The Northern Banat
"Where the lust for murder raged"
Sanad
The
far northern portion of the Banat
had a very small Danube Swabian
population. The liquidation of
these Swabians happened in their own
home communities or in the district
towns of Neu Kanischa and
Kikinda.
The
mixed language village of Sanad was far
to the north. On October 20, 1944 all
of the Danube Swabian men were arrested
and taken to Neu Kanischa and imprisoned
there. For several days they were
brutally beaten by the Partisans. On
October 25th all of them were
shot. Only one of the men was able to
escape and make his way to Hungary. Now
it was the turn of the Swabian women.
The
first group of Swabian women was also
taken to Neu Kanischa and shot. The
other women and children were driven out
of their homes on December 9th
of 1944. Most of them ended up in the
concentration camp at Kikinda. On
December 17th, late in the
evening sixty-four women were shot.
Among them were thirty-two women from
Sanad. Only five of the women from
Sanad remained alive in the camp at
Kikinda. In March of 1945 the new
authorities in Sanad discovered that
four Swabian women had hidden in one of
the homes in Sanad: a mother, her two
daughters and an old woman. They were
apprehended and taken to Neu Kanischa to
be shot. The Partisans decided
to be lenient and not shoot one of
the girls. She said she did
not want to live if the others were
to be shot. All four were
executed.
Kikinda
The
northern Yugoslavian Banat is the site
of Kikinda (Gross Kikinda). There were
twenty thousand inhabitants in the city,
of whom about one third were Danube
Swabians. The rest of the population
was Hungarian and Serbian. In the
vicinity of the city there were numerous
communities with Danube Swabian
inhabitants. Very close to the city was
Nakovo an entirely Danube Swabian
village with a population of five
thousand. To the east were the Swabian
villages of Heufeld and Mastort. In the
north east were the so-called “Welsh
Villages”: St. Hubert, Scharlevil (Charlesville)
and Soltur. Their ancestors had been
French. They originated in Alsace and
Lorraine and had emigrated to the Banat
about two hundred years before in the
time of Maria Theresia along with the
German settlers to resettle the former
Turkish and now depopulated Banat. They
lived in harmony with their Swabian
neighbors and over the years they
assimilated with them and became German
speaking. At the beginning of October
1944 after the Russians marched into the
Banat from Romania they handed over the
control of the Banat to the Partisans
and Communists and all of what these
“French Swabians” had was also taken
away from them. They were driven from
their homes and property and in long
columns were dragged to Kikinda and from
there to various concentration camps
where they were exterminated.
Rose Mularczyk from Heufeld reports:
“On
Octbober 20th at
mid-night we were taken from our
beds by Serbian Partisans. There
were eighty-two men and twenty-two
women. We were imprisoned in the
community center overnight. The
next day we were forced to walk to
St. Hubert. The men in the group
were beaten along the way. The
night of that same day we left St.
Hubert for Kikinda. We were
imprisoned there in the courthouse
and all of the women were placed in
one small cell. On the 22nd
of October we were led to the Milk
Hall. All night long we were
threatened and abused by two
Russians. For five days we received
hardly any food. On November 2nd
the Partisans brought in another
group of men and women, about one
hundred in all from our village of
Heufeld.
On
November 3rd I was an
eye-witness of the first slaughter
of a large group of men. In the
past individuals had been killed
individually. This group of
twenty-two men was brutally
murdered and two of them were from
our neighboring village of Mastort.
The men were first stripped naked,
forced to lie down and their hands
were tied behind their backs. Then
all of them were thrashed with
ox-hide whips. After this torture,
they cut pieces of flesh from their
backs, and others had their noses,
tongues, ears and male parts cut
off. Their eyes were poked out and
all through this they were whipped
and thrashed at the same time. They
were also hit with pipes. At this
time I was with another prisoner in
the ground floor cell of the Milk
House and I could witness all of
this. The prisoners screamed and
writhed in pain. This lasted for
about an hour. The screaming died
down until there was only silence.
The next day when we crossed the
courtyard it was bathed in blood and
tongues, ears, eyes and male parts
lay everywhere.
The
following day all of the married and
single young women were force to do
labor. At the train station we
cleaned the bricks and loaded heavy
stones.
