My early life

When I grew up in Austria I took a lot of things for granted. Most of it however was negative.

Something positive I can well remember. It was an adult at grade one at our school. He would find me from the crowed of kids and pat me on my body. I will never forget how good that felt. Nobody else made me feel that good. Who he was? He was my speech therapist. Eric, my brother and I were so ignored by our parents (I don't mean in terms of food, shelter and clothing but love and attention), that by the time we started to go to school, we had developed our own language and could not communicate with others effectively enough for our age. They saw us being behind, like retarded but that is not the way I see it.

My father in his fortieth. I was sad, but he tried to hide it. This picture was taken after Helmuth's death.

Most of our teachers were telling us how stupid we were. I can hardly remember being praised. School was very authoritarian. It was all about fear and discipline. The Roman Catholic Church, which taught us their "religious crap", only instilled more fear of punishment and the feelings of guilt, especially in terms of sexuality.

By the time I got into an age of puberty, and started to look at girls, I felt that I was such a bad character for having these desires that my self-esteem plummeted. The feeling of not being a person worthwhile and loving enough was very powerful indeed. I thought that I was a complete unattractive reject and that I had no right to make an attempt to even talk to a girl, and that she would know that and the fear of punishment and having my unworthy and dirty sexual feelings exposed paralysed me. Then they would really know how low I was. I had to protect myself by not showing anyone how I felt inside.

At one stage I summoned up my courage (I was already desperate) and started to chat up girls. I can not describe the overwhelming guilt that would suddenly stop me. I thought the whole world would look down at me. It was terrible.

The girls also made it difficult too. First of all the ratio between girls and boys was completely "out of wack". There seemed to be three times as many boys than girls (I do not know what it is like nowadays, it could have changed). And the girls (around 17 years up) seemed to run after what I then considered older men late 20s early 30s.

Only a few years later, when I was in Australia, I realized how few girls there were in Vienna. One of the greatest nonsense that I have heart was that Australia had a shortage of woman. This is the greatest myth that I have heart in Austria and this is completely untrue. The two sexes seemed to be 50 to 50 percent. But what I realized was that in Sydney the girls were actually looking at me. In Vienna, the best they did was chasing the English teacher, and when he pointed to the boys in the class the girls replied "ova, de san jo schiach", which in English means, "but they are ugly.

Beyond my dreams in Austria. I had no chance, to ever experience that in real life, given my circumstances. Far beyond the reach of finding someone to love or to be loved. It was only reachable in my imagination. This would haunt me for years and I would get help, first from a country that made up for the lack of love I had received, namely the Philippines and then from help in Australia. But that will come later if you keep reading on.

In my 17 to 20 years of my life in Vienna I would always go to a night club and disco. But they were always crowded with boys. It was a depressing scene. Yes, there were woman in Vienna, plenty of them, namely the old ones who had lost their men 30 years earlier for their "bloody fatherland", what ever that is.

But all this did not make me leave Austria. It took something else that did and you can read it in "the army experience page", which is the next page.

I also want to mention that with all these transitions I have very few photographs from my past, if I did have them I would be delighted to put them into this page.

MY EARLY LIFE

UNLOVING AUSTRIAN SOCIETY