Outskirts Press, INC.

A JOURNEY THROUGH TITO’S DEATH CAMPS

This memoir conveys the journey of ethnic Germans living in an area that had changed to a non-German nationality after WWI in southeastern Europe. The towns existed because during the Austria-Hungary reign, people were asked to resettle there from northern areas of that empire. The author tells the story of her life that began in a town called Franzfeld, not too far from Belgrade. The town now is called Kacareva.

During and after WWII, the village was occupied by the German Army, then the Russian Army and ended up under Tito’s regime. The men were away in the war. This town, along with other German towns, was drastically changed after the Russians came through in 1944. The Russians took men and unmarried women with them to rebuild their war-torn country. These workers lived in camps with little food and had to perform hard labor.

When Tito came to power, the Germans were stripped of all their rights. In 1945 all Germans were forced into concentration camps, many of them known as death camps.

The author and most of her family survived, and because of her mother’s courage, escaped to Austria in 1947. After re-uniting with her father, it took the family five more years to find a permanent home in America.

ONE PERSON STILL MISSING

Now all of my immediate family was together except for Adam, my brother. He was still back in Franzfeld with the other young people, taking care of the horses that pulled the wagons for the farm work still going on there. Mom was finally fully recovered from her illness and was back to work in the fields. My aunt Lisi’s daughter, Kati, was also still in Franzfeld. So she and my mother decided that summer, it was July, that they would try to get them. They asked around and found other ladies that had the same idea. Together with two more mothers they decided that now was the time.

The distance from Rudolf to Franzfeld was about 40 km. The women left the camp the next morning as usual with the rest of the field workers. Soon after they got out to the fields to work, the women excused themselves to go to the bathroom in the cornfield. They did not return to the workforce, but took off to the south on foot, toward Franzfeld.

The four of them fared well for a while, but then a partisan spotted them and decided that they needed to be taken to the next police station. There was not much they could do about it, since he had a rifle. He was taking them on a country road towards the nearest town. As they walked with him, they tried to decide what to do. Since they spoke in German, he did not know that they were scheming to escape him. They decided, that if an opportunity presented itself, they would all take off in different directions into the cornfields that lined both sides of the road. Sure enough, there was a time when the man did not pay much attention to them. Mom and Aunt Lisi took off in two different directions to the right side of the road, and the other two women took off to the left, into the cornfields. Mom said that she just kept running for a while and then stopped to listen. She did not hear anybody in the cornfield behind her. The partisan apparently didn’t want them badly enough to go after them, or could not decide which way. After a little rest, Mom and my aunt found each other again and they continued on their journey. Later they learned that the other two women had returned to the Rudolf camp.

Around noon they came to a river they had to cross. This river is called “Temesch” in German. They walked along the shore for a while and then came upon field workers having lunch. The workers were Serbian, but they still shared some of their food with Mom and Aunt Lisi. The workers also informed them that there was a man with a boat that had just crossed the river. The man would be getting back shortly, and he would probably take them across. When the man returned with his boat, he did take them across and even gave them directions as to which was the safest way to Franzfeld.

As they continued on their journey into evening and dusk, Aunt Lisi thought she saw somebody walking in front of them on the road. It was getting dark and they could not be sure, but they surely didn’t want to be caught again. They decided to get off the road and walk hidden in the cornfields for a while. This made it harder to walk, but it was better than being caught again. When they thought that maybe they were past the man, they came out to the road again. They did not see anybody and they were never sure, if there had been a person or not. I’m not sure if they slept at all that night, but I would think that they might have slept a couple of hours and then continued the journey. Since it was summer, they could have slept in a field.

It took them a day and a night to get back to Franzfeld. When they got there, sometime in the morning they snuck into town.