Around November 10th the
Partisans and Russians brought in a
transport of two hundred and eighty
prisoners of war. All of them were
Germans, except for six Italians and
two Hungarians. These soldiers
could no longer walk. They were in
rags and many were ill. I heard one
of the Russian guards who had
accompanied the prisoners tell one
of the Partisans that the prisoners
had had no food or water for six
days. If anyone bent to drink water
in a puddle he was immediately shot
on the spot. In Kikinda they did
not receive any food or water, but
were packed into the cellar. The
prisoners were left there for three
days, with no food or water and were
abused and mistreated in all kinds
of ways I do not want to relate.
Then they were taken out of the
cellar and led away. Most of them
were unable to walk and like animal
carcasses they were tossed on wagons
and driven away. The column set out
in the direction of Schindanger and
from there we later heard the
shooting. Later we learned that
they had all been shot at
Schindanger and were buried there in
a mass grave.
I
along with the other women and young
girls were given the task of house
cleaning and we were somewhat freer
than the others and I always tried
to locate any of the Heufeld
prisoners who might be there and did
find some of my relatives and bring
them water. But one could only do
very little to ease their pain,
through the constant mistreatment
they became apathetic and depressed
and most had been beaten beyond
recognition. One man went around on
all fours and bellowed like a dog.
About eight days after the prisoners
of war were shot, it was on a
Friday, they began to murder Swabian
men. The Partisans announced that
all those men who were sick were to
report to the so-called camp
“hospital” and be looked after.
After the sick men reported in they
had to stand behind the Milk Hall in
the courtyard, forced to strip from
their clothes and were slaughtered
on the spot. We could hear the
screams of the victims from inside
of the Milk Hall where we were
working. The women received some
food but the men got nothing.
Later, additional women were
brought to the Milk Hall from
Kikinda and neighboring
villages. Civilians were
not allowed to enter the Milk
Hall and any who dared to
approach the barbed wire fence
were shot
down.
On
Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays there
were always large numbers of men and
women who were slaughtered. When
one passed through the courtyard
there was nothing but blood, eyes,
ears, tongues, noses, etc. It was
horrible. Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday and Thursday were used to
refill the camp with prisoners,
people who were driven to Kikinda
from the surrounding countryside.
On Fridays the slaughter began
again. Later, I could not see the
"actions" but I could hear them.
The screams of the victims and the
mirth and frivolity of the Partisans
who thought it was all in good fun.
Often men were forced to kneel
together in threes, and were shot in
the nape of the neck and fell in a
pile. A Swabian woman who was from
Mokrin was married to a Russian but
still imprisoned with us. One time
she was able to swipe a potato and a
Partisan saw her and thrashed her
and all of the rest of us had to
watch. The woman was then placed in
the cellar with the men. She was
bound together with several men and
they were forced to lie on the
floor. The Partisans stomped all
over them. Then each person had
their hands tied to their feet and
they had to rise and sit down in
exercise fashion. Most of them
just lay there. They simply could
not go on. Later, all of them were
taken away including the woman in
the direction of Schindanger and
then again we heard the shooting.
Until the end of November I worked
in the Partisan’s kitchen, and then
along with nineteen other women we
were sent to work in the city. Six
of us, including myself were taken
to work in a store. We had to sort
clothes. The other women had to go
washing clothes, and most of them
had belonged to the murdered Swabian
men. Four days later we had to go
to the store again and were no
longer allowed back into the camp at
night, and so we slept in work
place. On one night, an automobile
came and brought clothing. The
clothes were bloodied and there were
bullet holes in all of them. The
cassock of a priest (Father Adam of
St. Hubert) was among them. In the
evening we had to pile up clothes in
one of the rooms, and then we could
see that the rest of the rooms were
piled ceiling high in clothes. The
next day we had to take the clothing
again to the cellar for sorting. We
also found clothing of acquaintances
from our villages who had
disappeared and of whom there was no
trace. I found the clothing of our
schoolmaster. His clothes were
pierced like a sieve and bloody, a
sign that he had been whipped and
tortured. The next day we had to
wash and iron the clothes and some
of the women found items belonging
to their husbands and relatives.
In
the camp at Kikinda there was a
young girl from Charleville. She
was assigned to work in the office
and had to record the names of all
the men brought to the camp who were
murdered or had died otherwise.
Eventually she was sent into the
camp because did not want to marry
one of the Serbian Partisans. He
denounced her and she was to be
shot. She had to write her own
death sentence. She was imprisoned
in the cellar and the door was
nailed shut. That was always the
case for those who had been
sentenced to death. Because of all
she had seen and heard she lost her
nerve and she became hysterical.
