Part One
I was born on November 11, 1918, in a small Austrian village located in the Krain region of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Don’t bother looking for it on a map. The maps and names have changed so much, what would it matter today anyway?
I always thought that it was one of life’s little ironies that I was born on the day that my father…your great-grandfather was killed. Of course growing-up in Salzburg, the schoolchildren found it strange that I could “celebrate” on the day the Great War ended. When you are ten, birthdays are important and you don’t think of it that way. It is only with the wisdom of age that I recognized the bittersweet emotions of my mother. To lose a husband and gain a son is something that no woman should have to contemplate. But in those days, sympathy was a rare commodity…everyone was missing a father, a brother or an uncle.
Your great-grandfather served in the Austrian ski patrol during the Great War. He had enlisted in 1913, a year before that madman killed the Archduke in Sarajevo. At that time no one thought the war would last longer than four weeks…and a length of four years was beyond comprehension to everyone, my father included. While on leave, he would jokingly remark to your great-grandmother that his unit and the Italians would trade schnapps and wine more often than bullets.
It was lightly snowing on the morning I was born and news of the official armistice was late in arriving. My mother’s joy over my birth was immediately amplified upon hearing the war was over and by the prospect of a returning husband. Unfortunately, fate has a cruel way of balancing one’s life. My father’s unit, which had been assigned to a relatively quiet sector in the Alps for much of the war, had been engaged in heavy fighting in the alpine passes along the border since September of 1918. The Italian army was making a late push to grab as much of the “spoils” as they could before the formal cessation of hostilities. Word of the impending armistice did not reach all the units, both Austrian and Italian, in the more remote locales of the offensive. My father was killed in one of these sporadic skirmishes on the last day of the war.
News reached my mother several weeks later.
The next months were hard for my mother as it became increasingly difficult for her to care for me. Family and neighbors helped out when they could, but many were trying to save for a move up north to Vienna and Salzburg. The end of the war and the collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian empire made it increasingly difficult for ethnic Austrians to remain in the Krain. The Slovenes, Croats and Serbs were attempting to create their own state and vestiges, as well as people, of the old Austrian-Hungarian Empire were being quickly brushed aside. By May of 1919, the Versailles Conference recognized the legitimacy of the new state of “Yugoslavia.” That summer, my mother left for Salzburg to live with her sister (my aunt) and her schoolteacher husband.
