Our lost Donauschwaben Children
The most tragic chapter of our
Danube Swabian tragedy.
Rosina T. Schmidt
Edited by Cornelia Brandt
Our Danube Swabian ancestors
lived for centuries in ethnic German communities surrounded by other nations,
like islands in a sea. They were far away from their mother country but firmly
kept their identity in custom and language and stayed untouched for centuries
by political events of the place of their original roots. For them their
language was their identity.
All that changed as the
hurricane winds of WWII swept over them, and in a matter of days they lost
everything that they had achieved over generations. When they had to flee the
place of their birth where their parents and grandparents and the grandparents
of grandparents were born, they left much poorer than when they arrived there
250 years earlier. So once again they stood there with nothing, once again
they had to start from scratch.
Those who managed to flee
before the Red Army invaded the Danube Schwabian ancestry lands were the lucky
ones. In Austria and the ravaged Germany they were not met with open arms, and
no one believed their stories of what wealth they had left behind.
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1944 Refugee Convoy -
Sketch by the author |
But from all the hardships
and genocide that befall us Danube Swabians, the most cruel and most shocking
tragedy is the fate of our lost children in communist Yugoslavia.
Today we know that between
40,000 to 45,000
Donauschwaben children below the age of 14 were sent into Tito’s starvation
camps and at least 6,000 (13%) starved to death. The torture of children was
programmed together with the internment of all ethnic German civilians.
Particularly cruel was the brutal taking of children from their mothers as
almost all young women were shipped as work slaves to Russia.
It is also documented that
over 20,000 children were taken from those camps and sent to orphanages spread
all over Yugoslavia. Siblings were separated, most children received Slavic
names and they were sent to areas far away from their ancestral homes in order
to be raised with a new ideology in a new language in order to make out of
them true patriots of the Tito’s state. This re-nationalization process runs
against the human rights and personal dignity as per the UN declaration in
1948.
That was 65 years ago and
there is nothing that we can change now. But it is our duty not to forget
them. Those were our people!
As winds of war took their
turn, our Donauschwaben were advised by wiser folk to leave while they could
and in Slavonia and Syrmien, where the Danube Swabian villages were closer to
war exposure, most of the inhabitants left in long colons going West, but the
Banaters who were familiar with various natural disaster like hunger, famine,
loss of harvest, floods and upheavals of various kinds decided to stay, as
they also knew that one just had to have patience and better times would come
again. Of course one assumed that there would be political changes after the
war was finally over, but for centuries now they successfully lived with the
motto loyalty to ethnicity and loyalty to the state and once
again they would adjust.
As the Soviets occupied
the Pannonian Plains, where more than ½ million ethnic Germans lived, they
turned over the military administration to the partisans. Those partisans were
not part of a disciplined army, but a roughshod group of thugs from Bosnian
and Serbian mountains, who considered Danube Swabian assets their rightful
war booty and handled as such.
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1944 - Cetniks - Herwig Pimiskern Archives
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Were those partisans
afraid of resistance? Of course not! All the men were on the Front, only
women, children and old men were left at home and had no means of offering any
resistance.
Tito’s administration in
Belgrade decreed a law on 21st of November 1944, that
1.
All
ethnic Germans living in Yugoslavia as of that day automatically lost their
citizenships and citizenship rights.
2.
All
the assets of persons of German ethnicity, liquid and real estate are
automatically confiscated by the state as of that day.
With that law those 200,000
of Danube Swabians, who still resided in Yugoslavia as of that day, became
outlaws. Both Moscow and Belgrade wanted to get rid of the ethnic Germans
once and for all.
The leaders of the Soviet
Army insisted to be repaid by the Yugoslavian government for the costs it took
to occupy Yugoslavia, or in their words to ‘free’ Yugoslavia. Belgrade was
bankrupt and had no means of doing so. Yet the Soviets insisted. If Belgrade
could not pay in gold, they could pay in workers, which were desperately
needed in the war torn Soviet Union.
