The Last of the German Village of Gross Jetscha

by Anton Zollner
With permission, translation was done by Diana Lambing, published at DVHH.org 10 Mar 2004 by Jody McKim Pharr.

Gross Jetscha (today: Iecea Mare; Hungarian: Nagyjecsa) lies about 33 km [20 miles] north-west of Temeschburg on the Banat Heath. The village, once the local authority seat , is not connected to the rail network; the nearest railway station is 9 km [5 miles] away in Gertianosch (today: Carpinis). These two villages are connected by a section of the Gertianosch - Klein Jetscha - Billed road which was metalled [paved] in 1977 and by the local Klein Jetscha - Gross Jetscha road. The village name comes from the former Praedium Jecsa which was nearby.

Gross Jetscha was a new settlement founded in 1767 on the advice of administrator Wilhelm Edler von Hildebrand and colonized by German settlers. In the beginning, the settlement consisted of around 200 houses which were built on pastureland which had already been drained in 1754. The parish was established and the church registers introduced at the same time as the foundation of the new colony in 1767. The Catholic church, the building of which had begun in 1770, was officially opened in 1780.

In 1772, this Swabian village apparently had 861 inhabitants who were distributed amongst 152 families. According to Gheorghe Drinovan, Gross Jetscha had its greatest number of inhabitants in 1890 (3,431 people). However, he is contradicted by Norbert Neidenbach who maintains that the highest number of inhabitants was in 1869 with around 4,700 people. At that time, Gross Jetscha was part of Torontal County and belonged to the Tschene District. In 1910, the 2,360 German inhabitants made up over 93% of the population, but in November 1940 there were also 2,232 German nationals registered here.

After the Second World War the number of Germans dropped constantly and between 1977 and 1992 as drastically as from 1,162 to only 96 people. In 1977 there were already 1,610 Romanians, 187 gypsies, 23 Hungarians and 2 Serbs living amongst the 1,162 Germans in the former pure German Swabian village. Thus, the population percentage of Germans had dropped to 38.9%. After the events of December 1989 a full-blown mass exodus took place. Whilst in March 1990 there were still 104 subscribers to the ‘Neue Banater Zeitung’ (NBZ), which implies that there were still several hundred Germans living here, according to an announcement in the NBZ in October 1991, there were only 110 Germans left in Gross Jetscha. In the January 1992 census 96 people declared themselves as Germans. As well as the number of Germans dropping, so did the total number of inhabitants of the village drop to 2,297 people. In 1992, as well as the 96 declared Germans in the village there were also 1,907 Romanians, 243 gypsies (the largest national minority group), and 51 others. But the number of Germans did not stabilize then either; by April 1983 their numbers had dropped even further to 80 people and, according to the Gross Jetscha village association (HOG) there were only 58 people of German nationality living in the village by February 1996. According to the home page of the Gross Jetscha HOG internet website, set up by Norbert Neidenbach, in May 1997 the number of Germans remaining in the home village was 42. Out of these there were two families of three, ten families of two, and 26 living on their own or in mixed marriages.

The October 30th 1991 edition of the NBZ carried a report partly on the Germans remaining in the old home village by the journalist Grete Lambert. One of the people not yet ready to abandon their home was school teacher Katharina Mettler, a long serving headmistress. Neither could the oldest inhabitant of the village at the time, 88-year old Michael Betsch, imagine living anywhere else other than in Gross Jetscha. After living in Germany for a year with his daughter, he returned to his old home because he ‘couldn’t leave his other daughter to run the two households on her own’. The 62-year old daughter, Anna Gimpel, had lost her husband during the Baragan deportation. Both had now received 10 hectares of arable land, according to the Land Law, but they couldn’t manage to work the land any longer and so they leased the land to an agricultural organization. At the time, father and daughter just worked their gardens and cousin Michl mainly looked after his vines. These days, he is no longer on the list of Germans still living in G. J.

In the same report there is also a piece on the Koch family of three. Hans Koch, who was 73 at the time, together with his wife Katharina, worked single handedly on the 10 hectare piece of land which they also had received according to the Land Law. The necessary tools comprising a field plough and share, a hoe plough with five shares, a harrow and a cart, had up until then been lying unused in the shed. The horse, which he had bought for 50,000 lei from the LPG [‘collective’] served as traction power. Their 36-year old son, Josef, whose main job was cabinet maker for the Temeschburg Craft Association ‘Mobilia Banatului’, also helped to work their land. The three Kochs still live in their native village.

In the same report, today’s post-communist community was barely recognizable. One day, a foreign ‘businessman’, Filip Patan, Romanian by birth, came to the village and bought all the village livestock in order to set up a livestock association. But before the members of the association could begin to think about profit, the ‘businessman’ was arrested for fraud as he had no money to pay for the purchases. This was the last report pertaining to the remaining Germans in Gross Jetscha in the Temeschburg newspapers.

