Mittersill

Aleksandra Gruzinska

When during the war, the time came for me and other Polish girls to leave the Achern Baden Heimschule, where we had been interned, I prepared for the trip by hiding a piece of paper with my mother’s name and address, and my Polish name, in my shoe so that no one would take it away from me. During the trip toward Salzburg, Austria, we visited the key cultural tourist sights of Hellbrunn, Schönbrunn, and Salzburg, before boarding a train, or perhaps a bus, that would drop us off, one by one, in different cities, to different German and Austrian families, and further isolate each one of us from all contact with the roots of the past. First Renate left us, then Wilhelmine. I finally arrived at my assigned destination in Mittersill, where a tall, slim and handsome redhead with a bike at her side was waiting for me. Her name, I soon found out, was Elisabeth Ronacher and together we set out on a five-kilometer walk from the station to the farm of the Ronacher family, deep in the valley of one of the fast-flowing tributaries of the Salzach river. When later I tried to retrieve the little scrap of paper with my mother’s name and address from my shoe, it was reduced to pulp and unreadable. But its message was also deeply engraved in my memory.

One could write a novel about life on a farm deep in the valley near a tributary of the Salzach, a river that flows through Zell am See and further north, through Salzburg. I was a city girl and remembered living, not so long before the war, in a new apartment building with electricity, in Poznań, a city with an Opera house, the Adam Mickiewicz University, and a superb city hall. Life on the Ronacher family farm was a totally new experience that required getting used to.

Once Elisabeth and I left the main road, we took a short but fairly steep pathway that led uphill to the farm, which included the farm house or living quarters. Facing it was a barn, somewhat shabby in appearance, where all the farm work was done, and where hay was kept, together with some farm machines and a chicken shed. A small enclosed garden adjoined the farmhouse and supplied fresh vegetables and flowers. Vast fields, meadows and hills, and woods extended all around the farm. Tall mountains nearby raised their majestic peaks to the sky, as part of the glorious Kitzbuhel Alps in the north, and the Hohe Tauern in the south. One couldn’t wish for a more glorious and splendid natural setting.

When we arrived, Frau Ronacher or “Mütti,” as everyone called her, was waiting for us. She was a middle-sized woman, with black hair except for a few streaks of silver grey. She seemed kind, gentle, and serious. I was immediately offered some freshly brewed coffee with raw milk and a very generous fat, thick milk skin, korzuch, on top. I was being treated to the finest cup of coffee that hospitality afforded during the war.

I remembered that, when I was a little girl, my mother had taught me one rule of politeness and good behavior: “When you are invited,” she would say, “you always accept and never refuse whatever food you are offered as a welcome gesture of hospitality.” But at home, back in Poland, I never drank milk, and refused it even when my mother stood next to me, with my father’s military leather belt ready to swing into action, but only as a threat. As for the fat thick milk skin, the korzuch, swallowing it was unthinkable. And now, the token of a warm and gracious welcome was in front of me. I could not refuse it; I heard my mother’s famous admonition about hospitality and food. So, I proceeded to drink the coffee, diluting it with bitter and profuse tears. I was in a state of utmost misery, almost sick inside, something Mütti and Elizabeth never suspected.

Mittersill became my home for the next three years and there was much to learn. Every morning I would walk the five kilometers from the farm to the school in town. Late in the afternoon, I walked back home the same distance, rain or sunshine, snow, hail, thunder and lightning. There was no excuse for missing school, not even when avalanches blocked the road in winter. I simply learned how to climb over the pile of snow. I do not remember ever being sick or missing school and did my homework while it was still daylight because there was no electricity until shortly before the end of the war. The absence of electricity did not matter very much. It was a question of going to bed early and rising with the first rays of light. In the worst-case scenario, there was always candlelight. Of course, during the war years, candles were expensive.

