Tuna wrote:i'd love to one day <3
Be sure to visit the Wachau in Lower Austria. It is really beautiful there. I am there as well, which makes it even more beautiful.
Story Time!To contribute to the initial topic here. I have been working at the Red Cross for almost 3 months now and I have met lots of people already, mostly old people. A couple of them were so nice to tell their stories from WW2 times and one in particular was exciting:
We transported an old man a rather long distance, so we had a lot of time to talk. As we got into our carriage he immediately started talking about his past. He grew up in Lower Austria but when Hitler invaded Austria in 1938 he had to join the Hitler Youth. He said that the feeling in those youth groups was amazing. Never did he feel so in unity with other people as in the HJ. They went on hikes, sang next to a bonfire, visited places in germany and so on. Everything was done together. All that was part of training humans to fight to their deaths for Hitler but how should a kid like him know this? It was a great time for him.
He then went to war in 1944(Eastern front in Russia), but he didn't want to talk much about what he did there. There proabably weren't many nice things to talk about there, so he skipped a bit. He took a grenade shrapnel to the leg and thus was allowed to leave the frontline. That was really good for him personally, because he could escape the frontline while the other soldiers got overrun by the soviet army. He spent the next time in an hospital near Berlin, I think. His leg turned out alright by the way.
In 1945 when the war was over and the allies controlled germany he was locked into an american POW camp with other former german soldiers. I don't know the details here, but I think it was that only people with a fitting pass could leave the camp. Some friend of him got him such a pass, so he could escape the camp. He was always a communicative, social man which was definitely a big plus for him.
He then worked at a friends farm in Germany for some months. It was a nice time, he said, but he grew homesick over time. He and an austrian friend of him then started to walk towards Austria. Getting there was hard because the borders between american and russian territory were guarded well. The first try failed and he got sent back but the second time they could slip past the guards and now they were in Austria again.
He reunited with his family there and he still lives today, which makes me happy because he is a really decent human being.