The South and South West Batschka
“…people were treated as if they were
even worse than animals.”
Neusatz
Neusatz
was the capital of the Wojwodina
(Vojvodina). In
October 1944 the Partisans arrested
many of the Danube Swabians and forced
them from their homes. For some time
they were held at the navy barracks on
the Danube and at night groups of them
were led away and shot in the vicinity
of the “Battle Bridge” over the Danube.
The well known engineer Wilhelm Weiss
and the lawyer Leopold Veith died in
this way. The rest of the Danube
Swabian population was taken to a nearby
concentration camp. Partisans and
functionaries took possession of the
homes and property of the expelled
Swabians. Many died in the
concentration camp and among the first
victims was Peter Weinert, a Roman
Catholic priest from Palanka.
The
concentration camp was located in the
swamps along the Danube. Although there
were always two thousand Danube Swabians
in the camp, there were only two
barracks. One was for women and
children and the other for the men. The
conditions were unsanitary. When the
Danube River rose the areas around the
barracks were under water. It was
especially bad for the women. More than
seven hundred of them were located in
one room that was meant to accommodate
one hundred. They slept on boards in
two tiers above one another. They could
not wash and were pressed together and
could not stretch out. For many of
them, this would last for three years.
There were no windows. It was always
dark and damp in the barrack. This
became a breeding ground for
tuberculosis. Pest and insects were
everywhere and the lice viciously
attacked the people. Many of the
children bore open wounds caused by them
and their own scratching.
The
barracks were surrounded by barbed wire
fences. Heavily armed Partisans were on
guard and threatened anyone with death
if they got within two meters of the
fence. There were only two brick
buildings in the camp. One was a pig
sty for the swine of the Minister of the
Interior for the Wojwodina and the other
was a “bunker” for camp inmates who were
being punished. Up to twenty persons,
men, women and children were locked up
in this room that was three by one
meters, with no windows or ventilation.
The swine had the freedom of the camp
and messed up and rooted up everything.
The
camp in Neusatz operated like a central
camp. Even though it consisted of only
two barracks, a pig sty and bunker about
half of the Danube Swabians living in
the area passed through it. When the
vast majority in another camp died, it
was closed down and the survivors were
sent to Neusatz. At one time, over one
hundred Lower Steiermark Germans were
sent here as well as many Austrian
citizens who had fallen into the hands
of the Partisans. Many others were
brought here for punishment. One of the
basic tenants' of the liquidation
operation was the separation of families
and ordered that no contact be possible
between family members. When mothers
were apprehended who had been forced to
abandon their children, or older
children who tried to reach a parent
were caught, they were sent to Neusatz
for punishment in the bunker, and were
then forced to remain in the Neusatz
camp.
All of
those who had been deemed “dangerous” by
the authorities were consigned to
Neusatz. All the intellectuals who
survived the mass shootings and
executions were ordered to Neusatz from
the camps where they had been
imprisoned. The majority of the German
Roman Catholic priests had been
liquidated. The surviving priests were
scattered in various camps. There were
fourteen Roman Catholic priests and one
Lutheran pastor kept in custody. All
them were dragged off from their
communities and brought to Neusatz.
There was also a veterinarian and
several university professors who were
also brought here to the camp.
When
the concentration camp at Betscherek was
shut down on May 22, 1947 and its
inmates were to go to St. Georgen, the
authorities found an excuse a few days
before to lock up five Danube Swabian
teenage girls and three married women.
They were brought to the main office
during the night and were forced to
strip naked in the presence of the camp
functionaries and the police
department. They butted out their
cigarettes on their breasts, tore off
their pubic hair and made fun of them.
They forced the menstrual pad of one
girl into her mouth. Following this
night of mistreatment all eight of them
were returned to the camp, but four of
them managed to escape during the
transfer of the camp inmates and somehow
made it to Austria. Their fear of going
through a nightmare like that again, was
stronger than their fear of death. The
other four women were brought to
Neusatz. Here they were imprisoned in
the bunker to make sure they would not
escape like the others.
The
inmates who were capable of working were
sent from the camp to do forced labor.
As a result almost nine hundred of the
inmates were sent to the forced labor
camp at Mitrowitz in Syrmien, where they
had to work on railway construction for
a long period. The women in the
Mitrowitz camp had their hair shorn, the
sick were marched out into the night,
were shot and their bodies thrown into
the Sava River. Only three hundred of
them survived their stay in Mitrowitz
and were returned to Neusatz.
At dawn
all of the camp inmates had to leave the
barracks and men and women were
separated for roll call that could last
for hours. After that, the slave
“dealers” arrived and chose the men and
women they wanted to “rent” for the day
or a longer period. Eighty Dinars a day
was the price and many of the young
women and teenage girls were used for
sexual purposes. Any who refused to
co-operate were beaten and imprisoned in
the bunker without food or water. Often
the young women were sent to keep house
for the Communist Party officials and
local authorities. They too, could be
used “for any purpose”. This became one
of he major reasons that young women
took terrible risks in attempts to
escape from the camps.
The
food in the camp was terrible and never
enough. It consisted basically of clear
hot water passing as soup and a small
piece of bread. When there was bread.
(Translator’s note.
The author
spends a great deal of time dealing with
this issue and lengths to which people
went to get food.)
At the
beginning of 1947 at the order of the
Minister of the Interior of the
Wojwodina all of the aged and all those
unable to work were sent to the camp at
Gakowa, close to the Hungarian border.
For one thousand Dinars per person
escape was possible by joining what was
called “white transports” across the
border to Hungary led by local guides
who were actually in the pay of the camp
authorities who received their “cut” and
became rich in the process. There were
nights when over four hundred Danube
Swabian inmates made it across the
frontier in this manner and then had to
make their way through Hungary to
sanctuary in Austria.
Meanwhile the brutality continued at the
camp in Neusatz, especially in terms of
the young women and teenage girls and it
was simply looked upon as the order of
the day. All of this took place with
the full knowledge of the highest
government officials and was
encouraged.
One of
the men from the camp somehow managed to
escape and out of anger the camp
commander threatened collective
punishment for the remaining inmates.
It was in the month of January in 1947
and it was a frigid winter day. An ice
and snowstorm raged outside and the
commander ordered the guards to drive
the inmates out of their barracks and
out into the storm and made them stand
in one place on pain of beating if they
moved. In the beginning of February in
1948 the inmates we all denied water for
one full day. These tortures were not
only visited upon the men in the camp at
that time, but the also the three
hundred surviving women and one hundred
children, as well as fifty-seven
Austrians and Reich German citizens who
had been brought to the camp.
Because
of the ongoing brutality and
mistreatment, Dr. Wilhlem Neuner one of
the inmates in the camp sent a petition
to the Yugoslavian Prime Minister in
Belgrade. As a result a representative
of the Ministry of the Interior in
Belgrade came and carried out an
investigation. In the presence of the
representative Dr. Neuner complained
that in spite of the end of the war,
Danube Swabians were still being
gruesomely dealt with and for no reason
at all were still being shot or
executed. The representative did not
attempt to dispute Dr. Neuner’s
contention that over twenty thousand
Danube Swabian civilians had been
liquidated in Yugoslavia in the camps
set up for that purpose. The doctor was
informed he was in no position to place
himself as the judge and jury over the
policies of the Yugoslavian State and if
he persisted in such charges the
situation of himself and the other
Danube Swabians would only become more
gruesome and the government of
Yugoslavia would not allow international
opinion or action to keep them from
their policies. On the next day,
February 16, 1948 Dr. Neuner was thrown
into the bunker but only after they had
first tossed in the corpse of a pig that
had died a few days before already in a
state of decomposition.
After
1948 and the gradual closing down of the
camps, the inmates at Neusatz could
volunteer to work in the coal mines in
Serbia or work on the newly created
collective farms. Those who were
unwilling to volunteer as ordered spent
time in the bunker, until they were
ready to go. In this way the camps were
emptied and eventually closed. In the
spring of 1948 with most of the men
gone, it was time to close the Neusatz
camp.
There
were still four hundred inmates in the
camp as they began to tear down the
barracks over their heads and sell off
the lumber, meanwhile resettling the
prisoners to the nearby prisoner of war
camp. There they joined the families of
intellectuals and other professionals
from the Lower Steiermark, some one
hundred persons mostly women and
children. The fourteen Roman Catholic
priests and the one Lutheran pastor were
also there. On March 29, 1948 all of
these others were taken to the train
station in Neusatz and loaded in two
cattle cars and then securely locked
before setting off without any water or
nutrition until they arrived in
Spielfeld in Austria. Those who
remained behind were taken to the camp
in Karlsdorf in the Banat shortly
afterwards.
Futok
Futok was a mixed language community,
and from the very first days the
Partisans mistreated and beat the Danube
Swabian population at will, especially
the women. There were individuals who
were singled out for torture and
execution. On December 4th
all of the Danube Swabians were driven
out of their homes and force marched to
Jarek. They numbered about eight
hundred persons. All of the able bodied
were kept back in Futok in a labor camp
set up in the local hemp factory and
were taken to various places from there
to work. Other slave laborers were
brought from other areas in the vicinity
later. The slave labor camp in Futok
was closed down in January of 1947, and
the survivors were sent to the camp in
Gakowa.
Batschki Jarek
"The First Hunger Mill”
The
Lutheran Danube Swabian village of Jarek
was almost totally evacuated by the
retreating German army in September of
1944. On December 4th, the
residents of Futok (Eugenwall) were the first
arrivals in the camp and included women,
children and the aged. In a very short
period of time Danube Swabians from all
areas of southern Batschka were interned
here in Jarek. They came from:
Palanka, Katsch, Temerin, Tschnrug
(Tschapring), Gajdobra, Bukin, Novoselo, Schowe,
Torschau, Plavna, Wekerledorf, Obrowatz,
Batsch, and others including some of the
evacuees who returned to Yugoslavia
after the war to return “home” at Tito’s
invitation.
Many of
the people driven on foot to Jarek,
never arrived there. Men, women and
children who could not keep up with the
marching columns were beaten and often
killed. Groups that could not go on
were told to wait for wagons to pick
them up and after the others had moved
on they were shot. Many of these
victims were children. Many of them
died in the vicinity of Gloschan
(Gloschein) and
experienced the brutality and sadism of
the Partisans. The cruel treatment and
lack of food at Jarek led to the deaths
of thousands. In the first eight days
after the camp was opened there was no
food at all. Corn bread and watery soup
was the staple fare of the camp
afterwards. The most terrible time for
the inmates and countless children was
the fall of 1945 and the spring of 1946
when there was no wood for heat or
cooking, no salt was available. Soon
large numbers of deaths began to occur.
