European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

We went back over the mountain to Carinthia, when the snow was gone.

We got to a farmer’s where the cousin’s grandmother was.

The aunt asked the grandmother whether she could leave the youngest daughter there,

because she was very ill.

This woman said she could. The girl would die otherwise.

I thought: ‘Oh, she can stay and I have to go again; and it is so nice and warm here.’

We were so full and it was wonderful.

So I lay down on the bench and thought: ‘what could I do to be allowed to stay?’

I played being unconscious.

Whenever they picked me up I fell down again until the woman said:

“This one is so exhausted, you cannot take her either. Just let her stay here.”

That possibly saved my life.

When the aunt left she went to a bunker in Ojstra, in Carinthia, near Eisenkappl.

This bunker was betrayed and she was shot dead.

The others got away, but she didn’t.

If I would have been there I don’t know what would have happened to me.

At the farmer’s it was really nice.

But it was still war and it was the last farmer before the border. There was bad fighting there.

Hiding with partisans in bunkers

At the end of January 1944