Paying with workers? Now that
was easy! There were all those Donauschwaben outlaws one could do with what
one wanted. So they talked of work reparations (Arbeitsverpflichtungen) and
went into Danube Swabian villages to collect the workers. In Banat’s town of
Apatin alone, 2,400 women were deported to the Soviet Union and in all of
Banat not counting the women of the other Danube Swabian areas, Batschka,
Slavonia, Syrmien, Bosnia, more than 40,000 women were taken.
At Christmas 1944 all men
from 18 – 45 and all women from 18 –30, later up to the age of 35 were
deported. Seized from their homes and sent by train in unheated cattle cars up
to 17 days through Russian winter to the mines in Kriwoi Rog and Stalino.
And in most cases their children had to be left behind by themselves.
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Stefan Jäger - 1944 Expulsion
What nightmares did those
mothers go through, worrying about their children left all alone? What
nightmares must they have had while toiling deep down in the mines and had no
means of getting in contact with home? Three, and in many cases five long
years, if they ever left Russia at all. Only one out of three of those women
made it home.
Home? There was no home. They
were abandoned in East Germany, broken down, sick and at the end of their
despair. For them a new Leidensweg began: the search for the husband,
children, and relatives.
For the children, though, who
had to be left behind the separation from the mother must have been an
unspeakable horror. That wound would not have healed for the rest of their
lives.
So the children stayed
behind. Life for the children improved somewhat, where there were older
siblings who could look after the little ones, or the grandparents close by to
help overcome this inhumane ordeal. In homes where the children were left
completely by themselves, the kindness of the neighbours touchingly smoothed
the pain. Depended on each other for support the Donauschwaben had developed a
thriving community spirit in those 2 centuries of living in the midst of other
nations.
Alas, now the partisans were
the masters, and no one was safe from theirs atrocities. The Partisans
collected all those Danube Swabians who were still there, those children, and
the old people and put them in the concentration camps. Those who could work
ended up in the slave labour camps and the others in Tito’s most infamous
starvation camps. Like Rudolfsgand and Gakovo starvation camps.
The A.V.N.O.J. –Antifašisticko
Vece Narodnog Oslobodjenja Yugoslavije- planned that in three years time;
by 1947 there would be not one ethnic German left in all of Yugoslavia.
The number statistics prove
that by 1948 when most of the starvation camps were closed of the 200,000
Donauschwaben imprisoned in them there were only a few ten thousands people
still alive.
The white death
as the hunger was called, was a simple way of Tito’s administration to deal
with the Danube Swabians. Each day a living room size hole was dug out where
the dead were thrown in. The Belgrade’s system functioned devilishly
perfectly. The smallest children were the first ones to die.
Father Wendelin Gruber of
Filipowa/Batschka spent some time in the Gakowa death camp as prisoner. He
visited the children’s homes, which were set up in the larger farmhouses
within the camp. 20-30 children in each room were lying around on straw and
scantily covered. Only skin and bones, sick and with infected wounds. Nobody
cared for them.
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Book Cover - Ein Volk Ausgelöscht - L. Rohrbacher
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Survivors talked about an old man in Filipowa, a grandfather, who collected
all of his grandchildren from the homes of his sons who were drafted and from
the homes of his daughters who were deported. There were 28 of them that ended
up in the starvation camps.
Another old man described the abandoned children’s situation as such: “The
children sat around, cried, and if someone threw them a watermelon peal to
eat, they would be happy for the rest of the day.”
By 1947 the rumor about those
starvation camps reached America and Tito’s administration finally and
reluctantly was forced to do something about the camp’s children. They looked
for a ‘humane’ way of dealing with the kids and decided it would be smarter to
raise them in their own communist ideology. The children of 3 years and
younger would not remember their names, or parents or where they came from, so
they were sent to the orphanages where they were trained to have an aversion
for all things German. Perhaps they might even train the boys to be Tito’s
future Janitscharen, as the Turks did with the Serbian male population
centuries before.
One of those children,
Katharina Sesko, nee Mandel of Sekitsch
wrote about it in her memoire:
“It was in the summer time
that a horse-cart drove through the Gakovo camp and collected all the
children, who no longer had any relatives with them. We were brought to a
house in Gakovo, where already other children were waiting. A little bit later
all of us were taken away. We were brought to Stara Kanjischa, where
already some 350-400 children from diverse camps were assembled.