The political commissar of Kikinda
of whom the girl was quite fond
spoke against the action taken by
the other Partisan and the girl was
released from solitary confinement.
She was then deported to slave labor
in Russia with many others.
On
December 26th we
convinced the Partisans to let us go
home to get some more clothes for
the winter. On the 27th
of December at 3:00 am we were
loaded on cattle cars and sent to
Russia to forced labor. For many of
us it was a release from an
intolerable situation…”
The
largest extermination camp in the region
was in the city of Kikinda located in
the east end of the community, centered
in the buildings associated with the
Milk Hall. Countless numbers of
Swabians, both men and women perished or
were killed here. The first to be
driven into the camp by the Partisans
were the Swabian men, women and children
of Kikinda who were thrown out of their
homes. They took everything from them
while others took up residence in their
homes and shared their possessions with
one another. The Swabians were killed
one after the other at the camp.
Whenever they were in the mood the
Partisans would select one hundred
Swabians and take them out of the camp
and kill them. Very often the Partisans
tortured and abused their selected
victims, then beat them to death, or
used knives and butchered them like
pigs, or shot large groups of them. The
first mass shooting took place here on
October 8th, 1944 when
twenty-eight were killed that day.
Shootings followed day after day. The
first to be liquidated were the
“leading” Swabians in the region. The
parish priest Michael Rotten of Kikinda
was among them. He had been shot in the
early days of Partisan rule.
Nakovo
Because
so many Danube Swabians from Kikinda had
been liquidated the empty spaces in the
camp were filled by Swabians from the
neighbhoring communities forced there by
the Partisans. One evening in October
1944, sixty-eight Swabian men were
brought in chains from Nakovo. For
three days they were locked up. During
this time they were brutally tortured by
a large group of Partisans. The
Partisans were free to do whatever they
wanted to these defenseless men. They
used their rifle buts on their backs to
injure the men’s kidneys, threw them to
the ground, jumped and stomped on their
stomachs, knocked in their teeth, broke
their ribs and mistreated them in every
way imaginable. This torture lasted for
three days and nights. Then they
dragged them out of town. It was a
Sunday just before sunrise. Close to
the cemetery, but outside of its walls a
large pit was dug. The men from Nakovo
and three men from Kikinda who had been
taken with them, now numbering
seventy-one persons had to strip naked
by the cemetery wall. Later, the
victims’shoes and clothing were traded
by the Partisans. They were tied to one
another with wire, and with thrashings
and blows of their rifles the men were
driven to the edge of the pit. In the
grey dawn these men were butchered with
knives and thrown into their grave. One
man was able to free himself and escape
in the early morning mist, naked as a
jay bird. He was fortunate. They shot
after him but they missed. He fled
across the Romanian border. But the new
city authorities of Kikinda posted
notices that there were now seventy-one
fewer Danube Swabians to deal with in
the Banat.
The
first Danube Swabian liquidated in
Nakovo was Franz Hess who was beaten to
death by Partisans at the beginning of
October 1944. Another man, Josef Kemper
was shot as he drove his wagon home from
work. Johann Kuechel was shot by
Partisans in front of the community
center on May 13th. Nikolaus
Hubert was shot when he was found hiding
in a hay stack. Johann Junker was shot
for no reason at all.
On
December 22, 1944 all of the men from
sixteen to sixty were taken to the camp
in Kikinda and on March 18, 1945 they
took all of the men over sixty years.
These eighty men were taken to do heavy
forestry and lumbering work at Mramorak.
All of them died there including the
former long standing mayor, Johann
Blassmann.
St. Hubert
~ St.
Charleville ~ Soltur
A large
armed Partisan unit set a blockade
around the three “Welsh French” Danube
Swabian communities on October 31,
1944. On the same day, three hundred
Swabian men were driven into the
concentration camp at Kikinda. For
eight days they went without food, but
the Partisans drove them out of the camp
to do heavy labor. When they returned
to the camp at night they had to report
for roll call. Then the Partisans got
the toll of those shot, beaten to death,
or tortured to death the night before.
On November 3rd of 1944 all
of the farmers who had large
landholdings were shot. On the evening
of November 4th after
arriving back at the camp after a day of
hard labor forty of the men in the camp
were sought out. They had to strip
naked and were shot next to the camp.
Their bodies were buried next to the
railway tracks behind the Milk Hall.
On
November 5th all of the
inmates of the camp had to sit on the
ground in one place all day long. At
evening they selected one hundred and
twenty men. Almost all of them were
from the “Welsh” villages. Father Adam
the Roman Catholic priest from St.
