The miracle was that she did survive. Her husband was one of the lucky ones, those that left in time to start a new life. The Donauswabian refugees were distributed all over Austria and Germany and many left for Canada, USA, Brasil and Australia.

We spent over three hours in the museum, fascinated by the wealth of information this man and his wife and assembled about the Danube Swabians in the Banat and the Batschka. I had heard much of the information in bits and pieces, from my father, from my great uncle and aunt, from what I had read, but nothing as comprehensive as I heard today. The curators had collected comprehensively from the original archives in Vienna and Budapest, and what this man knew was amazing;  about the original settling of the Banat and the Batschka, the lives of the Danube Swabians in the 150 years they lived there, and the end of their lives along the Danube when they fled. The story was remarkable at times, stark and harrowing near the end. Tara was in tears, and I wondered if she was truly ready to hear this. 

We walked out of the museum shaking, unsure how to recover, how to move forward. I understood my father a little better today. I understood why he tried to protect us from his past, why he refused to talk about it for years.

We sat by the river Inn, eating our picnic lunch, watching the water rush by. There was a lovely restaurant nearby overlooking the river, and we warmed up in the sun over coffee and limited conversation.

How to reset, to re-equilibrate? We drove further, to Taufkirchen am Trattnach, where Adam and Loni’s family arrived after their 23 day trek, and where Eva and the Richters finally showed up months and months later. Loni had described where the farmhouse was that my father and his family were housed. I had a picture in my mind of what it looked like, but the first place we stopped in Unterozling was not quite right. We talked to the farmer there, who guided us to the farm over the hill. He knew where the Richters had stayed. His family had a Sudeten German man stay with them for years and years. When we found our way to the farmhouse where my father had stayed, we encountered 87 year old Maria, and when we asked about he Donauswabians who had stayed nearby, she immediately mentioned ‘Sepp’, which is my father’s nickname. She was the daughter of the farmer, precisely the father who had asked my father, 'Sepp' to stay and marry Maria and inherit the farm. My father chose instead to study in Graz; he did not want to be a farmer at all. Maria had only positive things to say about my father and his family. We were absolutely stunned to run into her, to see the window of the room where my father stayed, to view the gorgeous landscape around us. But could not stop thinking of the wagons which had no brakes. The Banat was flat, so vehicles just stopped moving when the horses stopped moving. How was it possible to maneuver through the Austrian foothills on the carts with the horses? What was it like for these Batschka people, who were accustomed to the flatness of their homeland, to arrive in this paradise in Austria? Maria expressed how sad she felt for the refugees who came with nothing, who had to start over, who had been so traumatized. The Austrians were incredibly generous and helpful when confronted with thousands of refugees, and welcomed them into their homes and their lives.

We later looked for Loni and Adam’s house in Taufkirchen, where my father and his family had visited each weekend, but were unable to sort out which farmhouse it was. We were so incredibly lucky to run into Maria, to hear her story, to share our stories.

The day was exhausting again. Too much emotion, too much tragedy, too much despair.