One day in 1945, the Americans started bombing Regensburg, Germany. The train station was the main target, but WWII didn't see much precision bombing. Instead, aggressors would simply try to saturate an area, hoping to hit a target.Josef Roggenbauer (right) was a 16-year-old Austrian soldier in the German army. Austria had been annexed by Germany in 1938. Desperate for more manpower, Germany drafted in the final years of the war both middle teens as well as old men in both Germany and Austria.
Josef Roggenbauer had no way of knowing that he'd later earn a doctorate in economics and then become a German professor at the University of Maine, and one day, my German professor. On that day, he only knew that the bombs were starting to fall and that he had no interest in sticking around at the train station where he’d been detailed to unload wagons.
He had extended family in Kumpfmühl, a district of Regensburg south of the train station. He stopped loading wagons and started to run. He knew that his family would have headed to a bomb shelter beneath the basement of their apartment house in Kumpfmühl. The whole neighborhood headed to Happelhaus, a book publisher, because a bomb shelter had been built underneath the building to accommodate the neighborhood.
Another Joseph (different spelling!), Joseph Kraus, was the Hausmeister or handy man of Happelhaus. It was his job to make sure that the bomb shelter was ready for use. He’d served in the German army himself but had been discharged in 1942 for medical reasons. When the alarm sounded, he whisked his wife and nine-year-old daughter into the shelter to assure them a spot because he knew that the shelter would fill up quickly.
When Josef Roggenbauer finally arrived, the shelter was indeed packed. The nine-year-old girl was wary of him. In the last bombing raid, a visibly injured German soldier had told her as he closed his eyes not to worry, that he just needed to sleep. He never woke up.
This time, though, there was nothing wrong with this soldier other than being full of fright and wondering probably why a 16-year-old had to worry about fighting wars. The girl kept her distance nonetheless.
The war ended a month later. The day was recalled from time to time by the girl as she became a teenager and then a woman, later a mother. The young soldier too later said that he often remembered the day as perhaps the most harrowing of his life.
Over 40 years later, a German professor and a mother sat at the same table, by birth an Austrian and German respectively, but since the early 1960s both American citizens. Their conversation led to family and their former lives as Europeans. As soon as Regensburg was mentioned, the pieces started to fall into place. They knew the streets, the same people, and the Happelhaus whose Hausmeister whisked his daughter off to the shelter that day.
My mother (left) had no way of knowing, of course, that that young soldier she was wary of would someday figure so heavily in her son’s life, turning him on to the native language of his mother and grandparents, leading him on a year-long adventure to Salzburg in 1990 that would turn into four years and forever change his life.
Josef Roggenbauer retired in 1991 six months after we returned from Salzburg. Today, he and his lovely wife Lore (standing) live in Salzburg on Sinnhubstraße overlooking the Untersberg. He just turned 80 last week. In 2003 as well as 2006, the Pennington students I brought to Salzburg had a chance to meet him. Next Thursday, he’ll be one of 26 of us who’ll celebrate Thanksgiving, and I’m looking forward to introducing him to yet another set of students.