The greatest losses were from among the
Danube Swabians from Bulkes another one
of the Lutheran villages. When they
first arrived they numbered nine hundred
and two persons, and after a few months
seven hundred and eighty-eight had
perished.
In the
summer the sick and those unable to work
any longer who were inmates in the
forced labor camps in the south
Batschka, Syrmien and Slavonia, both men
and women were brought to Jarek where
most of them died in a very short period
of time. Twelve men were occupied day
and night burying the dead. Every day
there were ten to twenty children among
the dead. They went from house to house
with a wagon collecting the dead who had
perished overnight. The bodies were
placed in mass graves. At first they
erected primitive crosses and names were
written on them. One day all of the
crosses were collected and burned and it
was forbidden to erect a cross in the
future. Those who left the camp in
search of food were shot if
apprehended. One woman sought to visit
a friend’s grave and begged the Partisan
guarding the cemetery to do so. He shot
her as she prayed at the graveside.
In the
spring of 1945 there were almost
seventeen thousand persons in the Jarek
camp. In spite of the large number of
deaths over the summer months of 1945,
by August 16th there were
eighteen thousand inmates. And although
vast numbers of Danube Swabians were
brought to Jarek after that by the time
the camp was shut down in the spring of
1946, the remaining eight thousand were
loaded into cattle cars during Holy Week
and sent Gakowa and Kruschevlje. In
all, almost fifteen thousands people
died in Jarek. In one year alone, six
thousand four hundred perished. Among
the dead were three thousand seven
hundred children under the age of eight
years. Included among the dead were
Pastor Franz Klein who served the
Lutheran congregation in Katsch,
Professor Dr. Jakob Mueller of Neusatz,
the physician Dr. Michael Koepfer from
Obrowatz, and leaders of the Swabian
Cultural Union, Karl Mahler of Bulkes
and Josef Bolz of Neu-Schowe
(Schowe).
The
transport to Gakowa and Kruschevlje
traveled for two days during which time
the cattle cars remained locked and no
one received any food or water and no
one was able to escape.
Bulkes
Bulkes
was an entirely Lutheran Danube Swabian
community with a population of three
thousand. When the Red Army arrived in
October 1944, only sixty-five families
had been evacuated by the retreating
German and Hungarian troops. The first
persons to be liquidated by the
Partisans were the local intellectuals
and leaders of the community. They were
arrested in their homes and taken to
Palanka and were murdered there by the
Partisans. On November 17th
1944 all of the men from the ages of 16
to 60 years were taken from their homes
by the Partisans and force marched to
Batschka Palanka. There were one
hundred and fifty-six in total.
Approximately two hundred men from Bukin,
and just as many from the entirely
Danube Swabian village of Gajdobra were
brought with them. They were imprisoned
in the local high school and on the 18th
of November they were force marched to
the forced labor camp in Neustaz. The
Partisans who accompanied them, killed
all of those who could not keep up. Six
men from Bulkes were such victims,
fourteen from Bukin and five from
Gajdobra.
From
the Neusatz camp these men were later
sent to Mitrowitz in Syrmien and worked
on railway construction. The work there
was difficult and hard. Of the
thirty-six craftsmen from Bulkes only
three would survive. A large number of
other men from Bulkes, Gajdobra and
Bukin were sent as slave labouers to the
coal mines in Vrdnik, where almost all
of them perished.
On
December 4, 1944 the remaining men in
Bulkes, there were only eighty-six, were
driven on foot to the slave labor camp
at Palanka. The older men from Bukin
and Gajdobra joined them there, and most
of these older men died.
The
young women and teenage girls of Bulkes
were deported to the Soviet Union in
three groups. On December 18th
there were one hundred and fifty. An
additional eighty were taken on
Christmas day, December 25th
and finally one hundred and twenty began
the way of sorrows on December 28th.
Not one of them would return to their
home community.
On
April 15, 1945 all of the remaining
Danube Swabian population in Bulkes were
driven out of their homes. The
community now consisted of old women,
children and a few of the older men
completely unfit for work. For two days
and nights they were forced to camp out
in the meadows. Then they were marched
to the camp in Jarek. Their pastor,
Karl Eichler was among them and he was
constantly abused and mistreated, but he
was one of the one hundred and fourteen
survivors after a few months in Jarek of
the nine hundred inhabitants of Bulkes
who had arrived in the camp.
Palanka
In
southern Batschka the Partisans quickly
took over the administration and
governance of the area after the entry
and occupation by the Russian troops,
and established a central forced labor
camp in Neusatz and Palanka and
established similar camps in those areas
where there were concentrations of
Danube Swabian populations. Both men
and women were taken and put to work
that winter doing some of the hardest
and heaviest work. For only a portion
of the Danube Swabian population had
been evacuated. The percentages differ
from district to district. In Bulkes
only a small portion of the population
fled, while in Jarek only a few families
remained behind, in Towarisch only one
family stayed. With the initiation of
the Military Government by the Partisans
in October the mass executions and
deportations of the Danube Swabians
began.
The
most beautiful community in the southern
Batschka was the large town of Palanka-
(Batschka-Palanka) on-the-Danube. It
consisted of three communities:
Batschka Palanka, Neu Palanka and Alt
Palanka (Old and New Palanka). Batschka
Palanka and Neu Palanka were entirely
Danube Swabian in terms of their
population, while Alt Palanka counted
Serbs, Hungarians, Slovaks and Danube
Swabians among its inhabitants. The
total population of the tri-town was
over sixteen thousand. The Danube
Swabians were the economic mainstay of
the communities. It was the center of
German culture, commercial and economic
life for the overwhelmingly Danube
Swabian population in the vicinity in:
Gajdobra, Wekerledorf, Bulkes, Bukin,
Novoselo, Obrawatz
(Obrowatz), Towarisch and Tscheb.
In the whole area there were
approximately thirty thousand Danube
Swabians forming a very large minority
among the other nationalities.
When
the Partisans came to power in October
1944, the most influential Danube
Swabians and some Hungarians were
arrested, gruesomely tortured and
killed. Later in October 1944,
seventeen Danube Swabian youth aged from
fourteen to nineteen were taken from
their homes. They were chained together
in the local high school and then driven
on foot into the forests north of the
town where they were forced to dig a
huge hole. When the task was done they
were shot. Their bodies were then
tossed into the pit by the Partisans.
The shallow graves were later disturbed
by pigs that unearthed some of the
bodies.
On
October 26, 1944 another one hundred men
were arrested. They were taken to the
local court building and were terribly
abused. In order that the screams of
the tortured men could not be heard
outside, radio speakers were turned up
to their highest volume. On October 27th
the survivors of the day of terror were
shot in the same forest as the young
teenage boys. Among those shot was the
Roman Catholic priest Karl Unterreiner.
On
November 7th, 1944 there were
one hundred and eighty-four Danube
Swabian men were taken from their
homes. They were first imprisoned and
beaten at the high school. At 2:00pm
the next day they were driven on foot
out of the community. They were to do
forced labor in the coal mines in Vrdnik
in Syrmien. As they proceeded on their
march eastwards from Alt Palanka the
Partisans led them to the Danube to be
loaded on boats. The boats were then
set adrift into the river current. The
Partisans tossed men into the cold river
and shot them like target practice.
Others were stabbed and thrown into the
river to drown. The survivors were then
force marched on the other side of the
river. When they reached Neschtin the
Partisans took away everything the men
still had. Many had to take off their
shoes and give them to the Partisans.
They marched barefoot through the snow
banks. The road was rocky and many cut
and bruised their feet. But whoever
could not keep up with the column was
shot. In the night the sorrowful column
arrived in Susek (Szuszek) in Syrmien. Here again
many of them were tortured and beaten.
Three of them, including a young boy
were delirious when they were finally
killed. As the march continued, six
more men were killed who could not
continue barefoot through the snow. At
Rakowatz, several men too weak from
beatings to go on were shot. In the
evening of the second day the survivors
arrived at the coal mines in Vrdnik.
Many of them would die there.
In
mid-November all of the remaining Danube
Swabian men from sixteen to sixty years
of age were arrested. Most of the
Danube Swabian men from the neighboring
villages were also brought to Palanka.
All of the assembled men were driven on
foot to the slave labor camp at
Neusatz. Many of those who could not
keep up on the march were shot. The old
Roman Catholic priest Peter Weinert was
on the march and died at the Neusatz
camp. The pastor of Neu Palanka, Stefan
Mesarock-Mueller was led on foot towards
the Hungarian border and was killed
somewhere along the way.
One
woman from Palanka reports: “I could
not flee at the time of the great
disturbances on November 14, 1944
because my mother was ill and my child
was very young. The local Serbian
population assured us they would protect
us from the Partisans in thankfulness
for our help to them during the German
occupation. With the arrival of the
Partisans, law and order came to an end
as plundering and murder were the order
of the day. Danube Swabians were being
killed and beaten all over the town. No
one knew if he or she would be next.
The merchant Joseph Hauswirth was killed
in front of his wife because he could
not produce the amount of sugar the
Partisans demanded. The watchmaker
Ladislaus Pressl was killed because he
could not produce enough gold watches to
suit them. The wife of the land owning
noble, Lajos Reis was dragged through
the streets by the hair and after
gruesome torture she was slowly killed
because she had sought to hide with a
Serbian family.
The
nobleman Wilhelm Wagner sought to work
together with the local Serbs when the
Hungarian officials were evacuated, and
his efforts to maintain order were
supported by the Serbian population.
When the Partisans arrived he was
arrested and day after day he was
systematically tortured and finally
killed.
Shortly
afterwards all of the remaining Danube
Swabian men were assembled and had to
march to work in the slave labor camps
in Serbia. Some of these who survived
reported than many died on the way.
Karl Csernvenyi was beaten during the
crossing of the Danube, was stabbed and
thrown off the bridge and drowned. His
brother Julius had an even more gruesome
death. His hands were both broken, his
eyes were put out, his nostrils slit,
many of his teeth were knocked out,
strips of skin were cut from his body,
his penis was cut off and stuck in his
mouth…
But one
day the entire population had to
assemble in the streets of our beloved
town. We stood in the rain all night
and marched to Jarek in a march of death
for the next sixty kilometers. We were
forced to march quickly and we soon
abandoned our baggage.
Shut-ins,
cripples and the sick stayed behind and
were beaten or shot to death. Infants
and toddlers lay with the bodies of
their dead grandmothers on the roadways
along with the grandfathers. The sixty
kilometer stretch of road was the site
of hundreds of corpses.”