Hubert was among them. A heavily armed
woman in Partisan uniform dragged him
out of the line by his black cassock and
beat him ruthlessly, supported and
assisted by other Partisans, simply
because he was a priest. The Partisans
whipped him with an ox-hide belt so that
his gown was torn off of his back. She
boxed his ears, hit him with the back of
her pistol and kicked him in the groin.
But he had to stand up on his own and
offer no resistance. She screamed that
priests were not needed in the new
Yugoslavia and therefore he would be
shot. Like a martyr he accepted what
was happening to him. Then all one
hundred and twenty men plus a few others
chosen by the Partisans were forced to
strip naked beginning with the priest.
They were bound to one another with wire
and had to crawl under a barbed wire
fence and from behind and above they
received blows from the rifle stocks on
their backs. When they reached the area
behind the camp they were machine gunned
to death.
Johann
Tout of Soltur was among the one hundred
and twenty victims, but he was only
grazed at the temple and was
unconscious. For a long while he lay
under the corpses which were only buried
in the morning. During the night he
came to and escaped to his native
village of Soltur. He was stark naked.
He hid out for ten days. Women who
still remained in the village tended his
wounds. But soon the authorities became
aware of his presence. They arrested
him and he was dragged off to Cernje
where he was shot.
A week
later a gruesome massacre occurred in
the Kikinda camp. One morning all of
the Danube Swabian war invalids in the
district, some of them veterans of the
First World War and other elderly men
unable to work were slaughtered. They
were kept locked up in a cellar of the
concentration camp. They were shackled
and beaten and led to an area behind the
camp. They had to undress and give
their clothes and shoes to the
Partisans. They let them wait for a
long time in the cold, so that one of
the old veterans from the First World
War who was an invalid became impatient
and called to the Partisans, that they
were far too old to be tortured like
this any longer and they should shoot
them quickly and get it over with.
After awhile the Partisans ordered them
to lie down in the bottom of the pit.
Whoever would not go, was shoved in. So
they lay there on the earth, one beside
the other, and because the pit was too
small, some were on top of one another.
The Partisans who stood above them began
to shoot into the grave. They were
buried immediately and no one checked to
see if they were alive or dead. The
next day another one hundred Swabian
civilians were killed. Sixty of them
were from Baschaid and forty more from
Kikinda. They were killed in the same
way as the group the day before.
The
large number of remaining older Danube
Swabian women bothered the Partisan
command now that most of the men had
been liquidated. On December 17, 1944
the first group of older and elderly
Swabian women was shot. That evening
for no reason at all another sixty-four
women were selected. Most of these
women were simply too old to work.
Thirty-two of them were from Sanad.
They were all shot the next day in an
area behind the camp.
For
several weeks now with the mass
shootings and executions the thousands
of Danube Swabians who once lived in the
district were reduced to those who were
in the Kikinda camp. Some one thousand
victims were buried in the fields behind
the Milk Hall. Months later the earth
sank where the mass graves were
located. Pigs that came to scrounge for
food and dogs often pulled up bones and
body parts of human beings. When this
became known throughout the city, the
authorities had the land leveled and
sowed oats over it, to hide and cover up
the genocide that had been perpetrated
there.
The
extermination camp at Kikinda earned a
reputation for its gruesome atrocities.
In the summer of 1946 a young man was
successful in escaping. Because of that
all of the remaining inmates were
brutally punished. All of them had to
stand in one spot for three days in the
camp courtyard in the hot July sun.
During these three days they received
nothing to eat. Whoever wavered in any
way had to stand on their toes. The
Partisans then placed a board with a
nail driven through it just under the
heel of the victim so that if he sought
to rest on his foot he would impale
himself on the nail. Just another
example of what the Partisans were
prepared to do to exterminate the Danube
Swabian population as painfully as
possible.
Heufeld
Heufeld
was a Danube Swabian community in the
northern Banat almost on the Romanian
border. In the early days of October in
1944 the Partisans took control of the
area after the Russian Army had moved
through and the leading Swabian men in
the Heufeld and Mastort, seventeen in
all were taken from their homes and
after gruesome torture in neighboring
Kikinda were put to death.
On
November 2, 1944 the Partisans arrested
all of the Swabian men and eighty-six of
them were brought to the town hall.
