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The Northern Banat
"Where the lust for murder raged"
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.
(Following the First World
War the Banat was divided
between Yugoslavia &
Romania, with two thirds
going to Romania & one
third annexed to Yugoslavia)
Österreichische
Historiker-Arbeitsgemeinschaft Für Kärnten und Steiermark
(Austrian Historian Working
Group for Kärnten and Steiermark)
Translated & contributed by
Henry Fischer |
