Franz not alone – 3. Try

Spring 1971 just before Pentecost. Second semester in the first year of my apprenticeship.

I was cycling with a friend from my class. At a break in a meadow, we talked about school and the report card that was due soon. We both had the same idea. Didn’t want to go back to school and work. Longing for freedom”. Maybe in my head the saying “All good tries are three”.

Although our school result would not be very good but positive, a plan developed to find better places for the future. I wanted to go to the warm south, he wanted to go north. In the end I gave in. The long Pentecost weekend seemed to us to be the ideal time. At Pentecost we went on a bike trip in the direction of the Wachau, a valley along the Danube River. On the first day we made it to the city Krems. To save money, we looked for and found an empty carriage at the train station to stay overnight. Early in the morning, because the wagon was uncomfortable and cold, we continued on our bikes in the direction of the Waldviertel (Forest Quarter). It began to rain. The switchbacks into the Waldviertel are steep and we often pushed our bikes.

After a few hours, exhausted and wet, we stopped at a village with a boarding house. After a goulash soup we took a room and fell asleep. When we woke up we had lost all sense of time. We went to the dining room to have dinner. The lady of the house pointed to the clock, which read almost midnight. So back to bed. We were on the road for a few days and realized that we weren’t getting anywhere quickly with the bikes. So we threw them away and tried our luck by stopping cars.

It actually worked well. Until something happened. My friend had an uncle who worked for ORF (Austrian Broadcast). He managed to get our photos on the news for a minute. The owner of an inn saw that, where we were eating, and asked him about a cheap guest house in town. He was very nice and showed us the way. It didn’t take long and two police officers picked us up from there. The village didn’t have a prison, so the police waited with us in the guardroom until my friend’s parents, with their car and my mother, picked us up late at night. The situation was very strange for me. Almost everyone seemed relieved and smiled, even my mother. Only I cried and thought “failed again”. I decided not to try to escape again and to wait until I was legally an adult.

The people in the small company where I was studying were great. I had a very bad feeling in my stomach when I came back. But nobody said a word about the event and I went on with my work as if nothing had happened. I stayed there until I joined the army.