The Romanian newspapers ‘Timisoara’ and ‘Realitatea banateana’ (Banat reality) have continued to report on daily life in Gross Jetscha since the beginning of 1995, when already in January the Alliance of the Free Temesch Trade Unions organized a protest in the local arts centre against the injustices in the village. The people were not satisfied with the way the distribution of the land had been carried out, nor with the social life in the village. In particular, the matters of health, social security and public transport. The villagers were also unhappy with the mayor of the day, Stelian Milota, who had never visited their village. For these reasons they also demanded that the local authority seat be reinstalled in Gross Jetscha.

In January 1996, the Gross Jetscha villagers at last had a reason to celebrate. The local arts centre, which had become totally dilapidated after 1989, since anything that was not nailed down had been dismantled and taken away, was redeveloped and renovated by the work of several enthusiasts. The catering and the transport of the committed craft workers from out of town was taken on voluntarily by the village inhabitants.

Another cause for celebration in both Gross and Klein Jetscha was the winning of the Democratic Convention candidate for mayor, Corneliu Manea, with 1,406 votes. He managed to acquire a bus which from February 1997 onwards, independently and without profit, drove passengers three times daily to and from Gertianosch railway station. However, all further news coming from Gross Jetscha is less pleasant. In December 1996, when the local children were supposed to be inoculated against measles, half of them couldn’t be treated as they had colds. There was nothing that could be done about the colds because the doctor had no medication at his disposal. So all he could do was to advise them to drink hot tea!

Three months later, the newspapers reported a highly infectious horse disease. It was the incurable 'equine infectious anaemia’. Formerly, such infected horses would have been shot. This could no longer be done, though, because the State simply didn’t have the money to compensate the owners for the horses. To stop the spread of the illness, all horses underwent a blood test. The animals which were found to be anaemic had to be isolated as far as possible in their own stall by their owners. How they dealt with ending the lives of their sick horses was their own problem.

Journalists who visit Gross Jetscha these days are also witness to the breakdown of village social life. The constant fights between people who have moved here from all areas of the country, and which often end in injuries to the body, are unfortunately part of everyday life. One example is the elderly villager, Petru Bitu who arrived at Temeschburg hospital with numerous cuts to his face, head and body. Those accompanying him said he had been bitten by a dog, but as it later turned out, the old man had been ‘done over’ by his neighbour with a rake. He was settling an 18-year old score.

On New Year’s Eve 1995/96, three young Romanians from the village were out on the street, wishing a Happy New Year to their friends and relatives in the traditional manner with a ‘Plugusor’ [?]. Suddenly, they were set upon by ten or twelve men and beaten up mercilessly. They were taken, almost unconscious, to a Temeschburg hospital where they were all found to have several broken bones in their faces.

The mayor, Corneliu Manea, a trained jurist, wanted to bring back law and order to his patch so he brought in fines of between 20,000 and 100,000 lei as punishment for minor offences. He soon realized, though, that after 50 years of communism, peoples’ mentality had changed dramatically, i.e. to ‘irresponsible collectivism’. Traditional values such as hard work, honesty and cleanliness no longer exist in the Banat villages.

And so there are plenty of fights over the houses in Gross Jetscha which have been left behind by the Germans. For six years they have wrestled hard over house number 198. The previous mayor had rented the dispossessed house to two applicants at the same time. Since then, there has been one court case after another for the possession of the former Banat Swabian house, whereby one court contradicts the other and the jurisdiction always lies between the two.

The fights over house number 281 also went to court. This house, however, had not been dispossessed, but the owner, Wendel Jochum, sold it ‘legally’ in 1958 to his fellow countryman, Ladislaus Szijarto, whose wife was German. What happened was that this family took in and looked after cousin Wendel up until his death. For that, Szijarto received half the house and after he had paid out inheritance to Wendel’s daughter, the Szijartos were the owners of the whole house. Soon after, the wife also died and Szijarto himself needed to be cared for. As his son Walter had decided to go to Germany, the father took in Romanian strangers and gave them the house in exchange for his nursing and keep, but without signing an appropriate contract. Because of this, Szijarto was soon unable to tolerate the surroundings imposed upon him by the Romanian family; at the same time, the ‘intruders’ were not prepared to move out of the house. As the helpless man was incapable of taking his case to court, by March 1997 he had almost decided to take his own life. Another Romanian family finally, out of pity, took him in and looked after him.

This is just one more example of what our elderly compatriots, who have stayed on in the old country, can expect once they are unable to fend for themselves.

Anton Zollner, August 1998
Translated by Diana Lambing

Gross Jetscha