The first slice of bread
and milk after such a long time we received in Kanjischa. Seeing the bread our
eyes were popping out. All of us children were grossly malnourished and
starving and quite a few of us were ill. Now we received medical care and also
had enough to eat.
After we recuperated we
were spread on different orphanages together with Serbian children, just a few
ethnic Germans in each orphanage, so we would learn the Serbian language. I
was in the orphanage in Sombor.”
In an open letter the
Salzburger Nachrichten (Salzburg’s News) on January 1950 reported about
the tragedy of the 40,000 Danube Swabian children and their parents in
Yugoslavia, but there was no reaction from Eleanor Roosevelt who was
representing “human rights” at the UN at that time.
Professor Adalbert Gauss from
Batschka traced in 1950 more than 40 of those orphanages about which he wrote
in Kinder im Schatten (Children in the Shadow). In his book he claimed
that they were raised with the ideology that the state was their mother and
father, to whom they owed absolute obedience.
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Hirsch Family ca. 1941- Helga Wilson Archives |
Helga and Erika, two sisters from Velika Greda (Georgshausen) one was 4
and the other 2 years old when their grandmother Katarina Hirsch died in 1945
in Rudolfsgnad’s starvation camp in whose care they were left, as well as
their little cousin Petar Bayerle. Their father was killed on the Front by
that time and the mother was deported to the Soviet Union. They were taken to
different orphanages one in Prilep and the other in Kumanovo, both in
Macedonia, where they soon learned perfect Macedonian and did forget all the
German they knew.
Helga remembers that first thing each morning they had to sing the national
anthem and salute to the photographs of comrade Tito and comrade Stalin. One
day there was only the photograph of comrade Tito with no explanation given.
Both of them kept their German names though and Helga had a nickname ‘macka’
(pussy cat), as she was one of the youngest there. The word ‘mom or mother’
was never mentioned, as if such a word or person just did not exist. Helga
remembers receiving a parcel from her uncle in Canada. She had no clue of the
meaning of ‘uncle’, nor could she keep any of the parcel’s contents.
The children slept 2-3 in one bed, and each morning they had to line up in the
huge yard to wash their faces in the huge basin filled with cold water.
Frequently they were surprised by the dreaded call for a de-lousing session.
They partnered-up and sat amongst the ruins in the huge yard and checked each
other’s head for lice. If lice or scalp sores were found their head was
shaved and benzene poured over it.
There was no celebration of Birthdays or Christmas or Easter, etc. However,
when some dignitary came to oversee the situation at the Orphanage they were
assembled, standing in salute while singing Druze Tito. This is one time when
they got a special treat, ‘a slice of white bread’ …what a treat that was!
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Family Schetterer from Schowe, 1942
-Johann Schetterer
Archives |
Johann Schetterer
from Schowe, the son of same named father and Elisabeth Heinz, nearing the end
of war, came with his mother to Novi Sad’s internment camp at the age of
three. His family was known as Schetris which was the name that he was
registered under. After his mother’s death he was transported with other
children in 1947 to the orphanages in Slovenia. In 1949 he arrived in the
Slivnica orphanage with Adolf Hauer, another child from his village.
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Former Slivnica Orphanage
- Johann Schetterer Archives
|
It was quite a cruel childhood. The
children’s responsibility beside schoolwork was also to work on the fields and
in the gardens. There were 12 cows and quite a few of pigs that the children
had to take care of. Corporal punishment was a daily order, and for the
slightest misbehavior, food was withheld for a day.
By 1953 his village friend Adolf
Hauer was reunited with his family in Germany, but because Johann’s name was
registered as Schetris (later spelled as Cetri) and he did not know any other
name, he stayed in different orphanages eventually finishing high school and
learning the trade of car mechanic.
Johann was all of 21 years old when
he finally discovered his real name by going to the Red Cross archives in
Belgrade. There he was able to trace the address of his village and his
orphanage friend Adolf Hauer in Germany. Adolf’s older sister knew the real
name of Schetris, and was also in contact with Johann’s extended family
members. As luck would have it, Johann received his father’s address and was
thrilled to be reunited with his dad in 1962. His father had been searching
for his missing son Johann after being released from the French prisoner of
war camp in 1950. To speed up the matter, Johann escaped illegally over the
border and was reunited with his father in Austria.
