This is Gsella (Gizi) Czitrom (23) from Sieghartskirchen, Austria, a village about 35 km West of Vienna as I met her on the Nr. 2 tram, getting off at Weihburggasse. We went for coffee at the Leibsteinsky on Schubertring and she told me her story (both shocking and stupefying as it was). Her grandfather, Karl Linzer, was found on the church steps by the cleaning lady who came to unlock on January 28th 1961, just before six AM. He was naked, severely hypothermic with no knowledge of who he was and how he got there. Dr Kerbl examined him, he was perfectly healthy, no signs of external trauma but under total amnesia. All attempts to joggle his memory failed. Father Czonka decided to call the stranger Karl (St. Karl was on January 28th in the Catholic calendar) last-name Linzer (the address of the church is Linzerstrasse 2). Karl was fluent in German, Catalan, Celtic, Bulgarian and Italian, he was a hard worker with talents to fix anything mechanical, would never eat meat and had a beautiful tenor voice. After Karl lived about six months in the church basement, he started dating Margit Czitrom, the young woman who found him, a refugee from Hungary's 1956 anti-communist revolt. They got married later the same year and took the family name of Czitrom living in the little cottage belonging to the church for a while until they obtained a small house with a garden from the community. That is where their son Alexander was born, he was to become Gizi's father. A couple of months before I met Gizi, in the morning of January 28th, Karl went to sit on the church steps where he was found all those years back; it was a yearly exercise originally recommended by Dr Kerbl, long since retired. Suddenly, his face lost all expression, his eyes glazed over and he said "rózsabimbó". He never uttered another word since that time; he just sits, he just stares, he just eats, he just sleeps.
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