"We kids were carrying on a great business with the GIs' breakfast leftovers..."

"In 1948, when I was in high school, I lived in a small village where the American soldiers always carried on maneuvers. They set up their tents in a sort of camp in the forests around the village. And when they moved out, they always left behind some of the things they got for breakfast. Everything was in cans - it was a sort of breakfast pack - and sometimes they would only eat, for example, the milk powder and the cocoa. And everything else that was left over they would kind of bury behind a tree. And for us kids, going around looking for this stuff was like a big Easter egg hunt. There were a lot of little sealed packets like Nescafe, sugar, some with little cakes inside, etc. We would hunt for these packets and then we were also carrying on a great business with this stuff. For example, among our friends and family, it was easy to sell this terrific Nescafe. We could make quite a tidy little sum of money just from the things the GIs left behind after a maneuver."

Helmut B., born in 1937, was then a high school student in a village in Salzburg (Boltzmann-Institut/Steinocher-Fonds Interview Archive, Salzburg)