Novoselo
Novoselo was one of the oldest of the
Danube Swabian settlements in the
Batschka and they compromised its entire
population of some three thousand. The
actions against the Danube Swabians
began in the fall of 1944.
The
first action was the arrest and murder
of the doctor, Joseph Fath. He had two
sons, both of whom were taken to
concentration camps and died there. The
youngest was Erwin and he was fifteen
years old and was brutally killed by the
Partisans at the Palanka camp.
On
November 19, 1944 all men from the ages
of sixteen to sixty years were taken to
Palanka. For several days they were
imprisoned in the assembly hall of the
high school. The men were from
Wekerledorf (Neu Gajdobra/Wekerle) and seventy men from Plavna
accompanied them. In all they number
about two hundred men. They were
brutally tortured and some for no reason
at all were shot. The survivors were
driven to the camp at Neusatz on
November 24th. They had to
march the forty-two kilometers while
their Partisan guards rode in wagons and
tortured, maimed and beat them at will.
They shot all of the men who could not
keep up. Nine men from Novoselo died in
this way. In a group of nine hundred
assembled Danube Swabian men at the
camp, only forty-five were alive when
they were brought back to Neusatz. Many
of them were then sent to Mitrowitz in
Syrmien.
At
Christmas the young women and teenage
girls were deported to the Soviet Union,
and then during Holy Week the rest of
the residents of Novoselo (Neudorf) were chased
out of their homes and sent to one of
the various forced labor camps or the
concentration camp at Jarek.
Obrowatz
In
the mixed language village of Obrowatz
right after the take over by the
Yugoslavian officials, thirty-four of
the Danube Swabian villagers, including
married and unmarried young women were
shot for no apparent reason. Two of the
leading Serbian villagers attempted to
prevent the shootings. As a result of
these attempts to protect their Danube
Swabian villagers, the two Serbs were
killed by the Partisans along with them.
The
village doctor, Michael Koepfer who was
well known and loved by the Serbian
villagers was brutally abused by
“foreign” Partisans and sent to the
concentration camp at Jarek where he
later died.
The men of the village were dragged off
to the labor camp at Neusatz or other
camps in the vicinity. At the beginning
of 1945, the young girls and women were
deported to Russia, and the old women
and children were taken to Jarek and the
vast majority of them perished there.
A
resident of Obrowatz writes, “A few days
after the Russian and Bulgarian troops
withdrew, a very difficult time was
ahead for the Danube Swabian population
as the Partisans undertook their brutal
reign of terror that began with
killings. Some of the Partisans were
local Serbs. On November 21, 1944 all
Danube Swabian property was confiscated
by the Partisans and we lost all rights
of citizenship. But by then the
Partisans had already taken the lives of
forty-two persons: thirty-four Danube
Swabians, six Hungarians and two
Serbs.”
The
shootings began on October 30, 1944. On
that day three women were shot. What
was their crime?
The
oldest was eighty-four years and
crippled after a stroke, another was her
daughter married to the merchant, Franz
Reinhardt who had fled to Germany, and
the third was their servant girl. Franz
had hidden some food before he fled and
that was found by the Partisans. That
was the crime for which the three women
were executed in the courtyard of the
town hall. The next shootings took
place on November 3rd and
continued all month. The last known
date for such “actions” was November 24th,
involving mostly men but also some
women.
Tscheb
This
community was the birthplace of Dr.
Jakob Bleyer the future leader of the
Swabians in their attempts at preserving
their Swabian identity in Hungary
following the First World War.
On
November 9, 1944 twenty Danube Swabian
men were taken from their homes. They
were to be taken to the coal mines in
Vrdnik in Syrmien to do forced labor, to
replace many of those who were killed on
their way there from Batschka-Palanka.
From the outset of the march from Tscheb
the Partisans chose the two youngest men
in the group and for no apparent reason
shot them on the spot. The other
eighteen were badly treated all of the
way to Vrdnik (Wrdnik). Like the men from
Palanka their shoes were taken from them
and most of their clothing in the bitter
winter cold. After the two day forced
march they reached Vrdnik where two of
them died soon after.
The
survivors from Tscheb were sent to the
camp at Neusatz in early December.
Again some of them were shot on the way
unable to keep up with the others. Most
of the others died in the labor camps.
At New
Year’s the women and teenage girls were
deported to Russia. On June 2, 1945 the
remaining population, women, the elderly
and children were chased out of their
homes and force marched to the
concentration camp at Jarek.
Towarisch
In
the village of Towarisch, Danube
Swabians accounted for about one third
of the population. They were farmers
and Roman Catholics. The rest of the
inhabitants were Serbs and Orthodox. In
the fall of 1944, as the Russians were
advancing across the Tisza River and the
Hungarian army was leaving the Roman
Catholic priest assembled the Swabians
after mass and encouraged them to leave
and join the German army that was
evacuating to the west.
Most
of the Danube Swabians followed the
priest’s advice and under his leadership
left their homes. Only ten families
remained. They could not believe they
had anything to fear from the
Partisans. They were later joined by
another family who had turned back when
the evacuation column crossed the
Danube. But by now the new Yugoslavian
authorities were in power in Towarisch.
Their first order of the day was the
liquidation of the Danube Swabian
population.
All ten
families and the returnees were taken
from their homes. They were forced to
march to the limits of the village and
dig a large pit. All the men, women,
children and elderly were bound together
and had to walk beside the pit and were
shot. They thought that they had
exterminated the total Swabian
population and left the mass grave
open. It was to be filled in the next
morning by some other people. The
returnee family was among the victims.
As the shots had leveled rows of people
bound together one women was not hit but
had fallen into the grave with the
others. She was tied to her dead
husband. For hours she remained under
the corpses of others. As night came,
she was able to free herself from her
fetters and crawled out of the grave
into the night. By dawn she reached
Bukin where she had relations and sought
a haven. Later she was apprehended for
being a “German” and was carried off.
She was sent to the Jarek concentration
camp.
During
Holy Week of 1945 all of the Danube
Swabian communities in the region had
been depopulated of their inhabitants
with the children, the elderly and women
in various concentration camps and the
men and able bodied women in the forced
labor camps. All of them camps in which
large numbers of them would perish.
Plavna
The community lies close to the Danube
and the overwhelming majority of the
inhabitants were Serbo-Croatian and the
Danube Swabians were a small minority.
In the fall of 1944, some seventy men
were taken into custody and removed to
Palanka and from there to various slave
labor camps. The other able bodied
persons in Plavna were sent to slave
labor in various places in the next
weeks and months. In the summer of 1945
men were brought from the camp in Sombor
on foot to work in the hemp factory as
slave labor. Because of the lack of
food, long and heavy work many died of
disease. These men were mostly from
Gakowa and Stanischitsch.
The
experience of the Danube Swabians in
Plavna is best expressed in the life
story of one of the children, who at the
age of seven arrived alone in Salzburg,
Austria on Christmas Day in 1948. She
tells the story of the five previous
years in this way:
“My
parents were both deported on Christmas’
Eve in 1944. My grandmother told me
that they had been taken to Russia. I
remained at home alone with my
grandmother. Then they also came for my
grandmother. Later she told me that
they had taken her to Kolut (Kulut/Ringdorf) where she
was forced to work. As my grandmother
was being taken away she begged our
neighbors to take me to Batsch where we
had relatives. But soon the Danube
Swabians in Batsch were on the agenda of
the Partisans and the relatives who had
taken me in, took me along with them to
Jarek and its concentration camp. But
soon I was almost alone again as my aunt
and uncle were taken from Jarek to do
labor elsewhere and they would never
return. Because so many had already
died in Jarek, we were all brought to
Gakowa.
My
grandmother working in Kolut discovered
somehow that I had survived from an old
woman in Plavna and that I was in
Gakowa. She came to Gakowa at night and
was able to smuggle me out of the camp
and took me back with her to Kolut.
There she became very ill and since she
was unable to work any longer, she had
to go to Gakowa. But because so many of
the people died of hunger there and were
badly abused, she took me with her one
night. We were able to sneak and crawl
out of the camp and we entered Hungary
that same night. We then walked a great
distance until we reached the Steiermark
in Austria. My grandmother worked as a
servant for a farmer and also died
there. Before she died she had given
the farmer the address of some friends
in Vienna to contact. After she died
the farmer wrote to the people in
Vienna. The woman in Vienna had been
our neighbor in Plavna (Plawingen) and came and took
me to Vienna.
My
parents had been released from Russia
due to severe illness and were sent to
Germany. At first, it was my mother who
found out where I was. Later, my father
did too. After my father wrote to us in
Vienna, we sent his address to my
mother. When she learned he was in
Bremen she went to join him. At that
time he was unable to stand or walk. We
arranged for my father to meet us in
Salzburg instead of getting me in
Vienna. Our neighbor sent me along to
Salzburg, but my father was not there.
He had become ill again and could not
move or travel. I was then taken by the
Red Cross to my sick parents in Bremen.”
North and Middle Batschka
"Where the bloodletting raged"
Werbass
In the central region of the Batschka
there were numerous and large Danube
Swabian communities that originated from
the planned settlement under Joseph II.
The vast majority of these communities
were Lutheran and some Reformed. The
twin towns of Alt and Neu Werbass (Old
and New Werbass) were the cultural and
economic center of the district,
surrounded by the Lutheran communities
of: Sekitsch, Feketitsch, Alt Ker, Klein
Ker, Tscherwenka and Torschau. Kula was
also in the neighborhood but it was an
ethnically mixed community and its
Danube Swabians were Roman Catholic.
This region would become a field of
blood for its Swabian inhabitants. It
was to be the scene of the most
atrocious mass murders and shootings
throughout the Batschka in the fall of
1944. In only a few weeks, some six
hundred men from the twin towns of
Werbass were victims of mass shootings.
In Neu
Werbass the most important and
influential leaders and intellectuals
among the Danube Swabians were arrested
and shot individually or in groups.
Other Danube Swabian men had to watch
the executions and bury the dead. The
victims were brought to their graves and
were shot in the back of the neck. One
of the Partisans who had lived in
Werbass was proud and boasted of the
fact that he had personally shot eighty
of the men himself. As a reward for his
“heroism” he was made the District
Commander at Kula and although he was
totally illiterate he held that office
for years afterwards.
The
rest of the Danube Swabian population
was packed into the old silk and velvet
factory which now became a camp until
the spring of 1945. Later all of them
were sent to Gakowa and Kruschevlje.
