A correspondent of The London Telegraph who spent three years in
captivity in Austria has told of the horrible brutalities and cruelties
suffered by interned aliens in that country. He states that there are
both stations and camps for the interned prisoners, but the former
are employed to exploit the captives; they are more livable than
the horrible camps, but to live at a station one is charged three
to ten times more for food and lodging than the current rates for
citizens, and the prisoners suffer greatly for want of food and decent
sanitation.
He describes the experiences of prisoners at a place called Illmau, in
lower Austria, as typical of Austrian methods. A party of Englishmen
were taken there shortly after they had been arrested in Vienna. They
were marched along for about twenty kilometers, carrying their bags
or packages. It was very cold, below freezing point, and when at last
they arrived at Illmau at dark they were pushed into a kind of cellar,
three or four steps below the level of the ground. A soldier locked
them in, telling them they could go there and die. It was a place with
no windows--only a small hole in floor. The floor, bare earth, was wet
and muddy, water trickling down the walls. For every two men was one
straw sack, also damp, of course, and they were so closely packed that
they could not lie straight.
During the day it was so dark that they could not see each other's
faces. In the morning they were told that, if they wanted to wash,
they might go to the pump from which they also got their drinking
water. This pump stood in the middle of a manure heap, and could only
be reached by wading knee deep through the liquid pool surrounding the
manure heap. The quality of the drinking water can be rather imagined
than described. The treatment was most rough; the only argument a guard
ever used was the butt end of his rifle--if not the bayonet. Not many
words were wasted on the "Schweine - Engländer," (Swine - English.)
One day some high officials came to inspect Illmau, and after they
had seen the above-ground portion, the Englishmen, who were shut up
in their cellar, could hear them asking if no one was shut up in the
cellars, as by rights they ought to inspect the cellars, too. But the
guard officer assured them on his solemn word of honor that the cellars
were empty. And those who were there did not dare to call out--they
knew what their punishment would be--"stringing up" at least. This is
an old punishment, where the wrists are fettered behind the back, a
cord attached and passed through a ring in the wall over the prisoner's
head. This cord is then pulled tight, till the man is forced right on
to his toes. He is then kept so for about an hour, or till he faints.
This was often done at Illmau.
After the Englishmen had been in their wet cellar for a week, and
were nearly all ill with the terrible cold, they were told they could
go into an upstairs room. These rooms were occupied by Serbs and
Poles, nearly all very ill with consumption and very dirty. Each man
received a blanket of a kind of checked pattern. When these blankets
were hung up in the yard to air it was impossible to recognize their
pattern--they were all a crawling mass. The room into which the
Englishmen were put was so full that when they lay down at night they
were almost one on the top of the other. The consumptives were always
expectorating, and "sanitary arrangements" were unknown.
Drosendorf was a camp where, especially during the first months,
prisoners endured the greatest hardships. They slept in sheds, in
stables, sometimes on wet straw, sometimes without, and were treated
as brutally as in other camps. "Here were also some women," says the
correspondent, "and a lady I knew personally. When the latter was
brought there with other prisoners, male and female, after walking for
miles, they were shut into a large room--men and women together. There
the 'sanitary arrangements' consisted of a large pail put down in the
middle of the room. This lady was kept in this room with the men for
some days, and not allowed to leave it." In this camp at present there
are principally Russians, and rarely a day passes that a death does not
occur from starvation. Here, as also in the large camp of Katzenau, the
rations are as follows:
Breakfast.--Tea made of a mixture of dried birch and strawberry
leaves, and sixty grams (about two ounces) of bread.
Midday.--Soup made of turnips, or potatoes boiled and served in
the water they are boiled in, (no salt or fat,) and another sixty
grams of bread.
Evening.--Same as breakfast. At some places the same vessels are
used for washing the floors and for boiling the soup.
Estergom in Hungary was at the beginning a much dreaded place. It is
surrounded on three sides by the Danube and barbed wire on the fourth.
At the beginning there were over 30,000 prisoners--men, women, and
children--there, but not sufficient accommodation, so many spent the
nights out of doors in the rain and endless mud. Some lived in tents.
Of course striking a match in the dark was strictly forbidden, and when
once some one did strike one, the guards rushed in, striking about them
blindly with their fixed bayonets. Once one unfortunate Scotchman was
attacked very badly with dysentery in the middle of the night, and came
out to ask the guard to take him to a doctor. The guard simply ordered
him to go back to the tent and be quiet. When the sick man begged
again, the guard knocked him down with the butt end of his rifle.
One camp, which was even lately mentioned as a disgrace in the Austrian
Parliament, is Thalerhof, near Graz, the capital of Styria. Here they
kept principally their own refugees from Galicia.
The London Telegraph correspondent writes of Thalerhof:
"One Polish lady who had been there for eight months is now in Raabs.
She was taken away from her own house in Galicia in the clothes she
stood in, allowed to take nothing with her. Eventually she reached
Thalerhof. Through her sufferings there the poor woman is so broken
down that it is almost impossible to get her to speak of what she has
been through. A little she told me. When they--she and other ladies,
priests, peasants, men of all classes--were brought to Thalerhof, the
ladies (not the peasant women) were told they must come and bathe.
It was many degrees below freezing point, but they were taken to a
shed, open all round, down the middle of which a long row of troughs
half filled with dirty water was arranged. The water had already been
used by soldiers for washing their clothes. Then they were ordered to
undress.
"The soldiers with fixed bayonets surrounded these ladies, while
they completely undressed in the open, and forced them to bathe in
the troughs, threatening them with fixed bayonets all the time and
torturing them with coarse jokes. The low-class women were left quiet,
not forced to bathe like this. After the bath was over they were shut
up in a room crowded with people full of vermin. The ladies were always
chosen for the dirty work--never the peasant women, just as the priests
were set to clear up the 'sanitary arrangements,' which there consisted
of a long open ditch with a board along one side of it."