Another orphan child
traced was Christian Heinz, born on 24 March 1940 in Neu Schowe to Adam
Heinz and Philippina Wolf. Philippina died in Jarek’s starvation camp on 29th
of December 1945 and her three sons Martin, Adam and Christian aged 16, 14,
and 5 stayed in the camp. Christian at 5 was taken to an orphanage and the
family to this day is still desperately searching for any traces of him. Adam
and Martin were smuggled out of the camp and live in Germany.
The book of Professor Gauss’ “Kinder im Schatten” publication in 1950, which
included 53 eyewitness reports, initiated some movement in the rescue of the
children. Under the pressure from most of the world, particularly the
International Red Cross and other organizations, the Yugoslav government
reluctantly established a ‘repatriation delegation office’ in Vienna, where
thousands of requests for missing children poured in. They insisted that the
original birth certificate would be provided, before they would even look at
the papers.
One has to understand what kind of impossible fact that was. The parents were
dragged from their homes with minutes of notice and stripped of everything
they had on them. They stayed for years in the starvation camps or the Soviet
Union slave labour mines or were on the front, before they managed to reach
the freedom with only their lives.
Tito’s government even insisted that those requests and documentation be
written in Serbian, sometimes even in the Cyrillic writing. It was all
deception and delaying tactics.
Yet it was hugely important to get in contact with those children, even if
only in writing. They were separated for almost 10 years from their parents.
Seldom were the letters as important as in those times and situations.
After some of the children
finally found out where their mother was deported to, one 9 year old girl, who
was at the time of abduction 3 years old, wrote to her mother:
‘My
dear, good mother, when I think on that word when I said: “mother do not go
away, and you had to go, it was an unbearable pain for you and me.”
Another heart wrenching story
talks about a boy, hardly three years old: The father went missing in the war
in 1941. The mother was deported to Russia in 1944 and he ended up with his
grandparents in Gakovo’s starvation camp, where he slept on straw between his
grandparents. When he woke up one morning both of the grandparents were dead.
This boy was sent later to one of the states orphanages in Krsko. His mother
after her release from Ukraine- managed to trace him from where he wrote in
Slavic:
“Dear Mother! I was thrilled to receive your
letter. I am so glad to know that there is one person in the world who loves
me. I was with grandfather and grandmother in the camp but both of them died
in the same night. Then I was all alone… ”
Our Danube Swabian children were highly manipulated in those orphanages.
Specifically the older children were made to believe that their parents
purposely abandoned them. They made those children believe that their parents
were hard-core fascist, while actually most of them were just farmers. In same
cases when some of those children were reunited with their parents, those
manipulated children spat in the parent’s faces and refused to go with them.
Let’s return briefly to the story of Helga and Erika, originally from
Velika Greda, who we left in two orphanages in Macedonia. In the meantime
their mother was released from Stalin’s slave labour mine camp in 1947 and
brought by train from Russia more dead than alive to East Germany. She managed
to drag herself across the country and reach West Germany with the last of her
strength virtually crawling across the border to freedom.
Eventually she found a housekeeping job in Bavaria, but because Bavaria was
already overflowing with refugees they did not accept any families, so the
mother found work on a farm in Wuerttemberg. First of all she got in contact
with the Red Cross where she found out that her brother in Canada did initiate
the search for the girls already.
Today we know that more than 5,000 named children were reunited with their
families. 5,000 reunited and those 6,000 who starved to death of the 45,000 of
Danube Swabian children. And the others?
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Letter from the orphanage in Celje,
Slovenia, that their pupil DAVID SADLES died in 1948 on tuberculosis. -
Family Sandles archives.
If one travels today through Macedonia for instance, one will be surprised to
find blue eyed and blond people surrounded by dark heads. Those blond people
themselves must wonder about their origin. Did they ever receive their
original birth certificates? Do they know their real names? In former
Yugoslavia one still does not talk about those children, as if it never
happened. Dr. Geiger in Zagreb is one of the brave souls who published a few
articles on those lost Donauschwaben Children.
