From
the book by Walther Konschitzky: Dem Alter die Ehr;
Kriterion Verlag Bukarest 1982
[interview conducted
in 1970]
It’s good
of Schmidt Niklos to bring you here; nobody else
would have known a Simone Dominik. Even old
people have told strangers asking for me: No,
there is no Simone Dominik in Alexanderhausen
and there never was one. But a Miller Dominik,
yes. Well, that’s how the whole world knows me!
I brought that nickname from Oschtre [Ostern –
NT]. You don’t have a nickname? No? Well, in
Oschtre you just have to cross the street and
your official name is gone, and you’re
rebaptized, for the whole world! So we remained
the Millers.
Our Miller family
story begins with my grandfather: He jumped out
of the priestly frock [quit priesthood – NT]
because of my grandmother, had fifteen children
with her, and learned how to build horse mills.
That was in Selesch, near Kikinda in Serbia. And
all his sons had to become millers, and all his
daughters had to marry millers. And I was born at
the village mill of Selesch in the year 1879. It
was there that I learned to be a miller. And when
I was nine years old, my father died, my mother
married the horse-miller from Oschtre, and I
continued learning at the horse mill in Oschtre.
Later I took over the horse mill in Wiseschdia.
That’s also when I got married. That was in
1902, and in 1904 on New Years day we moved to
Alexanderhausen, to the horse mill towards Uihel;
the other horse mill, towards Warjasch, was just
being dismantled. One mill in the village,
imagine that, all hell broke loose.
We lived at the
mill, and we started at 3:30 in the morning and
did not stop until 11:00 in the evening. I had
learned from my father what the miller’s life
was; and not once did I fall asleep around
midnight on the sacks. At 4:00 in the mornings
the farmers came with their wheat and corn,
there was no time to catch your breath from New
Year to Silvester [the day before New Year -
NT]. When people went to midnight mass, I was
still delivering the ground corn to feed the
animals over the holidays.
Six horses were
hitched in pairs and trotted round and round
until blind and nauseated. The farmers who
provided their own horses paid me with only 2 kg
of corn or 6 kg of wheat for every 100 kg
milled. The others paid more. The poor people
joined their horses together, and for those who
had no horses, I used my own. These were mostly
blind horses – they were cheaper – and to just
trot around in a circle day and night, they
didn’t need to see anything. To be a miller’s
horse was not much fun in those days, they had
no time to get hyper like the six of farmer
Vogel that were so high strung that they once
destroyed my whole mill. It was luck that we
detached the millstones at the last moment, or
they would have destroyed even the straw roof of
the mill. It took us eight days to repair it.
It got a little
better when we shelled clover seeds. They came
out as clean as an eye. Then one could enjoy a
good mulberry schnapps. But to be a miller does
not only involve milling; we also had to grind
the stones, once or even twice. With a special
tool called Pille and a hammer that looked like
a schnitzel beater, we ground the stones. Each
hit had to be precisely like the other, and we
hammered like this into the night, it could be
heard across half of the village.
During World War
One, when I was in Galicia, the mill was
dismantled, and to this day no decent mill was
built in Alexanderhausen. No roller mill can
produce flour as good as the one we made. I did
not want to join the steam mill, so I bought
myself a house and became a “for-half” farmer
[working somebody else’s land for half of the
crops produced – NT]. My wife already died
before the war [WW2 – NT], but I never
remarried, and I lived just for my children.
During WW2 the house we had bought for ourselves
burned down when Alexanderhausen was a
battlefield for two weeks, and we were poor once
again and had to start once more from nothing,
like many others.
Now I am 91 years
old. Our family is getting more and more
‘international’: I am from Selesch, my wife was
from Wiseschdia, my son Jakob was born in
Alexanderhausen, his wife is from
Kleinbetschkerek, and my grandson Werner got
married last week to a girl from Guttebrunn
[Guttenbrunn – NT]. I am now hoping that, with
the new couple, even though our horse mill
history is long gone, our nickname “Miller”,
still carried by by all of us Simones, will not
die out that soon.
Translated from the Alexanderhausen dialect into
English by N. Tullius.
