Vojvodina Germans Seek Moral and Cultural Rehabilitation
By Darko Sper, Zrenjanin



ZRENJANIN - Franz Jerger, 72, holds firmly a snapshot of his family while standing in front of a monument to Germans who died in a communist camp in Knicanin, Vojvodina. Almost all his brothers and sisters were killed in the camp immediately after World War II. As he remembers these events, his eyes begin filling with tears.

In fluent Serbian the old man, a German born in the Vojvodina town of Pancevo, recounts how in 1945, from a camp in Banatski Brestovac, he was transferred to the camp in Knicanin, formerly Rudolfzgnad, near Titel. The same fate was shared by thousands of his fellow Vojvodina Germans at the end of 1944 and the beginning of 1945, when the German occupiers of Yugoslavia were defeated and forced to withdraw.

In the years that followed, Jerger lost almost his entire family in the communist camps in the province.

"Before that my father was shot dead near Knicanin, having been forced to join the German army during the war," says Jerger, wiping away the tears with his sleeve. He adds that only he and his sister, three years his senior, survived the horrors of the Knicanin camp.

"I was 14 then. I was the first to get sick in the winter of 1945. Later that winter and in 1946, I lost my mother, three sisters and two brothers. I recovered towards the middle of 1946," he continues. At about that time "some Americans" came in and powdered them against lice. "They gave us some cornmeal to improve our diet. I told myself that as soon as I recovered I
would flee," Jerger says.

Yet he was so weak that he couldn't even walk; his only mode of transportation was crawling around on his knees and his bottom. The recovery took very long, and in the summer of 1946, he fled to the town of Centa, where he hid for about one month. The partisans discovered him and sent him back to the camp. Only three days later, however, he fled again.

"In Centa I found shelter with a man named Uncle Vasa, whom everybody called Dinar. He took me in and protected me. I took care of his sheep. Several times armed partisans in civilian clothes called on him to get me, but each time Uncle Vasa said he wouldn't hand his Francika over to them. This is what he called me. He protected me each time," Jerger says.

He has been living in Germany since 1964. Remembering gets harder every time and Jerger says that he hasn't met anyone who survived "the communist terror" in the Knicanin camp. The pre-war photographs he holds are the only things he has left from that period.

"I remember one boy my age and who also fled the camp, with 12 or 16 other inmates. They tried to swim the Tisa River, but everybody except him drowned," says Jerger.

The communist government of Yugoslavia issued a decree in 1944 stripping the Germans in Yugoslavia of their citizenship, voting rights and all property because of German atrocities during WWII. Persecution and assimilation followed. The few who survived this had their citizenship and property taken away, though this was never confirmed by law. Most of their property was granted to migrants from poverty stricken parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Croatia, whom the communist government resettled in Vojvodina.

Jerger survived the persecution and returned to his native Pancevo, where he completed a course at a trade school. He says he is proud that in 1953 he did his military service in the Yugoslav People's Army, and afterward married a Serb woman, Vera. Then in 1964, for financial reasons, he left to live with relatives in Germany. He now lives in the German city of Mannheim.

"I was born in Pancevo, and I still feel deep nostalgia for it. Every year I come here to Knicanin. I do not feel hate; if I felt it, I wouldn't have kept returning. I was a child then and I don't know why did they do that to us," he says. He adds that he was aware that the German soldiers did many
atrocities in Vojvodina and Serbia, but that Germans born in Yugoslavia shouldn't have been punished for that.

Every year on November 1, All Souls Day, he arrives to visit the monument to German victims, built only a decade ago.

There are two mass grave near Knicanin in which about 12,500 people were buried. When he is in Knicanin, Jerger visits the graves at least a couple of times. "I always say: 'Vera, I would buy a lawn mower to take care of the graves. After all, that's why I visit'," he goes on to say.

Jerger adds that he did not forget Uncle Vasa. As long as he was alive, he kept visiting him. "I used to bring him suits, shirts, shoes as a gift. Once he asked for shears so that he could shear his sheep. I brought them as well. Uncle Vasa was a good man."

Jerger believes that after the war, about 70,000 children, women and old people perished in the communist camps. Their only crime was that they were Germans.

The chairman of the German National Alliance of Subotica, Rudolf Vajs, who also lost family in Knicanin, says inmates were killed, raped, and left to die without medical or other help.

Vajs says that because of the large number of victims, the communists buried the bodies quickly in shallow graves, and that when Tisa flooded its banks, underground streams would put the bodies out into the river.

"Eyewitnesses say it was horrible -- there would be heads, legs, arms floating in the water. They would then line up German children and force them to push the bodies into the ground with spades. Imagine how horrible it was for the children. All human, civilised and Christian laws were breached when they treated the children and the victims that way," Vajs adds.

He also says there are very few survivors, mostly those who managed to escape from the camps. Once they sneaked out, they frequently received help from Serbs living nearby.

"They would give them food and medicine. They also gave them salt, because they weren't given any, which causes nervous disorders and death," says Vajs. He adds that well-off Serbs who openly opposed the communists, were also killed.

Vajs goes on to recount how in Knicanin a "slave labour market" was set up.

"When they were finally satisfied with the number they killed, they would lease the inmates to local Serbs to work their land. The Serbs paid a so-called head tax and took the tortured people home. There they would feed and clothe them," Vajs said.

"They tried to take as many girls and women with children, allegedly to do some female chores, but in fact to save them from starvation, the cold, and certain death. As human beings, they did what they could," says Vajs and adds that a part of his family survived thanks to Serbs.

Vajs also says that during the German occupation his family protected their Serb neighbours, and that they in turn, in 1944, took in the female members of the family "to protect them from being raped by the partisans and soldiers of the Russian Red Army."

"This is why my family has an almost genetic understanding with our neighbours, that we should protect and help each other. I owe the fact that I, as a German, am alive and standing here to the Serbs from Banat," Vajs concluded.

Witnesses say that not even after the Knicanin camp was closed down in 1948, were the imprisoned Germans set free. They were forced to work for the next three years and only then, with the money they had collected, could they buy their freedom if they wanted to emigrate.

Vajs says it shouldn't be difficult to determine how many bodies were buried in mass graves in Vojvodina. He says technology has become so advanced that satellite photographs can be used to find locations containing human remains because they emit small quantities of caesium.

"But let's not boast of the number of victims. We aren't mentioning them to collect war damages, because that is not in the spirit of the German people. We only want people to know of these events, for the sake of future generations so that it doesn't happen again," says Vajs firmly.

The chairman of the Association of Danube Germans, Hans Supric, says Vojvodina Germans are seeking complete "moral and cultural rehabilitation." "We want the Germans recognised as one of the nations that used to live and still live in this territory. There is no collective responsibility, and we do not want to suffer collective punishment," says Supric.

A new Yugoslav minority protection act granted the Germans the right to present themselves as an ethnic minority. Representatives of their associations claim that what is most important for them is to obtain moral satisfaction from Yugoslavia. They don't care about their confiscated
property. Even if they could get their Yugoslav citizenship back, they would be unlikely to accept it, because German laws don't allow for dual citizenship.

It is estimated that almost half a million Germans lived in Vojvodina before the war. Today, there are several thousand.

(BETA)