Children living on the farm learned to work and help with the various chores. I was no exception. In the summer I worked in the field with the adults, took care of kid goats and sheep while they were grazing, or gathered eggs the chickens had laid in the shed. In winter, the chickens lived in an enclosed space under a long bench in the Stube or living room. I churned the butter, gathered mushrooms and blueberries and wild raspberries in the woods, picked frogs to be cleaned and fried, a really delicious treat, although I disliked catching them in the muddied waters and touching their slimy bodies. I loved climbing high into the Alps with Beutel, the Ronacher son, and his friend Peter, to check on the cattle, goats and sheep, taking some salt to them and checking to make sure that they were safe. Coming down the tall splendid Alps was another matter. The boys would run ahead, leaving me alone in unexplored territory, and they enjoyed seeing how scared I was, begging, whining and imploring them to wait for me.

Shortly after my arrival, the family and friends were working in a vast meadow behind the Ronacher farmhouse. In the first row, men with scythes were cutting grass. Behind each man, two persons followed with rakes; they gathered the freshly cut grass into rows with one person on each side of the row. Moving forward and keeping up with the men with scythes required frequent small repetitive movements and steps by those who followed them. If a person was not careful or a novice, like I was, one could accidentally hit an anthill with the rake. They would be tossed into the air, and sometimes they landed on the closest human body.

That night, in my sleep, like in a nightmare, I continued to perform the same repetitive gestures, forming the grass into a row, advancing forward, hitting the ants. I was sleeping on a mattress filled with fresh straw and as I moved forward in my dream I reached the edge of the high bed, fell out, landed on the floor and woke up Mütti, with whom I was sharing the room. Not a glorious performance on my part.

I remember the cat who one winter night climbed through the window (always open at night, even in zero-degree temperature), and brought one kitten after another, hiding them in my bed to keep them warm. I remember Frika, the German shepherd dog. One day she paid less attention to her farm duties because she had little puppies to worry about. She was severely punished for it. Beutel Senior’s wife found the puppies and threw them into the river. I felt so sad for poor Frika. The punishment seemed much too severe. The poor dog was so unhappy.

Frau Ronacher, Mütti, was a widow. She had given birth to ten boys. Eight died on the battlefront, Beutel Senior, her oldest son died of natural causes while I was in Mittersill, and Siegfried (Sigi) was married to Elizabeth, but they had no children. Accepting a little “orphan,” an Ostkind without parents, was almost natural for a woman who had earned many awards for the sacrifices she made and losses she endured as a mother in the name of the Vaterland.

I soon became a member of the family. At night I shared Mutti’s room with a lovely wooden floor, two twin beds, walls painted white and decorated with the horns of the wild animals that were hunted and killed every fall; they supplied us with meat and their furry pelt. Adjoining Mutti’s room was the Stube, an ample family room with a big round table, surrounded against the walls by benches. The Stube was heated in the winter by a giant oven where fresh bread was baked. In this room, the family consumed most of its meals. In the hall some stairs led to the second floor. Facing the Stube, on the other side of the hall was the kitchen, furnished with a big iron coal stove, table and benches and many utensils used for cooking and running a farm house.

On the second floor were bedrooms and an open outhouse toilet attached to the house and used mostly during the day. While attending to nature’s needs, one could admire the splendid Alps, and at the same time hear the poo drop from the second floor. It made a resounding splash in a vast enclosed space below that would periodically be emptied of its contents, which were used to fertilize the meadows and fields. In the wintertime, at night, we used chamber-pots. In zero temperatures no one ventured to go outside at night.

During the more than two years that I spent in Mittersill until the end of WWII, I do not remember taking a shower. There was none. The house had no bathroom. And yet body cleanliness and cleanliness of clothes remained important. I remember private hygiene sessions in Mutti’s room or in the Stube, when no one was present, using a stand and a washbowl. I have no recollection of washing my clothes, or of anyone washing them, and yet they were always clean. Lice were a major problem. No harmful liquid treatments were used to get rid of them. Instead I recall frequent long Sunday sessions, rather pleasant, with my head anchored in Mutti’s ample and warm bosom, as she searched for the lice and I could clearly hear frequent “clicks” whenever she squeezed one between her nails. Many years later, when I created and taught a Nineteenth Century French Poetry course, Arthur Rimbaud’s poem “Les Chercheuses de poux” (The Lice Pickers) remained among my favored poems to share with the students. I was particularly sensitive to its dream-like sensuality and I always included it in the syllabus. “The Lice Pickers” was not just poetry; the poem was a living experience deeply and intensely relived at each rereading.

