A New Day Beyond the Horizon

By K. Meador

World War II was on. Bombs were exploding over Austria, and Adele was a very young girl there. Hitler was in power. Across a big ocean and a thousand miles of land, there was a place called Texas. Paul was a Texas boy and was three years older than Adele. What could these two have in common, and how would they meet decades and a world of experiences later? What important things happened in their lives before and after they met? It is an amazing story!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543458954

K. Meador

This author is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) with a Bachelors Degree in Business Administration. To avoid any possibility of misleading the public regarding financial matters, the author is writing under an assumed name and clearly not making assertions pertaining to financial matters or particular institutions. After his early years of working for a firm of Certified Public Accountants, the author spent the remainder of his career working in business and government. Positions held include working as a Manufacturing Cost Accountant, a Regional Controller, and a Director of Internal Audit, among others. Far from being a typical accountant, just living with boring details, this author has sought and found adventures in foreign lands during exciting times. This experience has provided inspiration for writing interesting stories. Other experiences have likewise inspired more interesting stories.

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PART 1

Adele’s Early Life

CHAPTER 1

In the Beginning

A dele was born in Flachau in the state of Salzburg, Austria, in 1940. She was the sixth of eight children, having a younger sister, Edith, born in 1942 and brother, Hermann, born in 1946. Adele was born during Hitler’s rule in World War II. The history occurring at that time made lasting impressions in the mind of this young child. She never forgot the Nazi police state brutality or the horrors of bombings by airplanes from faraway lands that caused fear, hunger, and hardships. Most forms of order were destroyed in that war. Then there was the occupation by foreign soldiers. Memories of bombings in Munich, not far away in Germany, stood out in her mind. After that, she remembered the bitter cold winter of 1946, after the war ended.

Adele’s father, Cyrus Wieser, had served the Austro-Hungarian Empire during World War I. He was in Italy and Russia and then spent five years as a prisoner of war (POW) in Siberia. His job as a prisoner involved going to villages and bringing in camp supplies. Most of the prisoners had been forced to work in coal mines and were only occasionally allowed to go out and bathe in the snow before taking back tree branches to sleep on inside the mines. Due to conditions and the coal dust breathed, most lived only a few months. When prisoners died, the Russians dragged dead bodies away by their hair onto the frozen tundra, where it was not possible to bury them. Prisoners who displeased their captors were killed by being thrown into latrines and left there to die.

Cyrus had been one of the relatively few prisoners to survive and be released after the war ended in 1918. The several-thousand-mile-long train ride back to his homeland of Austria took many days. Finally, Cyrus arrived at his mother’s home in Austria. There, he discovered that all of his possessions were gone. His mother had gotten rid of everything while Cyrus was away. When asked why, his mother responded, How did I know that you would be back?

When World War II broke out, Adele’s father, Cyrus, was too old for regular military service. So he was relegated to guard duty in the neighborhood, watching out for terrorist activities of Communist partisans.

Adele’s mother, Barbara, had heart-damaging scarlet fever and nearly died when she was a young child. Then, while in her forties, Barbara started having heart attacks. She had three during her lifetime. All of this plus raising her eight children left Adele’s mother unable to do her work during the heat of the day. So she would begin her work in the garden at 4:00 a.m. to avoid unbearable heat. Having given birth to the eight children plus one stillborn child, Barbara was awarded a silver mother cross by the Hitler government.

CHAPTER 2

Early Life during the War

I n most traditional ways, Adele never had much of a childhood. During the war, her family, like millions of Europeans, lived with the disturbing news reports about one city after another being bombed. Every evening, Adele’s mother carefully taped all windows and doors to hide light so as not to be visible to overflying bombers. Adele saw fear in her mother’s eyes as she taped. Her father knew not to believe, as their government was telling the people, that they were winning the war. He would post the boys along the road in both directions as lookouts while listening to shortwave broadcasts in the German language from England to get news about how the war was really going. The boys would signal in case anyone approached, to avoid being caught listening to the broadcasts.

Adele never forgot the pain of true hunger as a small child. The adults were skinny and hungry, too. Food and other supplies were destroyed by the bombings. Her family was fortunate to live in an area where they could grow a small garden; people in the cities were starving. Neither had she forgotten, as a small child, being carried to a bomb shelter at the hospital where she was treated for an infection. There was a bombing nearby, and she lost control over her bowels while being carried to the shelter.

