The day, the hour when every bell in Vienna proclaimed peace and the end of the Second World War. I was lying on an upturned fridge, unwashed and unshaven, covered in filth in my ‘partisan uniform’ in a coal cellar in the Plösslgasse in the 4th Bezirk. The door to the cellar was guarded by a Red Army soldier speaking only a smattering of pigGerman, who played ad nauseam the first bars of the Volga Boat Song - he clearly couldn’t manage the rest.Carl Szokoll, Die Rettung Wiens, Vienna 2001, 380 Vienna On 9 May 1945 Cardinal Innitzer said Mass for Karl Renner’s new Soviet-backed administration. All the working bells in the city were set to chime and celebrate the end of the war in Europe. Vienna was still a sad, wrecked city. More than 80,000 homes had been wholly or partially destroyed and 35,000 people had nowhere to live. For the most part there was no gas, electricity or telephone. Large tracts of the 1st Bezirk had been turned to rubble in the last months of the war and in the wild looting that followed liberation.
