4th post - "Auslanders"

During the reign of Austria’s empress, Maria Theresa, her subjects were invited to settle in a fertile farming area near the Danube River, between Hungary and Serbia.  My father’s ancestors settled as farmers in this part of the Austrian empire, which would have been considered the “hinter lands.”  These settlers were called "auslanders," which means "hinter lands" in old high German, but nowadays, the term is more generally used to refer to foreigners.  My father’s relatives lost everything due to the war, and the communist take over by the “partisans,” which happened around the same time.  After  World War II, their lost homes & farm lands were part of what had become the communist country of Yugoslavia.  

My grandparents told a lot of stories about the cruelty of the communist partisans, and their brutal slaughter of the people who stayed behind in my grandparents’ villages.  Most of the able-bodied men were off to war, but when my great-grandmother, my grandmother, her sister and infant niece, heard the warnings about the partisans coming, and what they were doing to the German people that were settled there, they fled in a covered wagon.  First, they tried to enter Hungary, because it was closer, but they weren’t allowed to enter.  Eventually, they became refugees in Austria.  

My “Oma” (grandma) was 19 at the time.  She never got over the trauma.  I can remember her turning almost every conversation, no matter what the original topic was, into a discussion about, “When we lost our home ….”.  She lived in the U.S. for over fifty years, became a citizen, worked and raised her children here, but this was never “home” to her.  Oma & Opa visited their home land in the 1980’s and were shocked at how their village church, elementary school, and the farm houses they grew up in, had been so neglected and fallen into ruin.  The farm lands were still productive, but nothing looked to them like they had remembered.