One of Adele’s older sisters, Helga, became seriously sick with tuberculosis and desperately needed penicillin for treatment, which was not available because it was being withheld from their country due to the war. Helga became ravaged by the disease and could only be treated with morphine, which was expensive. Helga’s pain was almost unbearable, and Adele had to administer drops of morphine when Helga could no longer take the pain.

Adele recalled an encounter with the Nazi police state in their home. Government officials came into their home and, while the family watched, put a gun to her father’s head, accusing him of harboring a woman who had dropped in at their house. The woman was guilty of having complained to the police about the government taking away sick or mildly retarded children who then died in the government’s custody. The gun was taken away from her father’s head when this heroic lady volunteered to go away with the four men. She was never seen again.

Adele told of other terrifying stories about the police state, including the fact that Helga’s husband, Karl, had a brother who was beheaded. Other stories did not directly involve their family. Citizens they knew were taken away in olive-colored, closed–in vehicles to later die of pneumonia. These were traumas that Adele wanted to forget and never talk about again.

CHAPTER 3

After the War

T he nightmare did not end when the fighting stopped; in most ways, things only got worse. Everything was broken, and people returning from war did not know where to go or what to do. Few goods were available to buy, and black market prices were high. People were required to provide shelter for former combatants returning from war. This included sheltering smelly and defeated men in people’s homes or barns. In addition, the country was occupied by foreign soldiers who represented new dangers.

At the Wieser home, the former combatants slept upstairs, while the entire family slept downstairs. Adele’s mother washed the men’s dirty laundry, and the men bathed themselves in the river nearby. On their trucks, the men brought with them large quantities of soap that Adele’s mother used for washing their belongings. After their departure, the men left behind large quantities of unused soap, which Adele’s mother continued to use later for washing the family’s laundry. Bathing and wearing clean clothes did wonders for the men’s odor problems. The men left behind shovels and some other tools, which Adele’s father was able to keep.

Not all families were so accommodating toward the men returning from war. Adele remembered one man who was so angry that he set booby traps for the men in his barn where they slept. As Adele recalled, the angry man had the misfortune of blowing himself up with his own booby trap and had lifelong injuries as a result. Why was this man so angry? It was probably because many military vehicles were parked on his property, making it difficult to operate his sawmill business.

The dangers from foreign troops were especially bad in the sectors occupied by Russians, who were a menace to women and little girls. Fortunately for Adele and her family, the Russians were not in their sector. Their occupying forces were American, and they were less dangerous than the Russians. Adele remembered coming home one day and finding her mother crying because the Americans had come and ransacked their home. The Americans were looking for weapons; when told there were none, they proceeded to turn over everything in the house. There was also a time when Americans drove through neighborhoods throwing hard candy to children. At least the children had that to enjoy.

During the war, kindergarten and school children had been taught to greet everyone with a friendly Heil Hitler Nazi salute. That greeting was compulsory for people of all ages from 1933 to 1945. Sometime after the war, though, a new government was established, and giving the Nazi salute became a punishable crime. As a first grader, Adele learned that in a painful way. She gave the formerly required salute. Then someone reported it to her father. He gave her a spanking that she never forgot. Of course, she never greeted anyone that way again.

As previously mentioned, the winter of 1946 was brutally cold. That was also the year Hermann was born. Adele’s father had to accept work away from home, and Adele helped her mother with chores due to her mother’s heart condition. The three older children had already left home. That left Adele, her next older brother, Roland, and the two younger children at home. Adele was already serious about responsibility and functioned somewhat as a little woman of the house at age six. This was considered girl work, and Roland did not participate. Adele said that her father would have held her responsible if anything happened to the two younger children, Hermann and Edith. Adele was going to school by this time, so she was a busy girl.

CHAPTER 4

Growing up Years

A dele craved knowledge and eagerly studied in school and prepared her homework. While Adele completed homework, Edith played, and Adele often prepared Edith’s homework to avoid embarrassment at school. When she was young, Adele wished there was enough money to afford her a fine education, but she knew that was not possible due to the ravages of war. When Adele was about eleven years old, she would check out books from the school library and read without paying attention to the time. Often, she would not stop reading until 2:00 a.m. Many decades and a world of experiences later, she would start that again, reading three library books a week.

Around the time Adele was twelve years old, her oldest brother, Ernst, bought a pig to raise for slaughter. Right away, Adele’s mother became attached to the pig, even though Adele’s father had cautioned her not to. Wherever Adele’s mother went, the pig followed, and she spoke to the pig. When she talked, the pig tilted its head and obviously listened. When she went to the garden, Adele’s mother instructed the pig to wait at the gate, and the pig obeyed. One day, Adele came home and found her mother brokenhearted and crying. Fearing the death of a family member, Adele asked what happened. Her mother told her that the boys slaughtered the pig. Her mother had ordered Adele’s brother Ernst to take the pork to his house, because it would not be served at hers.