They also wanted to take Adam
Steigerwald, a seventy-five year old
retired Roman Catholic priest who had
returned to the village where he had
been born. He protested and refused to
the leave rectory. The Partisans beat
him with their rifles and forced him out
of the rectory yard. The Partisans
continued to brutally assault the old
man in one of the rooms in the town
hall. The other Swabian men who were
standing in the courtyard of the town
hall both saw and heard how the old
priest was being manhandled. The
Partisans knocked him down and jumped on
his stomach breaking countless ribs in
the process. Because of his internal
injuries he was unable to rise from the
floor. They tossed him down the stairs
so that he landed at the feet of the men
in the courtyard. Not even now was he
able to raise himself. The Partisans
shot him from the stairs in disgust.
This was the morning of November 2,
1944. In the afternoon the priest’s
body still lay there. Finally, the
Partisans called the Gypsies to take the
body for burial. They stripped him of
his clothes and buried him naked along
with some dead animals.
On the
same day the remaining Swabian men in
Heufeld were driven on foot to Kikinda
where after brutal torture by the
Partisans most of them were killed.
Only three men from Heufeld survived.
Anna
Klein of Heufeld remembers:
“My
father was reported missing in
action from the German army in 1944,
and then in the same year at
Christmas, the Russians dragged off
our mother to go to forced labor.
With hefty sobs we cried after her,
“Momma stay with us! Don’t leave
us!” It was only years later that
we discovered she had been taken to
Ukraine where she along with many
other Swabian women were working on
construction projects.
I
remained behind with my older sister
and younger brother. We lived with
our great Aunt until the spring of
1945 when all of us Swabians were
forced to report at the town hall in
the neighboring village. She got us
already to go and sent the three of
us on our own, because she felt it
was her duty to remain behind with
her mother who was unable to walk.
My sister, who was nine years old at
the time, took us two younger
siblings by the hand and we followed
close behind the rest of the people
from Heufeld.
A
huge crowd of people had already
assembled at the front of town hall
by the time we arrived there.
Because we were terrified and we
were beyond crying we witnessed what
was happening all around us. How
fortunate we were, to be able to
find our grandmother in the midst of
all the weeping and fearful people
who immediately grasped us into her
arms as we clutched her body in
every way we could. We were taken
to the internment camp in Molidorf
where hunger, poverty, fear and need
became greater and greater every
day. We lay on straw with many
other people all packed together.
Many people began to die because of
hunger, exhaustion and mistreatment
and abuse. As children we watched
many people around us starve and
die.
One
day our grandmother was to be among
the victims. In the early morning
she slept longer than usual, and we
did not want to waken her, but she
never woke up, she lay dead there
beside us on the straw. She was
wrapped up in a blanket, and a wagon
that came by every morning to pick
up all of the dead, arrived and took
her along. We were not allowed to
go with her and we watched from a
distance and saw the place where she
was buried in a mass grave. We now
faced everything alone among
strangers. After two years the
Communists took the surviving
children who had escaped death into
their State Homes. This included
the three of us who they considered
to be orphans and put us in the
Children’s Home in Debeljaca. Here
we found ourselves treated like
human beings again, we could even
sleep in beds. But what was most
important to us was the fact that we
could eat to our heart’s content.
During this early period away from
the camp I lived in constant fear of
the future and what it might hold
for me and my brother and sister.
Because of everything we had gone
through I was mistrustful and kept
everything to myself and distant.
Shortly after we had been able to be
rehabilitated physically we were all
sent to different State Homes. We
had all been Swabian children in the
first home but now we were placed
among Serbian orphans. At the age
of nine I entered the Serbian public
school. We had already had a
working knowledge of the Serbian
language but now we were forbidden
to speak German and I could only
speak a few words to my sister in
German secretly in the hiding places
we found. If we had been discovered
doing so we would be severely
punished and have our eating
privilege suspended for a day or we
received a beating.
Slowly but surely I began to lose my
ability to speak in German or even
remember it, until I could only
speak Serbian. But now we were well
treated. They took a special
interest in the state of our health
and children who were still weak
were sent to special
rehabilitation. As a result I spent
some time with a Serbian farm family
and on one occasion I was taken to
the Adriatic coast to Split. The
first letter we received was from my
uncle and for the first time we had
news of our mother and this filled
us with a rising sense of hope.
After years, there was hope and joy
once more after our abandonment.
After what seemed like forever for
us children who held on to our hope
on October 12th in 1950 I
arrived in Germany to meet my mother
for the first time after six long
years.”
Ruskodorf
There
were one hundred and twenty Danube
Swabian families who lived in Ruskodorf.