There was an incident with the bees. A farm always has bee-hives for plenty of delicious honey, a treasure during war time. An experienced person in handling bees attended to them, dressed in special protective clothes and armed with a container that produced a great deal of smoke to ward off the defensive insects. I once ventured too close without any protection or smoke in order to observe the removal of honey. The excited and unhappy bees immediately attacked the innocent and inexperienced intruder and found their way into my long hair and attacked my head with a vengeance. My screams seemed to resound over the entire range of mountain peaks and all the near and distant farms and the entire range of the glorious Austrian Alps.

I once accompanied Sigi taking a cow to a nearby farmer. He had a bull, for mating purposes, and I witnessed, at ten or eleven, the entire mating process leading to the final mounting of the bull on a somewhat resistant but finally subdued cow. I felt uneasy when Sigi and the farmer, by some more or less discreet utterances, hinted at this mating performance as a rudimentary introduction to sex. To be truthful, I would have preferred to be spared the entire episode.

I can think of only one type of farm work that I disliked. In the summer, during the grass harvest, the hay had to be tossed into the air with a giant wooden fork for it to land inside a long horse-drawn wagon. A person on top of the wagon treaded the hay to distribute it evenly, to keep it down and compress it. One of the more responsible children, instructed on how to keep the horse calm, made sure that the wagon did not move abruptly, otherwise the person on top of the wagon could fall and hurt himself. One summer it was my turn to make the horse behave. When thick swarms of big black flies landed on the horse, I used some soft branches, as a swatter, to get rid of them. They in turn landed on me, biting ferociously. I used the improvised swatter to rid myself of them, and again, they mercilessly attacked the horse, making the wagon jerk, and everybody angrily screamed with orders to keep the horse calm. There was no end to the misery. It was the horse or me, taking turns with one exception, the horse was never blamed or screamed at.

An experience of a different type concerned French culture, to which I became introduced by the blond, pale-looking Henri from northern France and the dark haired and more hot-blooded François from the South. They worked on the Ronacher farm as prisoners of war. They ate in the Stube alone, and I do not recall where they slept, probably in the barn. François was definitely the sexy type and even made passes at Beutel Senior’s wife, who one day entered the kitchen extremely flustered, indignant and outraged by François’s advances and explicit proposals, to which she presumably did not respond!

My task was to serve dinner to the prisoners in the Stube, also a new learning experience for me. As I entered the Stube for the first time carrying two heavy plates loaded with food, each in one hand, I unexpectedly, without any warning, sneezed right on the plates in front of me and swiftly proceeded to serve the food to Henri and François. Back in the kitchen, I was severely reprimanded and admonished that sneezing on food was very bad manners and showed a lack of politeness, something I did not need to be told twice, ever again. But to tell the truth, how could I have avoided it, with both my hands full of heavy plates loaded with food! I had no choice and certainly no way of avoiding the unexpected exploding sneeze.

I no longer recall how I renewed contact with my mother. Was it I who wrote to her first? Or was it she who discovered where I was? One day, the mailman delivered an envelope. It was addressed to me. Before giving it to me, Mütti sought advice and called a teacher at the school in Mittersill, who was one of my instructors. When this young and charming Austrian Fraulein came to our house, she asked many questions, looked intensely at me as if she wanted to know me deep inside. It must have come as a shock to Mütti and the entire Ronacher family to discover that the little girl, the Ostkind (whose assumed German father possibly died on the battlefront and whose German mother died per- haps when her child was born), had a Polish mother still alive in Lódź. The positive decision after this interrogation resulted in allowing me to keep in touch with my mother throughout the war years, in German of course, as I no longer spoke Polish. My mother also wrote to me in German. I still have a photograph with the words “Der lieben Mütti,” to my dear mother, inscribed on it. It was meant as a Mother’s-day gift, the only remembrance that my mother had kept from the Mittersill years. From the time that my mother’s first letter arrived, my relationship with the Ronacher family slowly changed. I was no longer an Ostkind or German orphan. I was a Polish girl who had a Polish mother in Lódź. In the agricultural world of Mittersill, reading and the enhancing and enriching imaginary world offered by books did not exist. There were no books at the farm. But my mother had introduced me to the world of books very early by reading with me, or to me. Her many simple questions always led to a wonderful conversation.

