Swabian Trek

 

  The following information is a summary of the information provided in Baranya:  Unvergessene Heimat and is based on my own personal translation of this section of the book.

 

  By 1767 there were 108 German households in the newly founded village.  More settlers arrived during the period from 1784-1787.  It is located in the eastern part of the Baranya.  In 1722 a Roman Catholic rectory was built a kilometre away and Fransican priests served the surrounding communities from there.  Babarc became a filial congregation of this wider parish.

 

  Babarc was one of the settlements belonging to the Abbot of Pécsvarad.  The Abbot, Franz Jany had a recruiting agent named Rehling working for him in southern Bavaria who was stationed in Augsburg.  It appears that he recruited his colonists from the vicinity of Augsburg between the years 1698-1702.  Some the family names included among these settlers were Keller and Appermann.  After the end of the Kurucz Uprising only three families remained in Babarc.  They were later joined by both German and Magyar settlers.  The Magyars were Calvinists.  By 1829 the village population included 969 German Roman Catholics and 258 Magyar Calvinists.  Surprisingly, no explanation is ever provided for the reason that the Abbot would allow Calvinists to settle on his church lands.

 

  A church built in the Middle Ages had survived the Turkish occupation and the Magyar Calvinists were forced to give it up to the German Roman Catholics.

 

  In 1941 at the time of the national census the Germans in the village split over the nationality question some of them chose to side with Hungary while others opted for the Bund position.  In 1942 the first volunteers who joined the SS left and only one of them returned from the war.  In May of 1944 the single Jewish family in the village was taken away.  The first German troops also came in May.  At the beginning of July 1944 all German males from 17 to 46 years were drafted into the German Army and went off to war by September 13 to 15^th in two separate groups.  On November 25, 1944 a few families fled with the Bund organized evacuation.  On November 26^th more families left.  In all, some twenty families fled to the Steiermark in Austria.  The village came under fire on November 26^th while they were still leaving.  On Monday, November 27^th just before noon the first Russian troops arrived.  By evening numerous troops were in the village and totally occupied it the next day.  All wagons were loaded with loot taken from the villagers and their horses were requisitioned.  An old couple hung themselves because of their fear of what they might do to them; two teenage boys were shot and one man died of heart failure as a result of being terrorized.  The bodies of German and Russian soldiers were buried by the villagers in the local cemetery.

 

  During November it seemed to rain all of the time.  No one went out on the street at night.  On January 2, 1945 men, women and teenagers from the ages of 17 to 45 years were dragged off to slave labour in Russia.  This involved 45 persons and another 59 persons were taken on January 15^th.  In May of 1945 Hungarians arrived in the village and took up residence in the houses of those who had fled.  Swabian refugees who had escaped from the Partisan extermination camps in Yugoslavia passed through the village and sought help to escape to Austria.  Three families that had fled toAustria returned home and were interned.

 

  Of the 104 persons taken to Russia, 61 half-dead and ill men and women were sent to East and West Germany and a few returned home to Hungary.  They were in the camps in Russia for 33 months and 43 of them died there.  In May 1947, Hungarians driven out of Czechoslovakia arrived in the village.  They brought everything they could with them.  German families were loaded on trucks as police officers and soldiers went to each house checking their lists and people were ordered to pack some bedding, clothes and food.  This took place on September 4, 1947.  The crammed trucks left two hours later and the people on board were heading for East Germany.  The reason for their selection for deportation was the fact that they had claimed that their mother tongue was German in the census of 1941.

 

  Several families were loaded on each truck.  They were driven to the town hall to be registered and listed for deportation.  They were taken to the train depot in Mohács where they were searched and some of their bundles were taken away from them.  Thirty to forty people and their belongings were packed into each cattle car.  Each person received a personal deportation notice.  On September 5, 1947 the transport of over two thousand people left from the six villages in the area including 80 families from Babarc.  They arrived in Saxony inEast Germany on September 13, 1947.

 

  Common family names in the village included:  Amann, Faust, Fischer, Grosch, Heil, Harich, Kaiser, Keller, Koch, Knoch, Müller, Ruppert, Till and Wentzel.