The deputy head of the police station in Kukmirn, Austria, was born in the U.S.A. and to this day has both the Austrian and the American citizenship. Nobody would ever call him by the local version of his name, Franz - he is Frank to everybody.
The first Heidenwolfs to emigrate to the U.S.A. were siblings of the grandfather of Frank Heidenwolf (born 1897). They left home around the turn of the century, and Grandpa Heidenwolf followed after the first world war. Like thousands of other Burgenländers he worked in the cement mills of Lehigh Valley. There he married Katharina, who had come to Pennsylvania from Kroatisch Schützen in the Hungarian part of the lower Pinka valley. They had three children: Frank (1923, Frank Heidenwolf's father), Mary (1925) and Alois (1927).
In 1926 Grandpa Heidenwolf and his family resettled in Burgenland. He himself went back to the U.S.A. after a few months, to earn more money. He did not return for good until 1935, and eventually died in 1963. 
Mary, tragically, became a victim of world war two. In 1944 she was badly wounded by a splinter from a bomb that dropped on Moschendorf. She died in 1950, never having recovered from this wound, despite the penicillin, which was still very expensive at the time, that her American relatives sent from overseas.
Alois moved to Vienna as a young man and lived there until he passed away in 1997.
Frank, born in the U.S.A. in 1923 but living in Burgenland from 1926 on, jumped at the last chance to return to the U.S.A. before the war broke out in 1939. Actually, he followed a girl from the neighborhood, also called Katharina, who had made the journey a year before him and who had since earned enough money to send him the fare for the trip. Frank and Katharina got married in 1947, and they, too, had three children: Linda (1948), Frank jr. (1951), and Edward (1954). They were doing fine, and especially for the children the U.S.A. was home. But they were not meant to stay.
In the mid-fifties Grandpa Heidenwolf sent a desperate letter. Alone after the death of his wife, he was struggling to keep up his farm. He asked his son Frank to come home to Burgenland and take over the farm. He argued that it would be very difficult to start from scratch at a later point once the cattle was sold.
At the Traupmann's, the neighboring house from which Frank's wife Katherina was descended, eight people had meanwhile died within a few years, leaving the house deserted. Two of Katharina's brothers had been killed in the war, her sister Maria had moved to New York in 1931. Katharina herself and her husband Frank, a baker/confectioner by trade, also lived in New York when Grandpa Heidenwolf's letter reached them.
Frank was a torn man. Upon his return to New York in 1939 he had not spoken any English, which he struggled to learn in evening classes. Then he was conscripted and served in Egypt, India and Australia during the second world war. He felt like an American by all accounts. Going back to the Burgenland again was hard for him. But return to Moschendorf he did, in 1956, together with the children Frank jr., Edward and Linda.
Linda did not stay long. She returned to New York in 1966, accompanied by her father. But her father only stayed for the winter, working in his old job as a baker to earn money, only to go back to Burgenland in the spring. 
Edward stayed in Burgenland. He became a mechanic in Güssing.
Franky, finally, born in the U.S.A. in 1951 and living in Burgenland since 1956, went to school in Burgenland and subsequently worked his parents' farm for 10 years. Then he gave up farming, because of the structural changes in agriculture, and joined the police in Vienna. In 1980 he got transferred to the local police in Burgenland. In 1972 he married Anna Groß.
Since last year Frank Heidenwolf has been a grandfather himself: his daughter Sandra (1973), married to Georg Löwer for a year, gave birth to daughter Anna Therese. 
(The picture in the right-hand bottom shows Frank Heidenwolf in the centre, with his mother, his wife and his daughter Nicole to the right, and his brother Edmund plus Edmund's wife to the left.) 

written by Walter Dujmovits

translation by Ingeborg Schuch