During WWII, Germanization meant acquisition of German language, history and culture. But it also meant dispossession. It required separation from family, country and mother tongue. It required the learning of a new culture, the adoption of another identity and language, and the acquisition of a new way of thinking. At the age of nine or ten, I was introduced to Wagner, Tanhäuser, Parzifal, the Nibelungen Ring, Brunhilde, Krimhilde and Siegfried, the fire ring surrounding sleeping Krimhilde and her dreams of a handsome young chevalier on a white horse coming to rescue her from the scheming, dark Brunhilde. Both the music and the mythologies became part of my new world. In Achern, and later in Mittersill, I was Krimhilde awaiting rescue but without a forthcoming rescue chapter. I was left suspended in a void, an emptiness filled with a vague longing for some miracle. At Christmas time, Santa Claus would bring perhaps that hoped-for rescue. Under the Christmas tree one year, in spite of the war, everyone found a gift. Santa left a pair of beautiful gloves for me that I had knitted myself. The gift stifled within me the myth of Santa. All hope for a miracle vanished forever.

I have no memory of brushing my teeth. I don’t remember brushing them regularly during my stay with the Ronacher family. Ultimately, a visit to the dentist became inevitable. A tooth was badly infected and had to be pulled. All anesthetics were at the battlefront, so the dentist had none. As I screamed from pain, he vigorously slapped my face, like Frau Ackerman once did. It worked: I bore the excruciating pain in silence.

One morning when I awoke, Mütti was still in bed. She seemed in pain and greatly distressed. I got up and quietly dressed. I was ready to have breakfast but as I opened the door to the Stube (living room), I saw a body dressed in Sunday best clothes lying on the dining table. Mütti’s oldest son, Beutel, had died during the night. His widow, young son, Elisabeth and her husband Sigi, and Mütti had prepared the body for the funeral. It was placed on the only piece of furniture, large enough for family and friends to see him and to say a last good bye before a church funeral and burial. I closed the door and refused to leave the room. Mütti, immersed in grief, got up and walked me through the Stube, into the hall and to the kitchen.

I soon found out that, as a member of the family, I was awakened during the night and repeatedly invited to help in the preparations and arrangement of Beutel’s body. Each time I promised to get up but went back to sleep. In the morning, I remembered absolutely nothing of what had transpired during the night. No one believed me. With time, I was forgiven.

I remembered that in the town of Jordanów, in southern Poland, the husband of my mother’s friend Hania had died and his body lay for a day or two in one of the rooms of Hania’s house where my mother and I lived. I was four or five years old. My mother brought me into the room, took me in her arms, raised me close to the body, suggested that I say goodbye, and invited me to kiss the dead man’s face. I started to cry, screamed, kicked and refused to do it, to the consternation of all those present. I was scared, even petrified. Perhaps it was this memory that made me so reticent to participate in the Ronacher family’s mourning. Many years later, in America, whenever I received an announcement of the passing of a friend, it took me a long, long time before I actually ventured to appear at a wake. The American custom of celebrating a person’s life, with the body absent, but family and friends present, became, and still is, a much kinder final goodbye.

Life at Mütti’s farmhouse was a challenging learning adventure, but somehow everyone lived in relative harmony. When the war finally came to an end, it was time for me to say goodbye to the Ronacher family, to leave Mittersill and reconnect with my mother in Poland by way of another challenging life adventure.

Editor’s note: This is a chapter in Professor Gruzinska’s autobiographical account of her experiences behind German lines during the Second World War. See also A. Gruzinska, Emeritus Voices Vol. 20, pp. 83-84.