Welcome to my site. I have researched and produced interactive web based Ortsippenbuchs for the villages of Sotin (Sotting), Croatia and Backo Novo Selo (Bacsujlak), Hungary Hopefully this will help people researching their ancestors.
Bačko Novo Selo
Novoszello Neudorf Bacsujlak Background
01
History
Bačko Novo Selo was historically populated by Danube Swabians. Following the end of the Second World War, the Yugoslav Communist authorities displaced the German population of the village and resettled families from Bosnia. The Yugoslav Communist authorities aimed to develop Bačko Novo Selo into a Muslim colony of Vojvodina, however, by the spring of 1947, only an estimated 138 out of an expected 320 Muslim families settled in Bačko Novo Selo. [Source: Wikopedia]
02
German Displacement & Persecution
On 21 November 1944, the presidency of the AVNOJ declared the Germans of Yugoslavia to be collectively guilty for the war and enemies of Yugoslavia. Germans in Partisan-controlled areas were interned. Prior to 1944, about half a million Germans lived in Yugoslavia. About 240,000 were evacuated before the arrival of the Red Army, another 150,000 were later deported to the USSR to work as forced labour, 50,000 died in Yugoslav-run labor camps and 15,000 were killed by the Partisans. Most of the others were expelled from Yugoslavia and German property was confiscated. By the time of 1948 census, fewer than 56,000 ethnic Germans remained.[55]
03
Tito's Death Camp: Lager Jarek
Almost all of the 2,000 inhabitants of the Danube-Swabian Community of Jarek in the Batschka left the village on October 7th and 8th, 1944 in 420 horse-drawn wagons. Their last mayor, Nikolaus Schurr, succeeded in persuading the inhabitants to flee, since they, as Danube Swabians, all had, indeed, been disowned and collectively declared “war criminals” and “enemies of the people” by the AVNOJ Laws. The entire harvest of the communal district of approximately 4,500 hectares, as well as the livestock in the stables and the entire inventory of the houses remained. In the following weeks, the village was completely emptied by the native inhabitants of the surrounding villages, already on December 4th the first Danube Swabians who had not fled were driven from their villages in the South-Batschka to Jarek and placed in the empty houses on sheaves of straw (up to 30 persons in a room).
04
Tito's Death Camp: Lager Jarek
The village was one of the worst starvation camps for the aged, the sick and the children. They received hardly anything to eat and suffered indescribable agonies. [(see: Lager Jarek (Internment camp)] Until the closing of the camp on Easter 1946 (one year the end of the war) ca. 17,000 people passed through it. Approximately 7,000 people lost their lives during that time due to hunger, illnesses, mistreatment and shootings; among them nearly 1,000 children. At first the dead were put into the tombs of the cemetery and after that hastily buried in mass graves of seven rows behind the cemetery. In the extermination camps in the Batschka, in the Banat and in Syrmia ca. 50,000 Danube Swabians lost their lives from 1944 to 1948. There has been dead silence by all Yugoslav and Serbian governments about the camps and disenfranchisements. Of the former 550,000 Danube Swabians only 4,000 are living in the country today. The AVNOJ Laws have never been revoked.