There
were also executions in Alt Werbass
involving countless Danube Swabian men
and women. Most took place in the
courtyard of the notary’s house and the
local garbage dump. The total deaths in
Alt Werbass due to shootings, beatings
and hangings numbered three hundred and
seventy men and women. All of the
corpses were buried naked while the
Partisans bargained or gambled for their
clothes
Kula
The mass executions in Kula were hardly
any less terrifying. In the fall of
1944 over two hundred Danube Swabians
perished and the methods were even more
brutal than in Werbass. Whole families
were beaten to death. That was the case
with Dr. Saur and his wife and two small
children. Here again it was the
intellectuals and leaders of the
community who were on the liquidation
lists.
Klein-Ker
Klein
Ker had a population of four thousand
Lutheran Danube Swabians when the
Partisans arrived on November 9, 1944
and sealed off the community and
barricaded the houses. Eighty-two of
the leading citizens were arrested.
Half of them consisted of married women
and single girls. They were all driven
on foot to the town hall. Here they
were imprisoned and tortured. On
November 10th they had to
strip down to their underwear. Their
hands were bound with wire. They were
force marched to the railway tracks
where all of them were forced to lie
down and each person was dispatched by
gun or rifle. Two of the stronger men
Dr. Leibmann the physician and a farmer
were left to the last, because they
threw all of the corpses into a large
pit. Then Gypsies were recruited to
cover over the mass grave.
On
November 14th an additional
seventy Danube Swabians were taken from
their homes. The majority of these
victims were women and single girls.
They were assembled at the town hall and
were terribly abused. The women and
girls were molested. They were kept
imprisoned in a very small room packed
tightly together until the following
night. The Partisans called them out
one at a time to bind their hands as a
prelude to taking them out for
execution. When the farm laborer Ludwig
Schwarz was called out, he suddenly
lunged at an armed Partisan, threw him
to the ground, jumped over him and in
front of everyone made it to the
courtyard. The other Partisans shot
after him. He was only wounded in the
hand and could jump over the wall and
escaped into the darkness. For the next
three months he was in hiding, until he
could escape with his family and get out
of the country. But the others were
taken to the town limits where they were
shot. Their bodies were thrown into a
water filled ditch and later filled with
earth.
On
November 17th another
blockade was in effect and fifty Danube
Swabians were assembled. Among them,
more than half of them were women and
teenage girls. Some children aged
fourteen were also among them. These
too were imprisoned in the town hall and
were physically abused. During the
night of November 18th they
were loaded on trucks that took the road
to Werbass, but all of them were shot at
the Roman Wall along the way.
On
November 19th the Partisans
assembled seventeen men and women during
the night and shot them at the local
mill. They left the dead in the
street. One of the women was only
wounded. She lay there under the bodies
of the others. One could hear her
whimpering in pain until noon the next
day, but no one was allowed to help
her. She lay there until she died. On
another day in November, three of the
older men in the town were taken and
shot in Werbass because the
functionaries there knew them and they
wanted “Swabian blood to flow.”
In
December of 1944 another fifteen men
were taken out of the town. They were
taken to Mitrowitz to work on the
railway and none of them was ever heard
from again.
In May
of 1945 the remaining Danube Swabians
after the deportations to Russia were
driven out of their homes and taken to
concentration camps. Many were taken to
Jarek where almost all of them died.
Subotitza
Subotitza was one of the major cities of
Yugoslavia and was primarily inhabited
by Romanians and Hungarians. In the
immediate vicinity of the city there
were villages with a large
German-speaking minority. The Military
Government of the Partisans established
two camps in the city in the fall of
1944. A transit camp was set up to
handle the flow of the returnees from
the evacuation and when it was
ascertained that they were Danube
Swabians they were sent to the camps in
the north and central Batschka. Most of
the women and children were sent to
Sekitsch, while the able bodied were
consigned to the forced labor camp in
Subotitza or its environs.
The
labor camp in Subotitza had a large
inmate population and the current number
was always kept in the neighborhood of
four thousand persons. They were
assigned to various work in the
vicinity. Conditions here for the
internees was no different than it was
in any of the other camps in the
Batschka.
With
regard to the extermination program in
North and Middle Batschka we are well
informed by the report from a woman from
Erdevik in Syrmien who had been
evacuated with her children in the fall
of 1944, and later along with many
others she returned to Yugoslavia in May
of 1945. She reports the following:
"We
arrived in Subotitza on June 6, 1945
from eastern Germany from where we had
been evacuated. Those of us who were
Danube Swabians were immediately
separated from the others and placed in
work details. Young mothers who refused
to be separated from their children were
beaten and imprisoned. Those who did
not give up their money or valuables
freely were shot. On the day of our
arrival I witnessed twenty-five such
shootings. All of them were women.
Among the dead were Frau Nusspl from
Palanka, the twenty-three year old Maria
Kirschner from Hodschag, nineteen year
old Katharina Beuschl from Wekerle (Neu
Gajdobra), the
twenty-seven year old Eva Beck from Ruma,
eighteen year old Katharina Mueller from
Ruma, seventeen year old Maria Fischer
from Krndija and thirty-three year old
Rosalia Berger from Pasua. The older
women among us were consigned to the
camp in Sekitsch and young women
remained in the slave labor camp in
Subotitza. The men were led away. They
had no idea of where they were going.
We never heard from any of them again.
For two months I worked at the Partisan
hospital where I became unable to work
any longer and as a result I too was
sent to Sekitsch."
Several
times typhus epidemics broke out in the
labor camp in Subotitza. Large labor
parties from the camp lived out in the
open for months, even in the winter.
They often stayed overnight in haylofts
or haystacks and at the crack of dawn
they were driven to work. Like inmates
in other camps they could never change
their clothes and for weeks on end they
could not stretch out and have a good
night’s sleep. Those no longer able to
work were sent to Sekitsch and later to
Gakowa and Kruschevlje. An excuse was
found to close down the camp in
Subotitza: there were no longer any
inmates left capable of working. In
January 1948 the surviving inmates were
all sick and of them fifty were in the
final stages of dying from typhus.
Sekitsch-Feketitsch
These
two Lutheran Danube Swabian communities
were on the route of the international
highway north of Werbass and were
entered by Russian troops on October 12,
1944. Three days later the Partisans
set up their Military Government.
Countless numbers of Danube Swabian men
were arrested and brutally beaten and
tortured. At the same time others from
the civilian population were being taken
to forced labor camps. In the beginning
they worked in the vicinity and were
allowed to return home, but soon they
were taken farther afield and were not
allowed to return to Sekitsch. In
October all men from the ages of 18 to
60 years had to report to the Partisan
authorities. They were never released.
The younger men among them were sent to
the camp in Subotitza, while the older
men were sent to Topola.
Sekitsch was officially declared a camp
on November 20, 1944. Those who lived
in the eastern portion of the village
were driven from their homes into the
western part of the community. The
houses in the eastern part of the
village were emptied of everything of
value and in late November the old men
and women, as well as the children from
Bajmok were brought to Sekitsch and
packed into them. In a very short
period of time all of the Danube
Swabians in the vicinity who were unable
to work, including those from the
Lutheran village of Feketitsch were
brought and interned here in Sekitsch.
Soon it became the dumping ground for
the region, while those who were able
bodied from Sekitsch, both the men and
the women were assigned to Topola,
Morawitza, Bajmok and Subotitza. Women
with small children and infants were not
spared. They had to leave the children
behind even if there was no one to care
for them.
The
death rate at the Sekitsch camp compared
to other concentration camps was not
among the highest. Everything had been
confiscated in the fall of 1944. Very
few of the Danube Swabians in Sekitsch
had joined the evacuation and those who
had remained had prepared and stored
provisions for the future as they
awaited the Russian occupation. As a
result the people of Sekitsch were not
dependent upon the camp food at all.
They shared this with the arrivals from
the vicinity. But this food supply
would soon end. When they were
transferred to the camps at Gakowa and
Kruschevlje they died very quickly.
They died like flies at Kruschevlje, as
they were unprepared for what they had
to endure there.
On
October 1, 1945 the whole camp at
Sekitsch was transferred to Kruschevlje.
The death rate there and at Gakowa was
so high that they could accommodate the
seven thousand inmates at Sekitsch. The
only Swabians who remained in Sekitsch
were those who were still capable of
providing labor of some kind.
Before
being transferred, everything the
inmates still had was taken away from
them. Most had only the clothes they
wore left to them, bedding and
everything else was taken away from
them. The Sekitsch inmates had nothing
to trade unlike the others in
Kruschevlje. The shipment of the
Sekitsch Swabians was in open cattle
cars and the trip lasted two days and it
never stopped raining. In Sombor,
Partisans pulled up to the train and
beat the women and children. Many of
them were gruesomely mistreated. A
secret church report in 1946 indicated
that of the six thousand inhabitants of
Sekitsch only about one thousand were
still alive. They were all in Germany
or Austria, so that less than one
hundred were still alive in Yugoslavia.
Two
women from Sekitsch were shot at
Kruschevlje. They had sneaked out of the
camp to beg for food in a nearby
Hungarian village. On their way back to
the camp they were spotted by a sentry
who shot both of them.
West and North West Batschka
"Death reaps a plentiful harvest”
Hodschag
In
the district of Hodschag the Danube
Swabians formed the greater portion of
the population. It was in effect a
totally Danube Swabian region. It
consisted of the entirely Swabian
communities of Hodschag, Filipovo,
Karavukovo and communities with small
Serbian populations like Parabutsch,
Milititsch and Brestowatz. While still
in other communities the numbers of
Danube Swabians was high in Batsch,
Deronje, Wajska and Plavna. A large
part of the population had been
evacuated in the fall of 1944 as the
Russians advanced into Yugoslavia. But
the percentage of those who fled
differed greatly in the various
communities of the district. While the
vast majority of the Swabian population
allowed themselves to be evacuated,
almost all of the Swabians in Filipovo
remained at home and the greater portion
of the Swabians remained in Hodschag.
In the
very first days of the arrival of the
Partisans, key and influential Swabians
in the district were arrested and
brought to Hodschag. With their arrest
many of them simply disappeared forever,
while others were placed in camps and
set to forced labor. In the fall, the
Partisans rounded up one hundred and
eighty-two Danube Swabian men from the
age of 16 to 60 years and they have been
missing ever since. They were led out
of town in two groups, one in the
direction of Karavukovo, and the other
towards Filipovo. Along the way they
had to strip naked and were shot. The
bodies were buried in a mass grave.
