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Neu-Pasua Today
Neu-Pasua,
A Short Homeland
Book
By Mathias Huber
Translated by Henry Fischer,
Edited by Rose Vetter
The church, the Luther
memorial and the
parsonage were
demolished by the new
inhabitants shortly
after the Second World
War. The Luther Hall
next to the church alone
was spared destruction
and today serves as a
place of worship and has
a cross attached to its
gable. The former neat
and tidy houses have
become quite unsightly.
Because the village is
easily accessible by
roadways to the nearby
capital city of Belgrade
it has been expanded by
its current inhabitants
and a portion of our
former homes have been
subdivided so that
around 14,000 people now
live there. The current
population of Neu-Pasua
are Serbs mostly from
around the surrounding
area as well as people
from more distant parts
of Yugoslavia who are
employed as workers in
Semlin or Belgrade.
Only the portion of rich
agricultural land around
the Pickerle has been
designated and used for
farming by the state
farm collective.
In conclusion to these
observations there are
two comments by persons
of non-Neu-Pasua origin
who have characterized
the village and its
inhabitants as follows.
Long before the Second
World War, a Serb from
the neighboring village
of Vojka was reputed to
have said, “It is good
that we have Swabians
around who drive their
wagons along the bumpy
road through our village
in the early grey dawn
of morning to go
ploughing and harvesting
and make such a noise
that they inadvertently
wake us in our sleep
announcing our own work
day was about to begin.
If there were no
Swabians around we would
have to invent them.”
A former
German soldier from the
Reich, a member of an
anti-aircraft unit, who
had spent a month in
Neu-Pasua and its
vicinity and gotten to
know the people quite
well, returned to
Yugoslavia years after
the Flight as a
tourist. As the editor
of a well-known
newspaper in the West
German Bonn Republic he
wrote about his
impressions, and I
quote: “Neu-Pasua is a
jewel compared to the
other communities around
it, and even today
remains beautiful on the
outside, giving
expression to its past.”
It is beyond dispute
that our people from
Neu-Pasua, as is true in
general of all the
Swabians in the Danube
basin, have fulfilled
their mission as
pioneers and German
colonists in the wider
world and our
descendants can take
pride because of it.
Reutlingen, May
1969
M. Huber
[Published at DVHH.org 18 Aug 2009]
Next:
The
Neu-Pasua Homeland Committee and Its
Task
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