A Boy's War: Vienna 1945

By Alfred Penz

A BOYS WAR. With charm and humour, a 92 year old Viennese writer invites you on a journey back in time to the last three years of World War Two.

In the first year, you take part in a perilous journey to his grandmother's home in the country. In the second year, you live through the happy, and often hilarious, evacuation of his class to a small town in Hungary. After a short stay in the Vojvodina, you barely make it back to Austria and narrowly escape the bombing once there. After suffering through a pre-military training camp, you are drafted to dig anti-tank ditches near the Hungarian border. In the last month of the war, your only choice is to become a member of a local Hitler Youth unit where you fight in the battle for Vienna and subsequently join in the retreat to the west.

To better understand all these events, the author explains the historical, geographical, and ideological circumstances, putting you in the action and making you a member of his family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alfred Penz
• Release date: May 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201172558

Book preview

A Boy’s War

DO YOU REMEMBER

---

WHEN YOU WERE A TEENAGER?

---

CAN YOU IMAGINE IF YOU WOULD

---

HAVE GROWN UP IN VIENNA DURING

---

WORLD WAR TWO?

---

READ ON

To my long suffering father, whose heart I broke when I left him.

All descriptions of events and people are based solely on the author’s personal experiences and remembrances, to the best of his abilities.

---

© 2022 Alfred Penz

All rights reserved.

Illustrations by the author

A Boy’s War

A Boy’s Life During the last three years of the Second World War

Alfred Penz

WELCOME TO MY WORLD

---

Seven decades have passed and child soldiers are still being used in wars fought in many countries around the world. Here, I describe the adventures and trials of a group of Viennese boys during the last three years of the Second World War.

Everything in this book is based on my personal experience as one of those boys. Historical and geographical notes serve to bring the time and places into context. Since none of my friends in Vienna are still alive, and my memory for names is limited, I have taken license to change all but some salient names.

Vienna, the city and its inhabitants, suffered less trauma than some of the major German cities. Destruction was only 20% as compared to 95% in Berlin, Hamburg or Dresden, and loss of life was much less than suffered by London during the Blitz.

This Viennese palette, therefore, allows me to paint a somewhat less hopeless picture of everyday life during those days. Including our experience in Hungary shows that young boys will be young boys whenever you loosen the leash a bit.

I also hope to shine a light on a regime that followed its leader to the point of insanity. My personal objections were not political—I was too young for that—but a realization that due to my background, mentality, and physical disability, I could fall victim to it. There was no wheel in which I could fit as a cog.

Read on, dear reader. May you find the details as interesting as the message.

---

Alfred Penz, 2022

Table of Contents

1. THE SCYTHE IN THE SKY

Death begins to swing its scythe over Austria.

The Allied air raids begin.

---

2. HUNGARIAN PASTORALE

A group of Viennese boys and their teachers are evacuated to a small Hungarian town at the Romanian border.

---

3. THE SWOOSH OF THE SCYTHE

A tale of death by bombing.

---

4. ALPINE BOOT CAMP AND DITCH DIGGING

The misery of boot camp

and digging anti-tank ditches.

---

5. THE BOY SOLDIERS

A unit of fifteen year old boys, their role in the defense of Vienna, and their subsequent retreat to the west.

AIR-RAID EARLY WARNING SYSTEM

Heavy formations of enemy bombers moving direction Vienna,

presently passing German border

---

AIR-RAID EARLY WARNING SYSTEM

Heavy enemy formations over Wiener Neustadt,

another group heading north towards Vienna

---

AIR-RAID EARLY WARNING SYSTEM

Woou Woou Woou Woou Woou Woou Woou Woou

---

The sirens wail, a grating high-low, high-low. War has reached us. It was expected. It had to come after the Allied landing in Sicily.

---

"Have you got your survival stuff?

Grab your bag and head for the shelter."

THE STAIRS TO the cellar wind down.

Like entering a tomb.

One bare spooky lightbulb glows.

---

There are about twenty of us down here, just our immediate family and some of our renters. I sit on a board, atop a pile of coal, next to my aunt Ria. A kerosene lamp casts eerie shadows. Our cellar is not a proper air-raid shelter, just the coal and utility cellar of a hundred year old house.

We can hear everything going on outside. Only the wooden door of the coal chute separates us from above. It is quiet outside except for an air-raid warden yelling at someone.

Maybe they have gone somewhere else?

Then, there it is, the deep hum of many, many engines.

---

Tak…tak…tak, tak, tak…tak…tak

Are they bombing?

I think it is our flak. Two 15cm batteries are stationed on two massive flak towers, guided by a giant Wurzburg radar screen on top of a third tower. Flak towers, huge blocks of concrete, sheltering a city of scared humanity. Thousands huddled on benches, safe in the tunnel network of the towers. We are too far away to reach the towers in time.

Finally, the steady wail of the all-clear signal. This time it was easy. They bombed some factories at the periphery. They were too high up to be accurate. The target radius averages 3km, but you never know what they are going to hit.

This time our flak downed four of them over Vienna. Heavy, four-engine Liberator bombers bursting with death. This formation has probably already lost five on the way here and now they face the long way back to Africa, passing the gauntlet of German-held Italy. It is terrible for them too. In German, we call this a Himmelfahrtskommando (suicide mission), a ticket to heaven. But they will be back again and again. Life is no longer safe in Vienna or anywhere else in the Third Reich.

