Austria  1945-1946
Post War Clean-up

Bert Bender is my mother's father and he was in Austria after the war.  He was in basic training when the war ended.  He was scheduled to go to Japan.  With the end of the war he had a choice of going home or re-enlisting for another year.  He rejoined and went home for a short leave of absence, then returned to base.  When he got back to base, he found his orders were changed and he was on his way to Germany as a member of the Army occupation and his unit replaced the regular soldiers that were being sent home. 

He was a member of the motor pool.  He drove truck and ambulances.  The most memorable task he had during this time period was the clearing of the concentration hospitals filled with children of the Jewish adults that were exterminated in the concentration camps.  The Germans held the children here.  They were sick and starving.  The army moved the children into downtown Vienna to the military hospitals. 

Grandpa would buy Hershey chocolates by the case at the base.  He, a nurse, and an interpreter would go to the hospital and try to bribe the children to trust them enough to come with them to the hospital and get the care they needed.  They would even eat some of the candy to convince them that it was not poisoned.  Sometimes, Grandpa got sick from eating so much chocolate in one day trying to convince each child to come with them.  The kids were so afraid that even this love for candy and seeing it eaten were not enough to calm them. 

The sights and sounds experienced at this time will stay with him forever.  During this time he got very emotional as he told of removing the children.  The children would scream, they were so scared.  Some would pass out from starvation, some from fear as they were carried out of the concentration hospital to the waiting trucks or buses.  The sounds were so bad.  The screaming and crying was so loud.

While on this mission, his unit cleared out two concentration hospitals with hundreds of children in each.  They worked the whole day and would feel lucky if they were able to load a bus and a truck with the children and take them to Vienna.  He thinks that many of the children were adopted out or stayed in the care of the Government of Austria.  They had no way of finding any relatives even if they had survived. 

He worked with the 124th Army hospital which was set up outside of Vienna, Austria. This was a hospital that was set up in the horse ranch of the great Lipizzans.  They had been moved out of Austria during the early years of the war to save them from destruction.  He also worked with the 126th just outside of Salzburg and helped them move to just outside of Vienna.  They would deliver medicines from one hospital to another. 

This is a very emotional story for him to tell and he doesn't talk about it much.  He is  a life-member of both the VFW (Veteran of Foreign Wars) and the American Legion both groups out of Bismarck, North Dakota.  This was where he had been living before and after his time in the army.