There were other occasions for Adele’s mother to fall in love with animals. Adele’s brother Roland raised rabbits, which were tended and talked to by their mother. When her mother went out to feed the rabbits, she would call out, Chi chi, and the rabbits would come. Of course, none of the rabbits were slaughtered at her house. The rabbits had to be sold while still alive.

Apparently this love for animals had been passed on to Adele’s younger sister, Edith. While Adele studied and did homework, Edith played with cats. She would dress the cats in doll clothes and push them around in a doll buggy. The cats tolerated it until they had enough. Then there were scratches. In cold weather, Edith would secretly coddle the cats in the house until her father heard sounds. Then she would put the cats back out into the snow.

When Adele’s youngest brother, Hermann, was six years old, he went along with the men as they bailed hay and loaded it onto a trailer pulled by a tractor. Then they taught Hermann to drive the tractor and pull the trailer while the men loaded hay.

One evening, two of the men drove the tractor and pulled the empty trailer up a mountain road. Hermann and the seven-year-old son of one of them rode along in the trailer. It was a narrow, winding mountain road with the Enns River far below on one side. Somewhere up the mountain, they drove the tractor and trailer up to a barroom and went inside for drinks while the boys waited outside. After a while, the boys grew restless and wanted to go home, so they cranked up the tractor to drive themselves home. There was no place to turn around. The only way the boys knew to drive down the mountain was to back up. So, six-year-old Hermann proceeded to back the trailer down the crooked mountain road. Little by little by little, they backed down the mountain road until they eventually found room to turn around and go forward. When they drove by the police station in the village, a policeman looked out the window and could barely believe his eyes! The policeman knew who the two little boys were and to whom the tractor belonged. The policeman mounted his motorcycle and rode to the home of the owner of the tractor and reported the incident to the boy’s mother. Adele never found out how the two stranded men got home.

Once, when Adele was twelve years old, her mother had to be hospitalized and leave the children at home alone. This was when the four youngest children still lived at home. Their father was away at work and only came home for a weekend once every few weeks. That left Adele with the responsibility of cooking for herself, her two younger siblings, and her older brother Roland. Adele handled all of the other household responsibilities as well. During that time, a schoolteacher asked Adele some personal questions after learning that her parents were away. He asked her who cooked the meals in the absence of her parents. Adele answered that she did. So he asked Adele what she was cooking the family for supper. When Adele told him that she would cook pork, he started asking questions about how she cooked it. Adele explained in detail how she would prepare the meal. You can wonder how the teacher reacted to that!

At the age of fourteen, Adele went away to a girls’ school at St. Wolfgang in the state of Upper Austria and lived in a dormitory. While at the St. Wolfgang School, Adele was given the opportunity to study English, and she took advantage of it. Later in Adele’s life, that study of English would prove to be more important than she could have imagined. She was there for two years and studied regular school curricula plus childcare training.

During this time, Adele became sick with the flu and had to be moved into a sick bay for children with the flu. Then she came down with pneumonia that caused excruciating pain with every breath, which she never forgot. Adele was very sick for three weeks before returning to her studies.

After that, her formal studies were concluded. In Austria, regular schooling lasted for ten years, and four more years of gymnasium were available. Those going on to universities were required to have studied through gymnasium.

CHAPTER 5

Germany and Travel

A fter completion of schooling at St. Wolfgang, Adele was hired by a couple in Cologne, Germany, to care for their children. She worked there for approximately a year and traveled with the German family to France and Belgium. The German man spoke French very well. The trip was an interesting and educational experience for Adele.

Something especially interesting happened in France one day when they parked the car beside the road and walked to the beach. There was broken glass where they parked, and a French policeman came and told them not to break glass there. Then the policeman asked the German, Aare you Mr. Frank? The German replied, Yes, are you Mr. Pierre?" Somehow, the two men had become acquainted during the war, when they were on opposite sides. Adele never found out how they had become friends under those circumstances.

This pertains to the trip to France and is not in geographic or chronological order. Some of the places visited include Paris, Leone, Lourdes, the Pyrenees, and the vast WW II cemeteries in Normandy. They visited world-class museums in Paris and Leone.

