Bikács, in Tolna County: A Short History
By
Henry Fischer
Published at dvhh.org,
Feb 27, 2007 by Jody McKim Pharr
There
had been numerous communities that were
established and once thrived here where
Bikács, as we know it, is currently located
in Tolna County. As a result of the Turkish
occupation after the disaster at Mohács in
1526 the whole region reverted to
wilderness, its population was decimated,
enslaved, went into hiding or fled to the
north. When the Turks failed to capture
Vienna in the siege of 1683 they were routed
and fled back into Hungary with the Hapsburg
forces on their heels. Buda and Pest fell
quickly and then they moved on into the
south liberating what had once been Greater
Hungary from one hundred and fifty years of
occupation and neglect.
At the
request of the Hungarian nobles eager to
reclaim their lost estates the Hapsburg
Emperor Charles VI issued the call for
settlers to redevelop the recovered "new
territories." This invitation was extended
throughout the Holy Roman Empire where the
House of Hapsburg held sway and as a result
a massive population movement began that was
to be forever known as the Schwabenzug… the
Great Swabian Migration… that lasted for most
of the 18th century. The first
phase of this migration was originally
designed to colonize and settle the Banat in
present day Yugoslavia and Romania, but the
vast majority of the recruited settlers
"jumped ship," along the Danube and settled
on the estates of Hungarian landlords. This
was especially true in Tolna County, in
which Bikács is located. It was assumed, by
many, that the first settlers, and those who
followed them to Bikács were part of this
Schwabenzug, when in reality they came from
Western Hungary, the narrow strip of
territory along the Austrian frontier that
the Hapsburgs controlled after partitioning
Hungary with the Turks.
The
invitation to settle in the "new
territories" was also spread abroad in what
remained of Hungary and Slovakia, and
throughout their history the German settlers
in Tolna County were well aware of Hungarian
and Slovak settlements alongside of their
own. But for many, these German settlers,
who spoke a distinctive dialect of their own
and claimed to be Heidebauern were a mystery
to most of them.
What
proved to be unique in both the settlement
and ongoing life and development of Bikacs
was that it remained a purely Heidebauern
community, unlike Györköny, which later
welcomed Hessian settlers in their midst.
The earliest records seem to point to the
founding of Bikacs by Heidebauern settlers
some time between 1725-1736. But strangely
enough the birth records of the Roman
Catholic Church in Paks on the Danube list
the first baptism as Jakob Pamer of Bikacs
in 17.04.1721. This entry is soon followed
by: Hackstock, Fritz, Weiss, Matern and
other familiar Heidebauern family names that
are listed as residents of Bikács. This
seems to indicate that this original
settlement was done on the sly. There was a
royal decree that stipulated: "Peasants who
leave their master’s estate and flee to
another County, must be ordered to return at
the command of the Emperor." In effect they
were fugitives and were most secretive about
their origins, which would confound
researchers in the future. Their landlords
simply kept quiet about their numbers and
origins for the sake of their own
advantages.
The
original settlers were from Vas County, the
Heideboden (Moson County) and the region
around the Neusiedler See and some came from
Steinamanger (modern day Szombathley).
These settlers came in small groups, usually
extended families, over a number of years.
They were renowned for their agricultural
skills, vineyard cultivation and
cattle-raising that they introduced into the
village economy.
According to the church records the settlers
came to Bikács to escape persecution and
find freedom to live out their Evangelical
Lutheran faith. The Lutherans had been
forced to go underground, after the Decade
of Sorrows in the late 17th
century, when over 800 Lutheran and Reformed
Churches throughout Hungary had been
confiscated and the pastors and
schoolmasters had been exiled or sold as
galley slaves in Naples. To all intents and
purposes these Heidebauern passed themselves
off as Roman Catholics publicly but formed
household churches in their homes and
maintained their Lutheran heritage and
teachings in that way. There were probably
other reasons as well, such as the fact that
the nobles promised them more freedoms and
privileges than they enjoyed at home, and
there had been some severe droughts in
Western Hungary.
The most
obvious telltale sign of their Heidebauern
origins is their family names which can be
found in the eastern and northern sections
of the Neusiedler See region: Schmausser,
Meixner, Fischer, Blaser, Forster, Hackstock,
Hackl.