Only one man survived. Already stripped
naked and ordered to the mass grave in
the blink of an eye he made a dash for
it. The Partisans fired and gave chase
and even shot one of their own by
mistake. He managed to escape and hide
with strangers. In the spring and
summer all of the Swabians in the area
were rounded up and driven on foot into
the camps and he was among them. He
managed again to survive in the camp
under a false name.
In the
spring and summer, large numbers of
women and single girls, as well as men
from the various surrounding communities
were brought to Hodschag. In the north
east section of Hodschag two rows of
houses facing one another the length of
one street were surrounded with a barbed
wire fence. For years to follow,
thousands of prisoners were imprisoned
here and were sent to work in various
camps and work stations. The most
dangerous work places were in the
marshes and bogs. The first large death
toll in the marshes was among young
women from Apatin. Most of them had
nursing infants or were somewhat
unhealthy in order to have escaped the
deportation to slave labor in the Soviet
Union and had been sent to Gakowa and
Kruschevlje. There they were separated
from their children and assigned to
Hodschag. In the first few days in
Hodschag and the marshes, twenty-seven
of them perished. They died of fever
and deep depression over their
separation from their children. They
suffered greatly from dysentery. Both
in the marshes and the central camp,
typhus broke out. In spite of
vaccinations, all who entered the camp
“hospital” died very quickly.
The
commander of the camp, a Partisan from
Deronje was a cruel and frightful
person. He punished anyone who broke
the camp rules brutally. He imprisoned
all “lawbreakers” by locking them in a
cellar until he or one of his men saw
fit to release the person. The victims
were often in the cellar for days,
without food or sanitary facilities.
Some were to be used as “examples” and
were beaten and tortured. Those
especially punished were those who had
tried to escape or pass information from
one camp to another.
The
rations the inmates received were barely
enough to live and the labor they did
was hard and done in the summer heat.
In the mornings they received a ladle of
tea made out of some boiled leaves of
one kind or another. There was no
sugar. At noon there was always bean
soup without salt or lard. They
received the same at night. In the
summer of 1945 the inmates numbered over
one thousand four hundred who continued
to be fed meagerly and faced constant
starvation.
There
was a “hospital” in the camp in name
only, and only those unable to stand up
on their own were allowed in it. They
were often simply skeletal from lack of
food, brutal hard work, dysentery and
diarrhea. It was the last stop before
the cemetery if there had been one.
In the
early summer of 1945 one after another
of the Danube Swabian communities in the
Hodschag district were depopulated.
Those still able to work were sent to
Hodschag and the others ended up in
Filipovo at first and then later in
Gakowa and Kruschevlje.
In the
fall of 1945 all of the women and single
girls at the work places throughout the
entire district were assembled and
brought to the central camp at Hodschag.
They were convinced they were being
deported to Russia. Many of the mothers
who heard the rumors found themselves in
the same camp as their daughters and
they did not want to be separated from
them and tried to sneak them into the
Hodschag camp with them. Most of those
who were caught experienced the brutal
and sadistic mistreatment of the camp
commander. He created a work brigade
consisting of these young girls and
women who had to break corn in the
fields all winter day after day. From
sunrise to sundown they had to work and
even in the worst winter snowstorms.
After only a few days, many of them had
frozen hands or feet. But work went on,
day after day. In the spring, the
“brigade” returned to Hodschag, and was
broken up and the survivors were sent to
new work places. A large group of them
later came to Batsch.
In the
spring and summer of 1946 the
unpopulated district was resettled by
“colonists” from the southern regions of
the country. The colonists had to take
over the field work in the summer and as
a result the Swabian slave laborers were
sent back to the central camp in
Hodschag. In the middle of September
with no work any longer available in the
area, all of the inmates were sent to
Gakowa and Kruschevlje. By now, the
number of inmates in the camp had
dwindled to less than one thousand. In
the fall of 1945 there had been over
four thousand. In the meantime, about
three thousand had perished or were sent
to Gakowa and Kruschevlje to die.
Karavukovo
The
population of the community was entirely
Danube Swabian and numbered some five
thousand persons. It was one of the
wealthiest and most prosperous
communities in the Batschka. The
majority of the population left with the
evacuation treks accompanied by units of
German troops to ward off attacks by
Partisans. Although the Partisans at
first established the Military
Government in the surrounding area
nothing was done in Karavukovo. A
delegation of Danube Swabians was sent
to Hodschag to meet the Partisan
functionaries there whom they believed
would take over the rule of Karavukovo.
To their great good fortune the Serbs
who were sent to set up the local
government of the town were upright
men. But they were unable to prevent
the orders for men and women to be sent
to Hodschag for forced labor or to other
places as ordered. But a large portion
of the able bodied were able to remain
at home longer even if they were called
upon to provide slave labor. But still
many of the Karavukovo Danube Swabian
men were arrested and shot. Among them
was the well known Balthasar Broder a
mason and builder.
In the
summer of 1945 all of those who were
unable to work were forced to go to
nearby Filipovo and after a short period
of time these elderly persons and the
children were sent to Gakowa. The local
priest, Alexander Thiel was among them.
He was later released and for a short
time he returned and served what
remained of his parish, but was arrested
and imprisoned for six months at
Neusatz. Following his release from
there he fled to Austria.
When
harvest workers were needed they were
brought from the camp in Sombor. A
group of one hundred and sixty men and
women were force marched from Sombor on
June 21, 1945. The men and women were
placed in separate camps that in effect
were the former houses of wealthy
families. The nutrition they received
here was somewhat better and there were
very few deaths among them. The
Partisan guards were accommodated in the
house next to the women’s camp. This
resulted in constant disturbances and
the mistreatment and abuse of the
women. For weeks on end they were
awakened every night and driven out into
the courtyard and were forced to stand
for hours in the rain and other bad
weather, while the Partisans went into
their quarters and searched through the
clothing and took whatever caught their
fancy. Women who had hidden anything
were forced into the cellar and were
beaten and locked in overnight. Some
were so badly abused that they died when
they were transferred to a camp at
Hodschag.
The men
had more peace from the Partisans than
the women. But if they too were found
to have hidden any valuables they were
beaten so badly that few of them were
able to recover.
In the
summer of 1945 the labor station at
Deronje was closed and the inmates were
sent to Karavukovo. From the beginning
of the Fall more and more of the Swabian
forced laborers were returned to the
central camp in Hodschag and from there
they were assigned to other work
stations. All of the women were
resettled in Hodschag, and in the spring
they were sent to work in the swamps
along the Danube where there had been a
massive death rate among women working
there the previous summer.
In the
spring of 1946 the brick factory was
re-opened and a labor camp was
established there. Former residents of
Karavukovo provided the leadership in
the factory and camp and brought former
residents in the Hodschag central camp
back to work here. This proved to be
heavy and difficult work for the
undernourished and exhausted Swabian
slave laborers. At that time there were
already new “colonists” from the Pirot
region well established in the community
occupying the former homes and living
off of the work of their former owners
and their ancestors over the
generations. They were simply not
prepared to do such heavy work and left
it to the Swabians.
In the
spring of 1946 as well, the men’s camp
at Karavukovo was closed down. Large
numbers of them were sent to Hodschag’s
central camp and from there they were
later re-settled at Batsch and put to
forced labor there.
Milititisch
The
community was located north west of
Hodschag and was a rich hemp producing
center. There were numerous Serbian
families in the area and they had their
own Orthodox parish and lived with the
majority Danube Swabians on good terms
over the centuries. A large portion of
the Swabian population were evacuated by
the retreating German army and to all
intents and purposes left the area to
the local Serbians. About one hundred
families from among the Danube Swabian
population trusted the word and promises
of their Serbian neighbors and
especially that of the Orthodox priest
that they would protect them from the
Partisans and decided to remain at
home. In the first days of Partisan
rule very few of the Swabian men or
women were arrested and taken to the
slave labor camps in Hodschag and
Sombor, which in effect was a result of
the local Serbian population and their
promise of protection. But not even
Milititisch would be spared some
atrocities. One of the Swabian men was
bound and tossed into a heated kettle in
the hemp factory and was scalded to
death most cruelly.
On
March 11,1945 a large number of men and
women were taken to the camp in Sombor.
They had to cover forty kilometers at
night on foot to a work camp to serve
the Russians in Baranya in Hungary.
But, by the time they got into the area
the Russians already had fourteen
thousand slave laborers, so that the
Milititisch men and women remained in
Sombor. Here they worked in the
Partisan hospital. In the months of
April and May numerous work parties were
assigned to Semlin and Mitrowitz and
included workers from Milititisch. They
worked in the marshes and most of them
perished there. All those who survived
who were not sent to Mitrowitz in
Syrmien on June 21st went
from Sombor to Karavukovo on foot where
they remained until the closing of the
camp in the summer of 1946 and then were
moved to Hodschag on their way to
Gakowa and Kruschevlje.
In the
spring of 1945 all of the Danube
Swabians were assembled in a central
location and there they were divided
into two groups. Those who were able to
work, both men and women, and those
unable to work, the elderly, children
and the sick and infirm. It was heart
rending scene to watch as the two groups
were led away each heading in a
different direction and destiny. The
children sought to be with their mothers
or grandmothers and cried after them,
the mothers attempting to take their
children with them or running after
them. They were beaten back with
punches and rifle buts. The elderly and
the children were first driven on foot
to Filipovo and like all of the other
Swabians throughout the Batschka in
camps for those unable to work were then
assigned to the death camp at Gakowa.
The able bodied were either kept in
Milititisch for labor, while others were
sent to Hodschag and then assigned to
labor camps in the district.
Batsch
Batsch
was a fortress town from ancient times
lying between the Danube and Tisza
Rivers and played an important role in
Hungarian history and after the
settlement of Danube Swabians in the
village it was a mixed village
ethnically. There were Slavs,
Hungarians and Swabians. The Danube
Swabians accounted for about twenty-five
per cent of the population of four
thousand. They were, however, the most
prosperous and educationally and
culturally advanced.
As
early as the Fall of 1944, large numbers
of the Swabians were taken to Hodschag
and used as slave labor in various
districts in the region. Later in the
spring of 1945 all of the Danube
Swabians throughout the district were
driven out of their home communities and
brought to Hodschag. Only two men were
left behind in Batsch where they
continued to do slave labor. They were
the butcher Pauschert and the locksmith
Armbrust. In the Fall the Partisans
brought the Roman Catholic priest
Novotny from Plavna and imprisoned him
in the town hall. A few days later the
Partisans claimed to be looking for the
priest who had escaped and rummaged
through the Franciscan monastery and
searched the rectory but without any
success they claimed. In actual fact he
had been beaten and tortured to death in
the basement of the town hall and
already buried. Two other well known
citizens of Batsch then also disappeared
and were probably murdered because they
were never seen again the men belonged
to the Kubesch and Gebauer families.
