Hunger Waltz

In 1868 the famous Austrian musician Johann Strauss II composed the "Tales from the Vienna Woods", Opus 325, one of his six ingratiating waltzes. A sublime musical triumph, it became an inseparable part of the pleasures of life in the joyous and romantic Austrian capital. However, as far as I am concerned, despite the beauty and loftiness of the "Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald", I approach the tenor and dance of life in Austria with mixed sentiments. This is because I spent a year in the Vienna Woods, where my experience was neither joyous nor romantic. Mind you, from the summer of 1944 until the spring of 1945, I was a prisoner in the Nazi slave labor camp of Strasshof, a suburb of the buoyant Austrian capital, located in the midst of the Viennese Forests. Surrounded by barbed-wire fence, the Strasshof lager was guarded by the SS and their Ukrainian minions. Here, rather than hearing the birdsong invoked in Strauss' flute cadenza, the melodious tunes of the "Tales from the Vienna Woods", I heard the sighs of war in the forest, the rattle of guns and the thunder of exploding bombs in the suburbs. In the camp I often was visited by vertigos. At different hours of the day my head suddenly went giddy and spinning; not because of dancing a whirling waltz but because of hunger. I suffered from malnutrition. I was starving. I was eight years old when we were deported. It happened on a rainy day in late June of 1944. Ruthless Hungarian gendarmes pushed mother, my three year-old sister and me, along with thousands of others, into box cars of a freight train in the railway station of my hometown, Szeged. After a dreadful journey of three days the cattle cars arrived in Vienna carrying a cargo of people. Many of them died on the road even before the train reached the Austrian border. Strasshof was a complex of camps filled with Jewish Hungarians, as well as Russian, French and Italian prisoners of war. They all worked as slave laborers in factories and farms. They built fortifications and cleared ruins from bombed out buildings. Historical research shows that the Nazis set up thousands of ghettoes and camps throughout the Third Reich. The masters of torture and death kept their victims in brutal conditions behind barbed wires, dispensing different degrees of agony, misery and suffering. In Strasshof there were no gas chambers. It was not an extermination camp but a prison of slow death. Still, compared to Mauthausen or Auschwitz, Strasshof was a first class hotel, a first class hotel in hell. In the unrelenting cold I had no warm clothes. I was exhausted and sick. The food was awful but its scarcity was even worse. It was never enough. I suffered from terrible hunger pangs. I hallucinated about delicious dishes and meals. I had drumming visions of tasty viands and savory pabulums. In many a day I fantasized about eating. I frequently envisioned being free and sated.The fabric of the future was made of foodstuff. And I had a recurring daydream: on my table there lay a huge slice of buttered bread, topped with a thick layer of apricot jam mixed with prune preserves.