These
original settlers signed a contract with
Lord Daroczy who promised them religious
freedom and the freedom of movement, which
had been denied them in the past. This was
similar to what the future “Swabians” were
also granted by Count von Mercy in the other
Tolna settlements.
We
discover quite early that there were also
Magyar (Hungarian) Lutherans among them, who
had lived with them in the Heideboden. In
1734, Lord Daroczy officially granted
religious freedom to the community. For the
purpose of holding services, George Forster
offered his home as a prayer house. The
services were in both Hungarian and German,
but eventually the Hungarians moved away and
many joined the new congregation in
Szárszentlörincz, while the Bikács
congregation became a filial of the church
in Györköny. The congregation also had a
Levite Lehrer. He was probably one of the
settlers and acted as the teacher in the
school and as lay leader in worship,
performing all pastoral acts except Holy
Communion. One of them was named Istvan
Salamon, while another was Mihaly Ursini.
Life was
hard and difficult in the early years.
Infant mortality was high, and the average
life span for adults was forty, and there
were always epidemics and then the plague
arrived in 1740. But the community survived
and grew and eventually prospered, with more
land under cultivation and herds
increasing.
But then
the world intruded into the life of Bikács.
The following is a partial translation taken
from "Unsere Heimat Bikács 1736-1986":
"On June
21, 1761 the District Judge in Paks, "on
higher authority" issued an order to put an
end to the Evangelical church life and the
exercise of the Evangelical faith on the
part of the people of Bikács. Troops sent
by the County Court dragged off the teacher Ursini producing orders to that effect and
put him on trial at Simontornya. He was
stripped of his office and dismissed. He
was no longer permitted to live in Bikács.
The Lutherans were now without a leader and
they were threatened not to elect a new
teacher in his place. The authorities
wanted to place a Roman Catholic in his
position, but this unleashed great unrest
and opposition on the part of the
congregation. The teacher appointed by the
County officials, a man named Metzger, fled
the village after a few days…
In order
to put down the unrest and opposition, the
son of the widow Schmidt was imprisoned in
the fortress dungeon at Simontornya. But he
was not the only one in Tolna County who
found himself in chains because of his
faith.
But the
people of Bikács did not bend before this
show of power, instead they appealed to the
Empress Maria Theresia. But in spite of
their opposition and protests as well as
their appeal to the Empress they were unable
to achieve their goal, for from 1761 to 1775
they were not allowed to call a pastor, and
the pastor in Györköny was forbidden to
visit or serve his congregation in Bikács.
The Lutherans in Bikács were placed into the
"spiritual care" of the Roman Catholic
priests in Kajdács, to whom they owned their
church dues.
It was
during these difficult and oppressive years
that followed, that a simple, pious midwife,
who is never identified, taught the children
how to read and write and the catechism,
scriptures and prayer. The congregation
held fast to their faith and met in one
another’s homes or haylofts secretly in
order to hold services as their parents
before them had in the Heideboden. These
were sorrowful and difficult days for the
villagers of Bikács…"
But in
1781 the longed for freedom they prayed for
came, through the Edict of Toleration of
Joseph II the new Emperor, and by 1784 they
were granted permission to call a pastor and
build a "prayer house." In their submission
to the emperor we discover that there were
104 houses in the village, housing a total
of 130 families, numbering in all 697
persons.
Bikács
had now arrived and took its place in the
life of the county and the nation of which
they were a part, without giving up their
identity, traditions or faith. That is what
they handed down to their children. But
times were changing. They lived through the
Revolution of 1848 siding with the Hungarian
nationalists under Lajos Kossuth a fellow
Lutheran and bore the consequences of the
Austrian backlash afterwards. They had
become German Hungarians. Ungarn Deutsche.
But they remained Heidebauern to the core.
Economic
conditions were altered and the rural
economy was dominated by the high price of
land and without land how could a
Heidebauern be a Heidebauern? America
provided an answer and became an
alternative. The first to leave Bikács were
the young, and they did so in 1893. They
went to earn money to send back home to buy
land. That was the theory. It did not
become a reality for many. But it took
until April 1927 for the first of them to
leave for Canada according to the church
records and included Julianna Barbara
Rempler nee Grunwald. But most of them
returned home within the year.