At the
end of March in 1945 a large work party
from the camp in Sombor arrived in
Batsch. A camp was set up for them in a
former dance hall. Most of them came
from Gakowa, Stanischitsch and Apatin.
In the
Summer of 1945 the Partisans led another
work party from the camp in Sombor on
foot to Batsch were they had to work in
the hemp factory. There was another
work party in the village consisting of
women forty-five years of age and
older. They had been brought from
Hodschag to Batsch. Both of these labor
camps were closed in the fall of that
year and the inmates were transferred to
work on the district collective farm.
In the
Spring of 1946 new slave labor
battalions were brought to Batsch from
the central forced labor camp in
Hodschag. Most of them were young
single and married women who had worked
in the corn fields all winter. Another
large group among these new slave
laborers were younger and older teenage
boys and men from Filipovo.
In July
1946 the camp in Batsch was dismantled
and the inmate survivors were taken back
to Hodschag, and most of them were later
sent to Gakowa and Kruschevlje in
September of that year. Those who were
kept back were “sold” as slave laborers
to the inhabitants of the district up to
1948.
Filipovo
Filipovo lies north of Hodschag and was
an entirely Danube Swabian community
which was well known throughout the
Roman Catholic world. The religious and
church life of the community was a
mirrored in the fact that approximately
forty of its sons became priests and
about one hundred women took the veil as
nuns in various orders. Of its four
thousand inhabitants only a small
portion left with the evacuation carried
out by the German army. On the counsel
of their priest, Peter Mueller most
remained behind. The priest was later
arrested by the Partisans and given a
long prison sentence.
The
Partisans were prepared to make Filipovo
into a showcase of their liquidation
program and carried out the most large
scale mass shootings here in the
Batschka. One morning, all men from the
age of sixteen to sixty years were
forced to report to them. Among the men
were the assistant priest Paul Pfuhl and
the Filipovo born priest Anton Zollitsch
home on leave from the Banat. The
commander of the liquidation squad
recognized Zollitsch as a former comrade
in arms in his former regiment and he
had the two priests leave the group and
sent them home. All of the rest were
marched out of the village on to the
road to Hodschag and were shot. But
first they had to dig their own graves.
Then take off their clothes. Then they
were shot in groups. Tossed into the
graves. There were two hundred and
forty-three victims in all. No
survivors. Their clothes were taken by
wagon to Hodschag a few days later and
were sold at the “flea” market.
Men and
women from Filipovo were taken to the
central labor camp in Hodschag to do
forced labor. In the spring of 1945 all
of the Danube Swabians in the village
were driven out of their homes. A
portion of them had to do slave labor in
Filipovo itself, others were taken to
the central camp in Hodschag and from
there scattered in labor camps
throughout the area. The children and
all those unable to work at first
remained in Filipovo and were joined by
the children and elderly from the
surrounding communities. They were all
later sent to Gakowa and Kruschevlje.
In September 1946 the able bodied who
had managed to survive in the Hodschag
central camp were sent to the same
destination and shared the same fate.
Apatin
The
Danube Swabian town of Apatin on the
Danube was not only the oldest such
settlement in the Batschka, it was also
the largest all Swabian community in
Yugoslavia with a population of fourteen
thousand. With its founding two hundred
years earlier it marked the beginning of
the Danube Swabian settlement of the
Batschka. It played a key role in
industry, commerce and culture and
served as a river port on the Danube.
The
Russian Army reached Apatin in October
of 1944. For weeks battles raged in the
streets of the town. The Russians were
determined to cross the Danube here and
as a result they suffered huge
casualties. It is estimated that up to
sixty thousand Russians fell or drowned
in the crossing. While the battle raged
to cross the Danube the Partisans
arrived to set up their Military
Government in the town and district.
Their first act was the arrest of large
numbers of the leading citizens. Almost
daily men were taken from their homes
and imprisoned in different parts of the
town and beaten, tortured and killed.
Others were put in a recently
established camp and were sent to slave
labor from there. Many were sent to
Sombor and then imprisoned at Zupanija
and Kronic-Palais or remained in
Sombor. None of these men were ever
heard from again. There were at least
sixty-four documented victims of this
action and many of them died a rather
painful gruesome death.
(Translator’s note.
The
bestiality and sadism perpetrated
against certain individuals is described
but I decline to translate that out of
consideration of the sensitivities of
the reader and my own.)
Arrests
were still taking place in the first
months of 1945. Apatin had been the key
center of Roman Catholicism in the
Batschka and the most anti-Nazi region
in the Batschka and yet the Partisans
were determined to liquidate the Danube
Swabian people en masse. The western
Batschka would witness the greatest
numbers of victims and the most gruesome
deaths in the region. Apatin was the
first of the Danube Swabian communities
in western Batschka to be cleansed of
its Danube Swabian population.
Countless numbers of labor work parties
were sent from Apatin to Syrmien by
forced marches on foot. Men and women
from Apatin were sent to various labor
camps. These labor battalions had a
high death rate. One forced labor unit
of five hundred men, lost twenty-seven
of their number on the way who died of
exhaustion and beatings. Within a few
weeks only forty-three survivors who
were barely alive returned to Apatin.
Not
much better was the destiny of the labor
transports in the spring of 1945 which
were sent to Semlin and Mitrowitz to
work in the swamps, from where only a
few from among every hundred managed to
survive.
March
11, 1945 was a black day in the life of
Apatin. On that day, the entire
remaining Danube Swabian population of
the town were driven from their homes
and forced to walk to Gakowa and
Kruschevlje as the first victims of
those concentration camps. They were
the first to feed the death mill. After
only a few months seven hundred of them
had died from hunger. On the march to
the camps those who could not keep up,
were forced on by beatings. Those who
collapsed were simply left to die where
they lay. No one was permitted to help
them in any way regardless of their
relationship to the unfortunate person.
Because
of the long term presence of the Russian
military and units of the Partisans led
to the rape of countless women and young
girls. The number that took place
cannot even be estimated. The extent to
which it occurred is reflected in the
fact that not even a ninety-two year old
grandmother was spared and was
gang-raped. But along with rape they
also perpetrated all kinds of torture
including electrical shock treatments to
the breasts and vaginas of their
victims.
Shortly
after the establishment of Military
Government by the Partisans a census of
the community was undertaken. A few
hundred families with non-German
sounding names registered as Hungarians
or Slavs. Those whose registration was
validated were not included in the
expulsion of March 11th.
Approximately two thousand people were
excluded in this way. It was estimated
that about two thousand had left with
the retreating Hungarian Army when they
abandoned the city. In the neighborhood
of two thousand and four hundred single
and married young women along with some
men had been deported to the Soviet
Union between Christmas 1944 and New
Years 1945. As a result not quite eight
thousand were sent to Gakowa and
Kruschevlje.
Those
who remained at home had no peace
either. There were raids and arrests,
and a pogrom on Easter Monday that was
unleashed against many leading citizens
of the town resulting in horrendous
deaths for many of them.
When
the first expellees from Apatin arrived
at Sombor on their way to Gakowa there
was not enough room for all of them in
the barracks of the camp, and about four
thousand women and children, including
nursing infants had to spend the night
out in the open in the bitter cold,
while others were allowed to huddle
together in the streets. When Bulgarian
troops who were stationed in Sombor
heard the crying and whimpering of the
children, they invited their Partisan
“allies” into their barracks for a
drink. They got them drunk and let the
women and children into their own
barracks. In the early morning hours of
March 12th the expellees went
on to Gakowa and Kruschevlje by foot.
The group that had found refuge in the
Sombor camp had everything they had
taken away from them except the clothes
they wore.
A few
days after arriving, women who were able
bodied were separated from their
children, most of them were infants and
toddlers and the mothers were taken to
Baranya to dig trenches for the
Russians. This work was completed on
March 21st and the women were
taken to Sombor and from there they were
sent to various labor camps throughout
western Batschka. Labor units of men
were from time to time sent to Syrmien
to work in the swamps and marshes. Most
of them died or were killed there.
For a
long time the inmates at Gakowa and
Kruschevlje came from Apatin, Kernei and
Sentiwan. All of those who could work
were taken out of the two concentration
camps and were taken to various labor
camps in western Batschka. In a few
weeks, only children and the elderly
remained in the camps. There were only
a few parents if any. A large number of
younger married women were assigned to
the Hodschag district, from among whom
months and years later were able to
return to Gakowa and Kruschevlje in
search of their children. Most of them
perished working in the swamps in the
Hodschag district. What the
extermination camps in Semlin and
Mitrowitz meant for hundreds of the men
from Apatin, the Hodschag camp meant for
the women which became the last station
of their way of sorrows and the cross
for both of them.
In
later months as the former industries in
Apatin went back into production many of
the tradesmen and craftsmen from Apatin
had the good fortune to return there as
slave laborers in their trained field.
This change in circumstances saved many
of their lives.
Sonta
In the
overwhelmingly Slavic community of Sonta
the population was ordered to report to
the town hall in the fall of 1944 and
declare their nationality, which meant
their ethnic origin. A short time later
all of those who were classified as
Danube Swabians and were able bodied had
to return to the town hall and report
again and were taken away to do forced
labor. They were first taken to Apatin
and then at Christmas and New Years they
were deported to Russia along with the
victims from Apatin.
At the
end of January in 1945 all Danube
Swabian men were taken from their homes
and imprisoned in the former bakery and
were used as slave labor. On March 12th
all of the men were taken to Sombor and
from there on to Baranya to dig trenches
and build fortifications for the
Russians. The seventy kilometer
distance was traversed on foot without a
pause. After completing their work they
were returned to Sombor and assigned as
slave labor. The rest of the Danube
Swabian population of Sonta was forced
to go to Milititisch in the spring of
1945 and those unable to work were later
sent to Filipovo and then on to the
grinding death mill in Gakowa and
Kruschevlje.
Sentiwan
The
richest and most prosperous community in
western Batschka was Sentiwan. The
population was six thousand mostly
consisting of Danube Swabians. It was
the center of the hemp export industry
known throughout the world. Hemp was
“the white gold” of the Batschka.
Soon
after the establishment of the Military
Government many of the Danube Swabian
men were arrested and taken to the camps
in Apatin and Sombor. Others were
imprisoned in government jails. The
former mayor Mueller who had campaigned
for the Serbian Nationalist Party, who
always denied his German origins was
taken to Sombor and imprisoned, while
his wife was taken to the slave labor
camp at Parabutsch.
