The mining company built the entire mountain village and until as recently as 1978 everything in the village circled around the mining industry… Towards the end of the 70’s the Austrian ore met fierce competition from the Brazilian day mines and their cheap labor and the mines were closed. Everyone was a communist and a cultural Catholic – theoretically an impossible ideological combination but one that still worked among the blue collar population in several European nations such as Poland, Italy and Austria… Among simple uneducated people almost anything works in strange combinations; a strong fear of God, superstition and Socialism…
The families that made up Knappenberg all lived in two story blue-collar townhouses, connected like row houses on the mountain slopes. They were divided into two areas; Altsiedlung and Neusiedlung. There was a post office, a tobacco shop, the local butcher and bakery, a couple small grocery shops, a small school, the city hall, a curling rink, tennis courts and a soccer field and of course the two pubs Gasthaus Giermaier and Gasthof Steller… Every Austrian village had one, even the villages with only five families. The Austrian beer Gösser was considered equal to holy water and incense when it came to holiness ;).
Our house was one of eight and seven families lived side by side; the Messners, Höfferers, Kaplaners, Amritzers, Sonnerbergersm Graschitzs and the Bergers… My father had both been to school with, been friends with and fought with all the boys in town as well as been in love with all the girls during his youth in the 50’s… My dad would often share stories from a poor, broken post-war Austria. The stories were often both warm hearted and funny yet at the same time sad… In the row of houses opposite ours lived other friends of the families; the Durnbachers and the Speckbauers. In the open area in front of our house was an old hand pump with a beautiful dragon head as the lever. Next to the pump was an old deserted shop with broken windows… Cars were parked everywhere or more precisely shoved in to the small open areas. All the families joined in to help cut fire wood for the winter, shovel snow and watch each others kids… The fellowship was intense and we could often hear the neighbors fight, argue, cry and laugh through the thin walls and open windows… Altsiedlung 128 was where my dad grew up and it became my second home (or first) during my upbringing and many Easters, Christmases and New Years have been celebrated there…
My grandma Anna, born in 1924, lost her husband Ewald in 1975 when a mine caved in. During the war she was hit by shrapnel and still shock her head slightly whenever she would sit down… She grew up in abject poverty and lost her first husband in the war and was left all alone with her first born, her daughter Heidi… She remarried my grandpa and they lost their first two children to jaundice… My grandma Anna, we would call her Oma, was a real card shark and new all the rules and exceptions and loved to teach us kids how to play cards. I would read the newspaper for her at the kitchen table during breakfast and she had a wonderful humor and laughed a lot… I cried a lot in her arms as a kid and she always defended me… Grandma had a strong belief in God but never talked about her faith. She would do the sign of the cross and had a deep respect for both priests and monks.
My dad grew up in a bomb-wrecked Austria that was still occupied by foreign troops and many were starving… My grandpa was most likely a psychic wreck from the war, just like all the other surviving men in that generation. My grandpa was a tough guy who survived five years in Hitler’s army and two years in a prison camp… He was the demolition expert in the mine for many years, womanizer and card shark. People say that he had a great sense of humor and charm combined with a soft heart… Both my dad and Elvira survived their childhood and Austria was rebuilt. At the age of thirteen my dad ran away from home and lived as a hobo / tramp in Italy during some of his teen years, turned to boxing, was convicted for minor felonies and sentenced to juvenile penitentiaries; all this during the 60’s…
As a kid I loved my dad more than anything else and his Austria was mine… I always wanted to be like him… He hunted, fished and loved pro boxing; I followed in his footsteps…
See Ya!
