It rang a poignant bell in my memory. That same admonition to wash before eating had hung in the little pension at near-by Gründlsee where I had spent a summer fifteen years ago.
Our mess hall was in the guardhouse down the road, the square stone building where the sentry had challenged us the night before. We lined up with our plates and, when they had been heaped with scrambled eggs, helped ourselves to toast, jam and coffee and sat down at a long wooden table in the adjoining room. George was finishing his breakfast as the three of us came in. With him was Lieutenant Shrady, who had recently been commissioned a Monuments officer at Bad Homburg. Subsequently he had been sent down to Alt Aussee by Captain Posey. He was a lean, athletic, good-looking fellow. Although he helped occasionally with the loading, his primary duties at the mine were of an administrative nature—handling the workmen’s payrolls through the local Military Government Detachment, obtaining their food rations, making inspections in the area, filing reports and so on. After he and George had left, Steve told us that Shrady was a portrait painter. Right now he was working on a portrait of his civilian interpreter-secretary who, according to Steve, was something rather special in the way of Viennese beauty. This was a new slant on the work at the mine and I was curious to know more about the glamorous Maria, whom Steve described as being “beaucoup beautiful.” But George was waiting to take us down into the mine. As we walked up the road, Steve explained to us that the miners worked in two shifts—one crew from four in the morning until midday, another from noon until eight in the evening. The purpose of the early morning shift was to maintain an uninterrupted flow of “stuff” from the mine, so that the daytime loading of the trucks would not bog down for lack of cargo.
At the building in which the mine entrance was located we found George with a group of the miners. It was just eight o’clock and the day’s work was starting. We were introduced to two men dressed in white uniforms which gave them an odd, hybrid appearance—a cross between a street cleaner and a musical-comedy hussar. This outfit consisted of a white duck jacket and trousers. The jacket had a wide, capelike collar reaching to the shoulders. Two rows of ornamental black buttons converging at the waistline adorned the front of the jacket, and a similar row ran up the sleeves from cuff to elbow. In place of a belt, the jacket was held in place by a tape drawstring. A black garrison cap completed the costume.
The two men were Karl Sieber, the restorer, and Max Eder, an engineer from Vienna. It was Eder’s job to list the contents of each truck. Perched on a soapbox, he sat all day at the loading entrance, record book and paper before him on a makeshift desk. He wrote down the number of each object as it was carried through the door to the truck outside. The truck list was made in duplicate: the original was sent to Munich with the convoy; the copy was kept at the mine to be incorporated in the permanent records which Lieutenant Shrady was compiling in his office on the floor above.
In the early days of their occupancy, the Nazis had recorded the loot, piece by piece, as it entered the mine. The records were voluminous and filled many ledgers. But, during the closing months of the war, such quantities of loot had poured in that the system had broken down. Instead of a single accession number, an object was sometimes given a number which merely indicated with what shipment it had arrived. Occasionally there would be several numbers on a single piece. Frequently a piece would have no number at all. In spite of this confusion, Eder managed somehow to produce orderly lists. If the information they contained was not always definitive, it was invariably accurate.
George was anxious to get started. “It’s cold down in the mine,” he said. “You’d better put on the warmest things you brought with you.”
“How cold is it?” I asked.
“Forty degrees, Fahrenheit,” he said. “The temperature doesn’t vary appreciably during the year. I believe it rises to forty-seven in the winter. And the humidity is equally constant, about sixty-five per cent. That’s why this particular salt mine was chosen as a repository, as you probably know.”
While we went up to get our jackets and mufflers, George ordered Sieber to hitch up the train. When we returned we noticed that the miners, who resembled a troop of Walt Disney dwarfs, were wearing heavy sweaters and thick woolen jackets for protection against the subterranean cold.
The train’s locomotion was provided by a small gasoline engine with narrow running boards on either side which afforded foothold for the operator. Attached to it were half a dozen miniature flat-cars or “dollies.” The miners called them “Hünde,” that is, dogs. They were about five feet long, and on them were placed heavy wooden boxes approximately two feet wide. The sides were roughly two feet high.