A large
number of the men were imprisoned in the
local convent and sent out as slave
laborers. On March 12th they
were taken to Sombor and then brought to
Baranya to build fortifications and
accommodations for the Russian troops.
After their return from Barnaya they
were divided up among various villages
and districts to do slave labor. On
March 15th the remaining
population in Sentiwan was taken to
Sombor and then on to Gakowa and
Kruschevlje. But the able bodied
remained behind, both men and women and
were used as forced labor working the
fields and the local industries.
Doroslo
Since
the turn of the century, Doroslo had a
large number of Danube Swabian
inhabitants. In the last decade before
the First World War a large number of
the German families took Hungarian names
and considered themselves to be
Hungarian.
The few
remaining Danube Swabians in the
community were taken to various labor
camps as early as the fall of 1944.
Many of those families that had
assimilated with the Hungarians, had
retained their German names and now had
to share in the lot of the Danube
Swabians. It was only after years spent
in the labor camps that they again spoke
the language of their forebears. This
was an example of the kind of basic
racism that lay behind the liquidation
program of the Tito Partisans.
Sombor
"Slave Market and End Station on the Way
of Sorrows"
The city of Sombor had a very small
Danube Swabian population. But it
played a major role in the destruction
of the Danube Swabians of western
Batschka. In the barracks on the road
to Bezdan the internment camp for the
Jews that had been set up by the
Hungarian officials just shortly prior
to their retreat from the area, now
instead received thousands upon
thousands of Danube Swabian men and
women who were packed together,
mistreated, abused, terrified, and
oppressed on their way to liquidation.
It was the first large scale slave labor
camp in the Batschka. Every day new
groups from every corner of the Batschka
arrived in the camp at Sombor and for
seven days a week they did hard labor
with only a limited amount of
nutrition.
In the
fall of 1944, a labor battalion from
Sombor was brought to Bezdan to bury the
one hundred and twenty-seven persons who
had been exterminated there in a variety
of ways. The first victims were the
intellectuals and businessmen. All of
the men in the area had to report and
show their hands to the Partisans, and
whoever had “soft” hands was immediately
shot.
The
regional commander of the Partisans sent
individual orders and commands to the
local communities identifying the number
of men or women they were to provide.
These orders were always filled
promptly. By the spring of 1945 the
Sombor central camp was the largest show
place of slave labor in Yugoslavia. New
labor groups were constantly being
selected and then marched off to all
areas of the Batschka to do labor. When
they were brought back from such a work
detail, within the day or week
individuals were assigned to another
labor group and driven on foot to
another work site. To enable the full
functioning of this method the inmates
were assigned numbers instead of names.
One of
the hardest and heaviest work
assignments was digging trenches for the
Russian troops in Baranya. At 3:00am in
the morning they were set to work. They
were housed in abandoned damaged homes,
barns, lofts and animal stalls where
they were packed together lying on
boards or bare floors, sleeping in their
clothes and unable to get comfortable.
As they left their “quarters” they had
breakfast: soup without salt or lard but
a handful of peas. The peas were always
hard and not edible. Most often it was
cold and had not even been heated and
“become” soup.
Because
all cups and utensils had been taken
away from them the slave laborers had to
eat and drink out of common dishes.
There was also a fifteen decagram of
bread. This was to last the worker
until night. At noon there was a short
break in which the piece of bread could
be eaten.
Each
worker was assigned to dig his own
trench/fox hole and the diameter was
proscribed. Until every worker was
done, none could leave. If a man was
assigned a rocky piece of terrain he was
unable to finish it. Because all of
them had been weakened by hunger, no one
ever finished before dark. But not even
then was there any rest. They had to
help those who were not done. In the
late hours of the night around 10:00pm
and even later, the laborers were
marched into a new area to overnight in
whatever they could find for
themselves. Many did not receive an
evening ration. These assignments
lasted for nine days. In the first days
they suffered so much from hunger that
they ate whatever they found in the
fields. Those who survived returned on
foot to Sombor. The heat was intense.
Already on their way to their work
assignments the men and women were
thrashed along the way. It was much
worse on the way back when many were so
weak that they could barely walk. The
inhabitants of the area through which
they passed were mostly Hungarians who
often stood in front of their houses
with food and containers of water to
give to the wretches passing by.
Whoever attempted to step out of line to
gulp some water or snatch some food had
to risk a beating or a battering with
rifle buts from their guards. The
return march lasted a full day and night
with only a brief rest during the night,
but without any food or water.
On
March 23rd a large labor unit
was assigned to work in the Partisan
hospital. The men and women worked until
10:00pm and longer and then were
awakened and set to work the next
morning by 4:00 am. The hospital
operated a fine kitchen, but with a
threat of punishment to anyone who gave
food to the slave laborers. Their fare
was tea in the morning and bean soup at
night and lunch and some bread, but not
the bread that the Partisans got.
The
Partisan commanders in Sombor saw as
their mission in life to bring about as
much suffering as possible to weaken and
discourage their Danube Swabian
prisoners and hasten their deaths and
yet make use of them for their own
purposes at will. When there was no
other work available in order to wear
down the inmates they would have to
dismantle buildings in one part of town
and then carry all of the heavy building
materials to the opposite side of town
and rebuild it there. There were always
endless columns of men and women slave
laborers hauling materials, stones and
lumber through the streets of Sombor, a
sight that no citizen of the city was
spared from seeing.
Until
the fall of 1945 there was not a day in
which individuals or groups were not
beaten or abused. In the camp courtyard
there was the body of a truck or car
whose windows were covered with tin. It
was painted white. Whenever a sentry
decided or wanted to punish someone, the
person was put in the “white horse” for
days. Those imprisoned in it received
no food or water and were not let out.
They had meet the needs of their bodily
functions inside of it, but then had to
clean it up when they were released. It
was terrible to spend cold winter nights
in there because they were not allowed
covers or heavy clothing. Most of those
who endured the hunger, cold, stink,
constant standing and thrashings never
recovered their health. Many died
shortly afterwards.
One of
the favorite tortures of the Partisan
guards was the ridiculing of God and
prayer. When women were found praying
together they were usually beaten. But
the penalty for praying could also be to
be forced the culprits on their knees
facing a wall in a row with others and
pray out loud in unison while the
Partisans kicked them. Then, one at a
time, they had to stand up in their
place in line and step towards the
Partisans and tell them if God had
helped them and would free them from the
camp. As soon as anyone answered they
received a whack across the ears,
followed by a myriad of curses. “What
are you praying for?” they usually
screamed and forced the person on their
knees and told them to pray on.
“Perhaps He will help you after all!”
And then a while later they would begin
the process all over again. These same
methods were used on those who attempted
to escape from the camp and flee out
into the countryside.
On July
20, 1945 all of the inmates of the camp
and the outside labor parties were
assembled at the camp and put in the
barracks. Because it was getting dark,
groups of tens were formed and put in a
barrack. Here they had to surrender
everything they had. Only their
necessary clothes were left to them. If
anyone tried to hide any possession and
he was discovered would be shot. In the
night shots rang out in the courtyard as
executions were carried out. The
Partisans carried out this same action
on the labor details that could not
return to the camp on time. The body
searches that followed were most brutal
and abusive when dealing with women and
the younger girls.
In May
of 1946 the Partisans in Sombor
demonstrated against the decision of the
Western Powers to place Trieste under
United Nations supervision as a free
city instead of annexing it to
Yugoslavia. In the evening, when the
commander of the camp returned after
participating in the demonstration, he
had two old Danube Swabian men taken out
of the barracks and brought to his
office where he and three other
Partisans brutally attacked them. They
cut off some of their body parts,
battered and hit them, stabbed them with
knives and finally slit their throats.
This was the commander’s personal
protest against the Allies decision with
regard to Trieste.
He
still sought other ways to still his
rage by shedding Danube Swabian blood.
A second torture chamber for the
Swabians in Sombor was the jail—Zupanija.
Hundreds had endured this prison. The
hostages went through countless
interrogations with no idea of why they
were arrested nor the significance of
the questions they were asked. They
simply endured the thrashings and
torture. Most of the questions were
about persons they had never even heard
of. Nor were they given any peace as
they were told to condemn their Serbian
or Hungarian neighbors or friends. A
hostage who was imprisoned here for
three months recalls:
“I
was asked if I knew a well known
lawyer in Sombor and if I was not
also known to him. I told them I
had never had anything to do with
him. From time to time I had simply
heard about him. I never ever saw
him. I was questioned about him day
and night and the questions were
always accompanied by thrashings. I
was once confronted by others who
had to answer the same questions. I
had to watch them being beaten and
abused, just like I had been. This
went on for weeks. They always said
we would come to remember what they
wanted to know. One night I was
again taken for questioning.
Pistols lay on the table. The
Partisan picked them up and told me
I was about to be shot. They asked
if I had a wife and children and
other things. Then they told me to
stand by the wall and to open my
mouth and one of them placed a
loaded pistol in my mouth. I was
afraid that my family would never
know what had become of me. But I
was returned to my cell where the
same man came for me again the next
day and wanted to shoot me if my
memory had not improved. The next
night I was taken by two armed
Partisans, questioned briefly, if I
knew anything now, and then taken to
the courtyard. I was convinced I
would now be shot. The Partisans
said it would be a shame to shoot me
right away when I cold cut their
firewood for them first. They took
me to the woodpile and I cut and
chopped the wood. After several
hours I was returned to my cell and
a few days later I was moved out of
the prison with others from the
Sombor camp and sent elsewhere…”
More
dangerous than Zupanija prison was
Kronic-Palais. Only a very few of those
who entered this prison ever saw the
light of day again. The world will
never know how many persons suffered
terrible torture and death in there.
The prisoners were moved from cell to
cell and some were sent to Neusatz.
Some were brought back again, only to be
sent to Neusatz again. The prisoners
were a means to an end to incriminate
others. The torture here was the most
brutal in the world. Every day there
were countless dead in their cells who
had died as a result of their torture.
Officially, they had simply
disappeared.
(Translator’s note.
I decided not
translate some of the grotesque things
that were done to the prisoners.)
There
is no record of a single Danube Swabian
who was investigated because he was a
Nazi or a war criminal. It was enough
to simply be of German origin and you
would be confined behind prison walls
and never be heard from again. The
so-called Committees of Investigation of
War Crimes were only located in
Hungarian communities and districts.
One of
the Partisan’s favorite methods of
execution was to shoot a whole row of
Danube Swabians with a single shot and
bullet. They held contests to see how
many people one bullet could kill if
they stood behind one another in a row.