---

Every summer school holiday, my mother dispatches me to my grandmother in Aigen-Schlägl, a town at the top of Upper Austria’s Mühlviertel. The venerable Westbahnhof, the Vienna Western Railway station, seems more active than ever. Many uniforms, the whole panoply of the Third Reich.

Come, Fredi, we have to buy our tickets. We line up at the ticket wicket. One adult and one child to Aigen-Schlägl, Oberdonau.

That makes fifteen Mark, fifty six Pfennig and three Mark for the Winterhilfswerk. The train leaves from platform three in forty five minutes.

Mama, look! Look at that crowd. They are all trying to get on our train.

Mother points to the door she wants. About ten people are outside it, trying to get on the train.

Do not push, dear sir. Do not push.

Jesus and the devil, take that Stradivarius out of my face!

Mister, you are cramming that suitcase right into the back of my knee!

A military voice calls, Quiet! Quiet, please. There is room for all of us, and there is a lot of time.

Mother is the queen of situations like this. With charm, a lovely smile, and plenty of panache, she gets us a prime spot right next to a window. The overhead bins are quickly filled up. Some altercations, rearranging. It cannot be helped that a few items end up on the floor between us, mainly the ones holding provisions.

I am wedged in between my mother and a heavy-set man with a party badge, brown suit, brown sweater, brown knickerbocker pants and brown shoes, shined to the point where they seem able to glow in the dark. He smells funny, kind of womanly, lavender or whatever they call the stuff. Turning sideways he accidentally pokes Mother.

My mother can become very regal.

One does not poke a lady in Deutschland.

I am glad she did not say Austria. Hitler hates Austria.

The bloke in brown apologizes, Forgive me, gracious lady.

My mother starts chatting with the Air Force master sergeant by the window opposite her. She is such a flirt sometimes, so embarrassing...

I decide that the best thing is to hold my tongue, listen, and people watch.

Next to the sergeant, the Stradivarius man clutches a violin case between his knees.

I am the first violinist of the Bratislava symphony. I have a teaching assignment at the Salzburg Mozarteum. When I was a young man you could go by tramway from Bratislava to Vienna. Now it is such a pain.

A priest in a black cassock and one of those square, partitioned and tasseled Biretta caps sits by his side.

Interesting, he says. You now have a Catholic priest as leader of Slovakia. I met Dr. Tiso in Vienna.

Oblivious to Dr. Tiso, a corporal in the Luftwaffe uniform, anti-aircraft service, gazes at a very beautiful young girl in an Army uniform sitting opposite him.

Next to him, a small woman clutches a rucksack on her lap. Next to her, a blond girl, about my age. She winks at me. It would have been super to have her sitting next to me.

We hear the station master on the platform, Train 368 to Salzburg, via St. Pölten, Amstetten, Linz. All aboard!

A whistle. We are rolling.

On the other side of the man in brown, a railway-uniformed man on his way back to Russia speaks about the tremendous task of converting the Russian railway gauge to the German one.

Building the Atlantic Wall is taking millions of tons of cement and aggregates, all transported by rail. Added to to this are the ongoing disruptions caused by bombing and sabotage.

It is incredible what the Reichsbahn is able to achieve.

Mama, what is a gauge?

I do not know, Fredi.

The sergeant opposite says, The gauge is the distance between the wheels on the tracks. The Russians have a wider track.

A man in the far corner, black suit, short dark hair, and a narrow moustache like Hitler’s, tries to unfold a large newspaper.

The Völkischer Beobachter. The party paper.

The woman opposite him holds a large paper-wrapped object. It must have taken several Völkischer Beobachter editions to artfully wrap the large parcel.

The compartment is full. Given the fact that at this stage of the war people are not as wide as they once were, we are still packed in like sardines. I count twelve in a compartment designed for ten. Many people are left in the corridors, some standing, some sitting on their luggage.

Somehow a conductor has made his way across the corridor obstacle course.

Tickets, please!

One by one, he punches tickets and examines marching orders. The man in the corner flashes a badge. The conductor stiffens. Jawohl, Herr Kommisar! The woman with the young girl doesn’t hold her rucksack anymore, white-faced, she squeezes it.

As we get closer to St. Pölten, the woman with the paper-wrapped package says, This is a beautiful, two hundred year old Meissen hundred-day clock. I am taking it to my aunt in St. Pölten.

She gets up and vanishes, her handbag slung across her shoulder and her package in her arms. We can hear her pleas in the corridor.

This is a precious, historic object. I have to get off in St. Pölten. Please help me.

A very old man who appears to me to be over a hundred slides into her place. His appearance is very Austrian in a rustic sort of way.

Grüss Gott.

The moustache across from him glowers but does not say anything. The only greeting allowed is ‘Heil Hitler.’

The grinding sound of braking wheels. The train stops. We are in St. Pölten. Very few passengers get off or on.

Rolling again, the old man produces a beautifully carved, hooked pipe and seems to be looking for matches.

Rauchen verboten! hisses the policeman.

Farmers