On a later trip with the Germans, Adele travelled to Brussels, Belgium, and saw more impressive museums. On other occasions, they visited Holland and witnessed the breathtaking beauty of the Floriad. All of this fed Adele’s voracious appetite for knowledge.

So far, it may appear that Adele’s job in Germany was a big vacation, but it was far more. Family life was unhappy at the Germans’ home, where Adele was performing twenty-four-hour live-in childcare duty. Adele was caring for girls, ages five and six, plus a baby who was not well. Apparently, the German was a nice man, but his wife was always fighting within the family. The man had served in the German army, and his father, who owned the home, had been a Nazi. Because of his father’s affiliation, there was an ongoing legal battle to prevent the home from being confiscated. The German family had a myriad of problems that Adele long remembered. One of Adele’s memories of that trip was an amusing story of the German’s wife wanting to buy a dress while in France. She was told by a French lady that dresses didn’t come in her size, because French women did not get that big.

There was no rest for Adele, and her health deteriorated with being on call twenty-four hours a day. At 2:00 a.m., she regularly had to carry merchandise from a loaded van into the cellar. This included large cans of sausages as well as chocolates and other items being supplied to cloisters and retail organizations. Adele suffered serious weight loss, and her clothes no longer fit her. Adele took a taxi ride to the train station to return to Austria. The German family followed her to the train station and begged her to come back. They could not stop Adele. She was going home!

CHAPTER 6

Back to Austria

A dele spent the next several months living with her parents in Flachau while going to the doctor and getting treatment for the extreme weight loss she had suffered in Germany. From there, Adele stayed for a while with her sister Helga in Leoben, which is in the Austrian state of Steiermark.

By this time, Adele’s sister Helga had received the life-saving penicillin for her tuberculosis. She had been so sick that potentially dangerous and possibly brain-damaging amounts of penicillin were administered to save her life.

Soon, Adele accepted a job with a family in nearby Trofiach to care for their young son, and she moved from Helga’s home in Leoben. The people she worked for had a retail store and lived on the second floor above the store. On the third floor, Adele shared a room with another girl. The employer provided room and board for the girls.

Helga’s husband, Karl, had a coworker named Otto, who often came to visit Helga and Karl in their home. Otto was housed in an employer-furnished room. He and Adele became acquainted through his frequent visits while Adele was still living with Helga. Otto seemed to be a nice man. In his case, though, what you saw was not necessarily what you got. Adele would learn that later on.

With much encouragement from Helga, Adele eventually became engaged to Otto, who was eleven years her elder. As late as their wedding day, Adele felt uncomfortable about going through with the marriage. Before the wedding, Adele told Helga that it did not feel right. Helga insisted that it was too late to back out and said that she would marry the man herself if she were not already married. Adele was eighteen and did not yet have the life experiences that might cause her to hesitate and reconsider. The wedding happened. For reasons to be described later, it was fortunate for it not to have been a Catholic wedding.

Here is some of Otto’s family background. Otto and his sister took their mother’s family name, Erdmann, because both children were born out of wedlock. Their biological father’s name was Kurz, and he had other illegitimate children by other women. One is described in the next paragraph. Otto’s mother was married to a Mr. Kohler, and the children had grown up with Mr. Kohler as a stepfather. In their marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Kohler had four of their own daughters. During Hitler’s rule, Mr. Kurz, Otto’s biological father, was in the state police agency, the SA. After the war, Mr. Kurz spent two years in prison because of that association. He was suspected of knowing something that he was not telling.

Mr. Kurz had one of his illegitimate daughters with a woman who later became married to a Mr. Kaufmann. That made the illegitimate daughter a half sister of Otto. Together, Mr. and Mrs. Kaufmann raised the Kurz daughter.

During the time of Hitler’s rule, Hitler and Göring and other dignitaries went to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Kaufmann for lodging while on hunting trips. Their home was a government-owned hunting lodge. Mr. Kaufmann was the hunting guide, and Mrs. Kaufmann prepared the meals. After their visitors departed, Mr. and Mrs. Kaufmann had the benefit of plenty of leftover food. While most people were hungry, the Kaufmanns were well fed, thanks to their distinguished visitors. After the war, Mr. Kaufmann spent two years in prison due to his close contact with such guests. He was suspected of having overheard things that he was not telling.

PART 2

Life in Early Marriage

CHAPTER 7

Early Married Life

H ousing was not immediately available for the newlywed couple, Adele and Otto. They had to wait for a rental to become available and to make temporary arrangements until then. Right after the wedding, they traveled to visit with Otto’s parents in the southern Austrian