The remainder of the population was
Hungarian. They were all poor people,
most them did not own land and hired
themselves out as day farm laborers on
the large estates, and the two
nationalities lived in harmony with one
another. After the annexation of this
portion of the Banat to the new state of
Yugoslavia after the First World War
many Slavic colonists were brought from
the south and settled here by the
Yugoslavian government. The estates of
the Hungarian nobles who had left the
county were divided up among these new
colonists and the Hungarian and Danube
Swabian population were not eligible to
buy any of it. After the Partisans came
to power in the fall of 1944 these
colonists wanted to confiscate the homes
and property of the Swabians and see to
their physical extermination. During
the first days of October, there were
twenty leading Swabians in the community
who were taken by force to nearby
Cernje, including four women. Here they
were imprisoned in a cellar along with
many other Swabians from the area and
were brutally abused for several days.
On October 27th most of them
were shot in the meadows just outside of
Cernje where they executed one hundred
and seventy-four of them.
Fourteen Swabian men from Ruskodorf were
taken to the camp at Kikinda and seven
of them were brutally killed shortly
after they arrived. Another group of
men were taken to the camp at Julia
Major where many of them perished.
But in
Ruskodorf itself there were large
portions of the Danube Swabians who were
being gruesomely liquidated by the
Partisans. On November 5th,
1944 two men and one woman were
horrendously slaughtered, the fifty-six
year old machinist Matthias Frauenhofer,
the forty-three year old landowner
Johann Martin and thirty-two year old
Maria Rottenbach. After the Partisans
inflicted all kinds of cuts to their
bodies with knives, they then chopped
off of their arms and legs while they
were still alive with axes. The walls
of the room where these brutal
atrocities were committed were
splattered with blood. Swabian women
were given the task of cleaning up the
mess. The limbless bodies were tossed
in a basket, loaded on a wagon and taken
and buried in the animal cemetery.
There
were ten young women both married and
unmarried who were tortured, violated,
raped and liquidated by an extermination
squad of Partisans made up of eight
young Slavic colonists who lived in
Ruskodorf who were rabid beasts who
committed the atrocity in the presence
of other terrified Swabian women in a
room of the castle residence of the
former Hungarian noble landowner. The
five married women, Katharina Kartje,
Fanni Hass, Elisabeth Martin, Margarete
Frauenhofer and Anna Reff had all of
their finger nails torn off by a pair of
pliers and then their hands and feet
were chopped off with axes and they were
raped and tormented until they died.
All ten women were buried in the animal
cemetery. After this bloodletting the
ceiling of the room remained splattered
with blood.
The
Danube Swabians who remained were in a
local camp in Ruskodorf that was set up
for that purpose. On April 18, 1945
they were driven on foot out of the
village to the camp in Molidorf. A
great portion of them died of hunger
there. Today you will find the Slavic
colonists living in the homes of the
Danube Swabians.
Beodra
There
were seventy-one Danube Swabian families
that lived in Beodra. At the beginning
of October 1944 the Partisans brought
twenty-eight Danube Swabian men, mostly
from other communities to Beodra. They
were imprisoned in the stable of the
police station and during the night they
were hacked and chopped to death. In
addition, ten of Beodra’s Swabian men
and two women were taken from their
homes and imprisoned in the jail and
were abused and tortured for sixteen
days and early in the evening of October
18th, 1944 they were shot at
the community manure pile. The corpses
were later buried. Other Swabians died
as a result of individual acts of terror
by the Partisans. The rest of the
Swabian community was sent to the
extermination camps at Kikinda,
Betscherek and Rudolfsgnad.
Molidorf
In
Molidorf a community in which a thousand
Danube Swabians once lived, the
Partisans established a large
concentration camp in 1945. It was one
of the largest in the Banat.
Approximately nine thousand Danube
Swabians, mostly women and children from
various other communities in the Banat
were brought here. In the year 1946
there were four thousand deaths. They
were simply left to starve. Many of
them were abused and shot. In 1947
Swabians inmates were still being put to
death. In January of 1947 two children
aged twelve and fourteen were shot. In
May of 1947 the camp authorities killed
two women from Soltur, one of whom had
three children and the other four. At
the end of May in 1947 this camp was
closed down. The surviving inmates were
divided up among other camps. But even
now in the resettlement of the survivors
from Molidorf, the women were beaten by
the Partisans along the way to the new
camps. The old and sick people who were
unable to travel were simply left behind
to die because there was no one to care
for them.
