8. Add to Belgrade, Novi Sad
Hilde Jauch, maybe you remember, is one of two sisters whose family moved into northern Serbia with the Austrians in the 19th century. Not expecting the advancing Russian army to make fine distinctions among Germans they feared for their lives.
The end of her story, at dinner tonight: The retreating German army took over their farmhouse (not far from Novi Sad) as their headquarters and commandeered their horses. When her grandmother decided to flee before the advancing Russians she asked the German commanding officer for help. He gave them back the two worst horses and told them to join, if they could, the column of German refugees coming from the east (the hated occupiers of the Ukraine, etc., that the Russians were killing). "We will try to keep the army between them and the Russians," he told her. So she and her two daughters hitched two wagons behind the two horses and, with their total of six children, joined the column and made it to Germany, where residents of the area they went to were told, "Each family take two refugee families into your house." Eventually the men, in the German Army someplace, joined them. It's part of a story we don't hear or, being about the aggressors (getting their just desserts), have much sympathy with, but from Hilde's mouth it was quite touching. We found ourselves saying, "Poor Germans. Nice German officer, trying to take care of his own."
Hilde, age six then, moved with the family to the Buffalo area and became a nurse (not a schoolteacher); Ingeborg (two then) became a schoolteacher. The name of the town closest to them was Kljajicevo, and several reunions of refugees, one of which they went to, have been held there.
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