"My fiancé was gunned down in the war, and then I met Bob..."

"Those were difficult years. And especially for a girl of my age, they should have been the most wonderful time of my life. But it was far from that. Cooking was very hard. We hardly received any butter or shortening, just a few ounces. There was nothing to wear. My shoes - when I think of what I wore in the laboratory - there were holes left and right. There were no shoes to be found, nothing, absolutely nothing! And of course there was a ban on dancing because the soldiers were fighting on the front. Just at the time that should have been the best years of my life, there was nothing. My acquaintances, the boys who I went dancing with, they all died in the war. There was no one left. They were all dead. My fianc‚ was gunned down in the war too.

And then, in the summer of 1945, I met Bob, an American soldier. He was stationed right near where I lived. We spent a lot of time talking to each other. The Americans had all gone to inspect these camps, like the Mauthausen concentration camp. Bob told me about all the dead bodies they had seen there. That was something new for me, that I had never heard about before."

Gertraud D., born in 1922 in Salzburg, was 23 years old at the end of the war (Boltzmann-Institut/Steinocher-Fonds Interview Archive, Salzburg)