The
vast majority of the Sombor district
Danube Swabian communities provided the
major portion of the inmates of the
Sombor central labor camp by the all of
1946. There were several thousand and
they came from: Kolut, Gakowa,
Kurschevlje, Stanischtsch, Monoschtor,
Siwatz
(Alt-Siwatz
), Tschonopel and Kernei.
Many
others were also being held prisoner in
their home communities and had to do
slave labor there. In the spring and
summer those unable to work were brought
to Gakowa and Kruschevlje. The last
community to experience this was
Stanischtsch. It was also the last of
the several hundred communities in which
the Danube Swabians lived in order to be
de-populated.
But
Kernei would experience the ultimate act
of barbarity. Here in the fall,
countless Danube Swabian women were
raped in the presence of their children
and those who resisted and fought them
refusing to submit were shot. On the
same day some drunken Partisans forced
fifteen of the Swabian men into the
cellar of the school. Pushing them up
against the wall in a corner of the
cellar they began to shoot them with
their submachine guns. One man’s body
had sixteen wounds.
Gakowa-Kruschevlje
In
north western Batschka just below the
Hungarian border the two entirely Danube
Swabian villages of Gakowa (Gakovo) and
Kruschevlje were located. They were
chosen by the Partisans as the last
station of the Way of Sorrows of the
Danube Swabians in their liquidation
program in Yugoslavia.
A few
weeks after the Partisans set up their
Military Government in Gakowa in the
fall of 1944 the whole population of
Gakowa, with the exception of the able
bodied men were brought to neighboring
Kruschevlje. Meanwhile, the able bodied
men from Kruschevlje were brought to
Gakowa. From there, the men who
numbered two hundred and fifty were
taken to Bezdan to do slave labor there
for a time. On the way to Bezdan, one
man who cold not keep up was beaten to
death. In Kruschevlje a man, Karl
Franzen and a woman Anna Depre were shot
in front of the church because they had
tried to enter their own homes. During
this time the Partisans plundered all of
the homes and assembled all the food
stuffs to carry out their extermination
project. From now on and later able
bodied men and women from Gakowa and
Kruschevlje were brought to the Sombor
forced labor camp and were sent off to
various labor details to do some of the
most difficult and heavy work that could
be found for them to do.
On
March 12th 1945 eight
thousand persons arrived in Gakowa and
Kruschevlje from Apatin who had come on
foot all of the way. Both villages were
hermetically sealed with the threat of
death to all who tried to enter or leave
the area. More and more new mass
arrivals of women, children and the
elderly streamed into the two villages.
As soon as the liquidation program was
set in motion in the communities of the
western Batschka, all of those not able
to work were driven to these two remote
border villages. Both camps were called
extermination camps by the Partisans.
Exhausted groups arrived in the
thousands on foot almost daily. Mothers
with small children were mostly brought
together to Krushevlje. But seldom
would they be allowed to remain
together. Every day, able bodied
persons were chosen and taken away to
work at the various labor camps in the
western Batschka, so that every day more
and more children were without a
parent. At first, most children had a
grandmother or relative to look after
them. But after only a few weeks the
death rate due to starvation rose
greatly and hundreds and hundreds of
children lost their relatives who could
have care for them and many a
grandparent gave up the little food they
had to the children and starved
themselves so that the children might
live.
There
was no mail or contact possible with the
people in the camp. Those who were
separated had no way of hearing from or
knowing about one another. The only
news was what the rotating labor units
in the labor camps would share when new
workers arrived from Gakowa and
Kruschevlje but often the news was weeks
or months old. Most of the mothers
would not know the fate of their
children for years…if ever.
Now
almost every Danube Swabian community in
the Batschka was represented among the
inmates of the two concentration camps
in the once picturesque villages. By
the summer of 1945 there were twenty-one
thousand inmates in the two village
camps. This number would remain fairly
constant because there was a constant
flow of people coming here from other
internment camps. At times an entire
camp would be emptied and sent here.
They simply filled the empty spaces of
the countless others who had perished.
In the
summer of 1945 the camp from Filipovo
was the first to arrive, followed by
those from Sekitsch and in the spring of
1946 the survivors of the infamous camp
in Jarek arrived.
(A note
from the translator: Ruth Brueckner
of Cservenka was eleven years old at
this time and arrived here in Gakowa
from Jarek with her mother and
grandparents. She alone would survive.
Later, all on her own, as a thirteen
year old she would escape into Hungary
and would walk across the country
following the railway tracks to Austria
by night and hiding during the day.
Through the Red Cross she was reunited
with her father who had recently been
released from a Russian prisoner of war
camp. She now lives in Canada…just down
the street.)
At the
point that the Jarek inmates arrived
there was a total of twenty-seven
thousand Danube Swabians in the two
camps. There were eighteen thousand
four hundred in Gakowa and eight
thousand six hundred in Kruschevlje. In
the following years the total number of
inmates was never less than twenty
thousand. As slave laborers were unable
to work or had become too sick to work
and all of the internment camps were
closed in the Batschka, all of their
inmates were sent here. When the labor
camps were finally closed Gakowa and
Kruschevlje became their last holding
camp. But now a new stream of Danube
Swabians came in large transports coming
from the Banat, especially the wretched
children from the notorious Rudolfsgnad
“starvation” camp.
In
April of 1945 all of the inmates in both
camps had to surrender all of their
possessions and valuables. Death was
threatened to those who hid anything.
Two women in Kruschevlje were shot as a
result of having hidden some money. All
of the camp had to witness the
execution. The others later had to pass
by their bodies on their way to
surrender what they possessed, including
the children. This “action” lasted
until early dawn next day and only then
could the bodies be removed for burial.
Because
of the gnawing hunger and mass
starvation all around them, many of the
mothers and older children took the risk
to sneak out of the camps and beg for
food in the vicinity as far as twenty
kilometers, and return and attempt to
sneak back into the camp. Often it was
at this point that they were sighted or
apprehended and shot, except some were
held back for a public execution for the
benefit of the other inmates.
Until
the fall of 1946 it was only death or an
attempt to escape to Hungary that
usually resulted in costing the person’s
life that were the only ways out of the
two camps. But now there was a new
opportunity opening to them. In the
spring of 1947 it became obvious to the
Interior Ministry and other government
offices that the time had come to end
the attempt at exterminating the entire
Danube Swabian population before world
opinion was totally awakened against
Yugoslavia over the mass executions and
shootings not to mention the internment
program and as a result it sought a new
way to deal with the issue of getting
rid of the Danube Swabians permanently
in another way. In the fall of 1946 the
camp commanders turned a blind eye to
the mass flights out of the camps into
nearby Hungary. Whoever was caught
attempting to escape was brought back to
the camp and all that the prisoner
possessed was taken away from him or
her. But this really had little effect
upon other inmates attempting to
escape. In response to that the camp
commanders and other officials changed
the “escape route into Hungary” into a
lucrative business. They tolerated a
group of middlemen who would organize
mass escape groups called “transports”
and personally guide and lead them
across the frontier into Hungary.
Anyone who wanted to join such a
“transport” had to pay one thousand
Dinars and of course the commanders
received their cut. These “official
transports” were never stopped or
apprehended by the border guards. They
were known as “white transports”
compared to the “illegal” attempts by
amateurs who went “black” across the
border. That whole winter witnessed a
flood of transports across the border
and the business flourished. It would
finally end in the fall of 1947.
The
camp commanders secretly made millions.
Transports left every night and often
the numbers were up to several hundred.
Everyone had to pay the one thousand
Dinars even small children in the arms
of an adult or older sibling. It has
been estimated that the escapees paid in
the neighborhood of ten to twenty
million Dinars to the operators and
commanders. But after having been
robbed of everything they possessed
where did the money come from? Above
all this demonstrates the close
relationships that many of the Danube
Swabians had with the other
nationalities, especially the
Hungarians, Slovaks and Orthodox Serbs
who were often middlemen as well for
family members who had escaped to
Germany and Austria and sent them the
funds. But there were always those who
had “no one” outside, whose only
alternative was to go “black” or
illegally. The number of those who were
able to save themselves from the camps
at Gakowa and Kruschevlje has been
estimated at thirty thousand. But when
the camp in Gakowa was closed down in
the spring of 1948 there were still
twenty thousand inmates.
At the
beginning of the fall of 1946 there were
able bodied persons who were removed
from the slave labor camps and were sent
to Gakowa and Kruschevlje. In the
summer of 1947 a new regulation was
introduced where these able bodied
inmates could accept work in coal mines
or collective farms. They would be paid
for their work and could live as free
persons. They really had no other
choice except to remain and die. Most
of them could not raise the money to buy
their way on a “white transport” for
themselves and their family members and
were also afraid to take the “black”
route and were not prepared to die of
hunger if they remained. Faced with
this only other alternative, many of the
able bodied accepted and were scattered
across the country working in mines and
collective farms finding a life for
themselves once more.
A
majority of those who responded were
parents of children who had been sent to
Gakowa, Kruschevlje, Rudolfsgnad or some
other internment camp. Because they did
not know the whereabouts of their
children and as inmates in the camps had
no access to any information, there was
only way for them to begin the search
for their children and a hoped for
reunion with them. Once they gained
their freedom and could earn money they
would be in a position to discover if
there was any word of their children and
if they had survived be reunited with
them. Was it a dream or a hope? They
desperately clung to their hope.
But
there were also others who were still in
various central labor camps far removed
from the possibility of a transport to
Hungary, either white or black. In the
spring of 1948 all of the labor camps
were dismantled. Those able to find
work and were still able to work found
whatever livelihood they could. Those
who were unable to work either found
support from family members or friends.
But the vast majority of them who really
had no one to take them in, were sent to
Rudolfsgnad and then later resettled at
Karlsdorf. There they lived in the old
air force barracks that was called the
“old folks home”. They were not allowed
to leave and lived much in the same way
as they had in the labor camps except
that they had money that they could use
to bargain with the people in the
neighborhood.
(Translator’s note. And now the
saddest page in the history of the
Danube Swabian people is expressed in
this one short paragraph. The ultimate
crime of inhumanity.)
In the
summer of 1946 all the children without
a father or mother resident with them in
Kruschevlje camp were taken away and
brought to the camp at Gakowa. After a
short period of time all these children
and those in the Gakowa camp under the
age of twelve were taken away from their
grandparents or relatives and were
removed to an
unknown destination. It
was only months after that it was
disclosed that the children had been
scattered throughout various state
children's’ homes and orphanages across
Yugoslavia and were being raised as
Serbo Croatians assuming a new name and
identity in order to be lost to their
families and people forever.
