01:54

Ruth Deutschmann

Benjamin Epp

Innsbruck

2008-06-12

Sylvia Manning - Baumgartner

Nicole D´Incecco

1946

During the night both of us started to itch. We checked and saw bed bugs. I had never seen a bed bug before, I didn't even know what they were. As a matter of fact, we put Gitti to sleep in her little bed and pushed our beds together. And Herbert lay close to the wall so that the bed bugs would go to him and not come to me. But they didn't like him. He must have had strange tasting blood. They crawled up the wall and let themselves fall onto Gitti and me. Somebody told us to use carbolic acid. The rooms were constructed of insulation panels and there were battens where the panels met. The bed bugs lived behind there. Every weekend we moved our things out into the hall. It was a long hall, to the left and right of it were the rooms. All the rooms were occupied. We had one small room. We took down the slats and painted everything with carbolic acid. But that didn't really make a difference except that there was a horrible smell. Two years later, DDT was available in Italy. It came from America. My mother sent me some DDT. Herbert bought a so-called Flitspritze, do you know it? It's a bug sprayer. So we sprayed the DDT. After that, there was not a single bed bug anymore.