12/30/1945

          One of my trips took me to Austria where I spent Christmas. Conditions in the Russian zone, where Vienna is located, are very bad. Looting and raping is still going on and the people do not dare to go out after sunset. The roads are empty, no cattle or poultry can be seen, and people somehow look differently. People live on dried peas and potatoes, and whoever cannot afford to buy enough in the black market may just as well die. Everybody is starving, people look pale and poor.The cutting into zones prevents any economic life. People in Linz have plenty of milk and food and in Vienna they are starving very badly. The Russians are responsible for their zone but they have stripped the countryside of all food. People in Wiener Newstadt and all their provinces are dying in the roads. Everybody wants potatoes or bread for work as money can't buy anything. Trains going from Linz to Vienna are stopped near Anstetten regularly; Russian brigants enter them and loot the passengers. People in Vienna have no coal, no gas, no street lighting, and only one hectowatt of power/day/household. The town was completely dark when I entered it, no street lighting whatsoever. The electricity is turned off 3 or 4 times a week for several hours. They provided candles in my hotel but most Viennese just sit in the dark waiting for lights to be turned on. The Americans and English refuse to send food into Vienna from their zones without assurance that the Viennese will get it. People in Vienna do not dare to be out of their house after dark if they live in the Russian zone. Every night one hears of robbery, violence, rape, and murder. Thousands of Russian deserters run wild in Lower Austria and Russian occupation forces do not try to keep discipline or order. There is no street lighting whatsoever.  Antisemitism is worse than ever. Nazis take no notice of orders to leave flats they should return to their owners and the police do nothing about it.
          Steel cannot be sent from Kapfenberg or Donawitz to Vienna for house repairs, because "self-sufficiency" principle in each zone prevents goods from going from one zone to another zone if there is no chance of other goods coming back. In addition, railroad engines are not allowed to enter the other zone, or, if so, they must not be used except for the delivery of the particular train. Vienna, however, is not badly bombed compared with German standards.  You find blocks and blocks almost untouched, then again a block or two totally destroyed. Stefanplatz and the surrounding streets are a sad picture. The cathedral itself is closed, part of the roof collapsed. The big spire still stands, but most of the interior is burned out. All the big shops in the neighborhood have gone, the houses are mere shells, and all that remain after the large fires. All this damage was done by the Nazis when they made the last desperate stand against the Russians. They blew up the bridges over the Danube and the Canal, with the exception of  the Reichsbruecke, and they certainly did their best to leave a memory of their terrible gangsterism behind them. On the other hand, there is plenty of food in Upper Austria and Styria, the British and US zones. The great difficulty in Austria is the splitting up into zones. Vienna and the Russian zones are starving bitterly, and this can only be remedied by the Big Four Powers coming to definite agreements. Austria is a liberated country, not an occupied one and this means that the Allied Powers take a very different interest in the recovery than they do in Germany.
   
      Uncle Hugo survived Thereseinstdt much better than I would ever have expected. He said conditions there were not too bad, food much better than in Vienna now, only the fear of Auschwitz was terrible. Aunt Fini managed to escape to Budapest, but she was deported to Auschwitz from there. One thing is certain, one does not feel like a stranger at all in Vienna. Ella Reiner returned from Auschwitz where she worked as a camp doctor. Beppo Afritsch was imprisoned for a long time, then hidden by friends for almost two years.
     I remember that in England some thought that people in Vienna would resent one's absence. But everybody has been separated from each other during the war: some were evacuated, some were sent to the front, and others were in concentration camps and still others were over seas.  All the old parties have come to the forefront again. Somehow it is sad, that so little has changed, the same old men, the same old ideas. One wonders what all the suffering of the last ten years was for. One may ask why this war was fought. Sure, the Nazis have gone, but the old ideas, the old men and old parties and ways have come to the surface again.The people seem to enjoy that the old is coming back as much as possible.  The old common past combines and overcomes quickly any possible estrangement. But so many people are gone for good, so much has been destroyed and no new ideas about life have come forward.  The old ideals for which I lived and in which I believed have been killed, and what may have survived the war was killed off by the Red Army. The hatred against the Russians is hardly believable.
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