Mother's Sad Search

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 79, 30 September 1933, Page 19

Mother's Sad Search

For six weeks a mother battled with melting ice and snow at the foot of a glacier near Innsbruck, in the Austrian Tyrol, for the body of her son, Karl Hoiserer, a . medical student from Munich, who was buried under an avalanche last February, says the "Daily Mail." There were two more avalanches in the same week, aud the first.had been nearly a mile long and 250 yards wide. When the snows began to me.lt, early in June, Frau Hoiserer engaged an Innsbruck guide and eight unemployed labourers, who dug a great hole in the ice and snow and erected a wooden grille to prevent the body being carried . away where the snow turned to water. '' Frau Hoiserer told them that when they found the body she alone must take it out.. She herself supervised the digging for ten hours every day, and when at last her son's foot-was exposed,'she sent the men away .while she uncovered the body and carried it to a stretcher. In.February, police and volunteers searched in vain for the body until they were forced by avalanches to desist. ■ During the six weeks of the mother's search, the level of tho snow, fell 10 feet. In a few more days there was no snow at all at that point, and flowers were blossoming. The body was taken to Munich for burial, but Frau Hoiserer is having a small stone monument erected to mark the spot where the body was found. ..