I Chose Liberty - Ludwig von Mises Institute

130 I Chose Liberty: Autobiographies of Contemporary Libertarians
to help those wounded in the fighting still going on in northern Italy’s Po Valley. My
memory is of a lovely city with many churches, interesting bridges over the Arno, and
hillsides sprinkled with Italian villas and cypress trees.
Our next staging area was Verona, north of the Po Valley. A group of us jeeped from
Verona to picturesque Venice and I remember dining and swimming in nearby Lake Como.
Shortly after V-E Day (May 8), we were relocated to Salzburg, in Austria. They sent me
by plane—I was envious of those who crossed the Alps by jeep through the Brenner Pass. We
eight BEW secretaries were the first American girls to reach Austria after V-E Day. American
civilians in Salzburg, both men and women, were billeted in Hotel Pitter, which had been
slightly damaged by bombs; some walls were a-kilter and some doors didn’t latch, leading to
some unexpected and hilarious encounters. Salzburg was our last staging area before Vienna.
The treaty that ended World War II divided Germany and Austria into four zones,
each to be under the control of one allied power: U.S., British, French, or Russian. Vienna,
too, was divided into four sectors, each controlled by one of these four Allies. Salzburg was
in the American zone but Vienna was in the middle of the Russian, so we had to travel
through the Russian zone to reach Vienna. In August the staff set out in a caravan of several
cars along the Russian-controlled highway to Vienna.
Vienna was a gloomy city that winter of 1945–1946. Many buildings had been bombed;
prices were controlled; a black market flourished; the people were hungry; on weekends
shabbily-dressed Viennese would go by streetcar to the end of the line and walk miles in
the hope of buying a few cabbages or potatoes. We Americans often traded candy bars and
cigarettes for family heirlooms, jewelry and curios. While most Viennese were starving,
one young lady who sold us rings, pendants, chinaware and Meissen figurines, on behalf
of her friends and acquaintances, actually gained weight from her candy bar commissions.
Another Austrian woman we knew, a single mother, slept with GIs in exchange for perfumed
PX cold cream in which she fried potatoes for her teen-aged son. I bought an oil painting
of the Austrian Alps for ten cartons of cigarettes, which still hangs over my mantle—at
that time one carton, i.e., ten packs, cost U.S. $1.00 tax-free at the Army PX. Every morning,
as my girlfriend and I walked from our hotel to the office, she noticed we were followed
by the same little old man; when she dropped her cigarette stub, he would stoop to pick it
up. She soon took to turning around and handing it to him personally, for which he thanked
her profusely. It was depressing how easily we privileged and fortunate Americans came to
accept poverty and suffering all around us.
Our office in the U.S. sector of Vienna was in a former boys’ school that had been
used as a hospital during the war. Life for us U.S. civilians was easy. In order to see how
the Austrians lived, I had wanted to live and board with a family, as I had in Bolivia, but
that was not permitted by the Army, for it would have been a burden on the local economy.
As we civilians enjoyed officer status, we were fed and billeted with Army officers in a hotel,
not far from the center of the city. Our contribution to the war effort as secretaries was, as
usual, to take shorthand and type letters and memoranda with multiple carbon copies (no
copy machines in those days).
We also occasionally attended a quadripartite (U.S.-British-Russian-French) meeting.
Responsibility for planning refreshments and recording the minutes rotated month by