But we must do more.
As
aforementioned, Katharina Sesko, nee Mandel
of Sekitsch was placed in the
Rudolfsgnad camp. She continued in her memoir:
“After the camp was closed my Oma received permission to return
to Sekitsch. I could visit her during the holidays. My father returned from
the concentration camp in 1949 and we stayed in Sekitsch until 1951. In the
meantime my mother came from Russia’s slave labour camp to Salzburg, Austria.
She helped us to join her that year.”
Erika and Helga where reunited with their mother trough the Red Cross. It took
the uncle in Canada and their mother in Germany seven years to be reunited
with the girls.
Helga described it this way:
During spring 1951 Erika
and I were re-united in Kumanovo with the purpose of being transported to
Germany to meet our mother. After the papers were processed in Belgrade we
were put on a train. We were given a coat and a small suitcase. I don’t know
what the contents were in this little suitcase, and as we recall, it never
occurred to us to check it out. There appeared to be a male escort with us
but he did not speak with us or explain to us where we were going. We were
frightened of the uniformed officer who approached us during a brief stop at
some border crossing. Erika and I never spoke of what is ahead of us; we were
‘strangers’ to each other.
On April 17, 1951 we
arrived at the Refugee Centre in Kornwestheim, Germany where we were told that
our mother would be picking us up. Neither Erika nor I were overjoyed,
excited or anxious. There was only ‘acceptance’ and suspicion. When mom
appeared we were non-emotional and had a feeling of detachment. She meant
nothing to us! I believe that is because of all those years of not being
allowed to question or show emotion. …. You did what you were told to do
without questioning. There was apprehension about leaving the Orphanage…how
could there not have been as, after all, we felt safe in the confinement of
this enclosed camp.”
Erika remembers a specific incident:
The parents were on the podium, while the children waited for their names to
be called. At last only Erika and Helga stood there holding hands, while on
the podium were 2 women. One was extremely skinny and the other quite the
opposite. Nine-year-old Erika prayed silently that the corpulent one would be
the mother, as anyone so well fed must be surely from America.
It turned out that the mother was the skinny one and the other lady the farmer
who helped their mother pick up the girls with her horse and buggy. While in
the buggy, both girls received each a large pretzel, something that they have
never seen or knew what to do with it. A lick tasted salty, so Helga whispered
to Erika in Macedonian, the only language that she new
“lets throw it away, they want to poison us”.
However, they soon discovered
that their mom was a very loving, warm and caring person and learned to love
and respect her tremendously.
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Helga and Erika with mom Anna Hirsch, 1953
- Helga Wilson
Archives. |
For us Danube Swabians those
young people still missing are lost forever. They may be lost, but they will
never be forgotten.
Sources:
Gauss,
Adelbert K. «Kinder im Schatten», 1950
Geiger,
Vladimir (prir.) “Radni logor Valpovo 1945.-1946. Dokumenti»
Geiger,
Vladimir «Logor Krndija 1945-1946»
Geiger,
Vladimir “O sudbini folksdojčerske djece u logorima komunističke
Jugoslavije”
Gruber,
Wendelin “In den Fängen des Roten Drachen. Zehn Jahre unter der Herrschaft
Titos”, 1989
Haltmayer,
Josef “Die verlorenen Schwabenkinder”
Hirsch, Helga
and Erika, personal letter to the author.
Laubach, Andreas “Nur mit
meinen Kindern”
Rohrbacher,
Leopold “Ein Volk ausgelöscht.»
Rohrbacher,
Leopold «Die Ausrotung des
Donauschwabentum in Jugoslawien in den Jahren von 1944 bis
1948”, Salzburg, 1949
Rohrbacher,
Leopold “Völkermord der Tito-Partisanen 1944-1948.
Schetterer, Johann, personal
letter to the author.
Springenschmidt, Karl “Janitscharen? Die Kindertragödie im Banat“, Wien 1978.
Wolf, Brigitte, personal
letter to the author.
Dr. Vladimir Geiger:
O sudbini
folksdojčerske djece u logorima komunističke Jugoslavije
September 2010