With the
coming of the Second World War, the
population of Bikács was caught up in
conflict. An organization that was known as
the Bund sought to unite the German speaking
population of Hungary to preserve their
language in church and school and maintain
their traditions and customs against the
inroads of forced Hungarianization of the
population. But with the outbreak of the
war, the Bund was soon infiltrated by the
National Socialists and their ideology
(Nazism), and Bikács like every German
speaking community in Hungary found itself
divided in its allegiance to the Bund or
remaining loyal to the nation of which they
were citizens. It tore families and friends
and neighbours apart. Hungary had joined
the Axis powers in their invasion of Russia
and many men from Bikács served in the
Hungarian Second Army at the battle for
Stalingrad. It was the final loyalty test.
And then the Regent of Hungary, Admiral
Nicolas Horthy, agreed to the forced
recruitment of all German-speaking citizens
into the German Army and Waffen SS. In the
fall of 1944 all men from the age of 17 to
60 years were forced to enlist in the Waffen
SS. The population of Bikács was angered
and protested but to no avail, this was
happening throughout all of Hungary.
By
Christmas of 1944 the Red Army had over run
and taken all of Tolna County and Baranya
and Somogy. They met little resistance.
There were few battles, limited casualties
and very little damage. It only took days…
Then the
drums beat in the village street as the
Klein Richter (town-crier) announced that
all men between the ages of 17 to 50 years
and all women 17 to 40 years were to report
for registration for labour. On January 4,
1945 several transport trucks with armed
Russian soldiers left with 49 persons from
Bikács on board. On January 10th,
trucks arrived again and took 42 more
persons. They were taken to the Soviet
Union as forced labourers to the area around
Rostov in the coalmining region of Dombas in
Ukraine. They were the "war reparations"
Hungary had to pay for being an ally of
Germany.
Many
became ill. Typhus broke out in the camps.
Labour methods were primitive and dangerous
and as a result there were countless
accidents caused by weakness and hunger and
overwork. The first to become ill, were
sent home. But twenty-one of them perished
there: fourteen men and seven women. There
were three married couples that had to leave
their children behind. There were three
fathers with their sons and two fathers with
a daughter.
But the
worst was yet to come.
Three
men met at Potsdam and redrew the map of
Europe: Joseph Stalin, Harry S. Truman and
Winston Churchill. The Swabians of Hungary
were ordered expelled back to Germany where
they belonged to accommodate the Hungarians
being expelled from Yugoslavia and
Czechoslovakia. This was part of the
"humane population transfer" that would set
all things right in Europe forever. It
meant the expulsion of 15 million ethnic
German throughout Eastern Europe, including
Bikács in the Tolna. During the process,
two million would die.
This
tragedy was re-enacted in Bikács three
times. It was a matter of the collective
guilt of every German man, woman or child.
On November 11, 1946 there were 334 persons
from Bikács who were taken by wagon to
Nagydorog as the bells in the church tolled
and the rest of the population watched in
silence and in horror. They were boarded
onto cattle cars on November 14th
and sent across the border into Austria on
their way to Germany. Six women who
survived the labour camps in Russia joined
them later.
It
seemed as if life was back to normal and
then in late August the Klein Richter beat
his drum along the village street and
announced another expulsion. This involved
177 persons who left on September 1, 1947
heading across Hungary in cattle-cars
towards Czechoslovakia and then on to Saxony
and the Russian Zone of Germany, where they
were later rejoined with twelve more of the
survivors from the mines in Ukraine.
Then
came the final group, on February 16, 1948,
the third deportation. There were another
64 persons involved and sent to East
Germany, where six others from the camps in
the USSR later rejoined them. While at the
same time, another eleven persons who were
interned in Budapest after their release
from the Soviet Union were also deported to
East Germany.
In all,
there had been 586 deportees. The vast
majority of the families who had been
deported to East Germany fled across the
border into the Western Zones. While the
remnant at home sought to find news ways to
live their lives as faithfully as they could
living under the rule of the Red Hapsburgs
in the years to come.
