Chapter 234
1/15/2010
Ch 234 Helmut Rudolf Samide
a Gottscheer refugee - sometimes you DO have to live like a refugee
2002: Hank was a fellow State engineer working across the partition from me for decades at the DEC and together we received awards for our time there. But during the time on the job, do you ever really know a person? As we live the comfortable suburban life a few miles apart now, the casual observer may think of us as similar non-descript retirees. True, our sons also became engineers and our fathers both started out as farmers only to later work in machine shops. But our fathers were thrust into the middle of a world war by circumstances neither sought, to essentially end up on opposite sides. Thus our early childhoods were worlds apart in many ways. I've discovered some of his past, living on the dark side that is worth mentioning.
1942-52: Born during WW2 in the war zone of what is now Slovenia; by 10 his family finally was able to sail away from Germany. Ironically, Erika, who he was to later meet and marry in NY, was also was born about the same time in the war zone of Konigsberg, East Prussia. As a toddler, she was taken by her mother thru Dresden, Germany with fire bombs falling to escape Europe for America as well.
1900-1941: Hank is a descendant of the ethnic Gottschee (God's Sea) German speaking people who settled in lower Slovenia in the 1300's. Hank's father, Johann, was born there in house #11 in Hasenfeld in 1900 and was a farmer much of his life. In the 30's, he (red dot) worked part time winters as a licensed peddler selling candies and sundries. He had been drafted into the Yugoslavian Army earlier in the 20's for a couple service periods. The Gottcheers seemed to be a proud and peaceful society until the Nazi regime caused an upheaval in Germany and the rest of the world. A Gottschee named Wilhelm Lampeter above appears to have been the appointee facilitating the Reich's desires.
1941-1942: The events are complicated, but in the spring of 1941 Germany had invaded Slovenia, Yugoslavia. Italy was also aligned with Hitler and occupied Gottscheer land. Gottscheers were manipulated into becoming part of the German empire building- consolidation- ethnic cleansing process. That meant Mrs Samide, pregnant with Hank had to give up their original self-built farm to the Italians. The Gottscheers moved out in the winter of '41 via truck, train, or ox cart to a resettlement area to the east. The Samide's resettlement home was one in Hundsdorf, part of the Rann Triangle (Brezice). Many original Slovene owners had been ejected from their homes and put into forced labor camps for the Reich. The resettlement process was such a very distasteful "choice" that Richard Rom's father committed suicide rather than resettle.
The Yugoslavian Communist Party issued a leaflet at the time with a foreboding warning, "The Nazi leaders have resolved to resettle you on soil and farms stolen from Slovenian farmers. You will be considered thieves of those farms and will be driven out. We will set those farms on fire and kill all of you."
1942-1945: In the spring of 1942 a midwife helped deliver Hank's birth on the resettlement Hundsdorf farm where living conditions were poor during the next 3 war years.
On 7 March 1945, Tito formally became Prime Minister of Yugoslavia.
I took some artistic license here using a City of Gottschee painting along with actual photo of bombed out castle there and the cast of characters to symbolize the exodus from Rann.
May 8, 1945 Victory over Europe day- The family departed Rann Triangle for Austria that day by foot, oxen, ox cart with whatever food and possessions they could handle. Simply put, when the war ended, the Gottscheers had to get out of Slovenia as they were hated for their association with the Germans and having taken their farms. Austria was somewhat more friendly, but not much.
Thus began the end of the Gottscheer culture; the indescribable nightmarish gauntlet of hell. Hard to know who the bad guys were- they were all bad. Hard to assign blame for choices made, many were on the horns of a dilemma- all choices were bad. Partisan communist Serbs, Croat 1, Croat 2 and Slovenians exacting revenge robbery, imprisonment, rape, torture, and murder of the Gottscheers. Throw in a little Allied bombing, atrocities all around - to German soldiers and sympathizers. A variety of militaries having effect: Russians, Italian, British, American. Stir in a little mayhem of bombings, explosions, gunfire, burning buildings, slaughtered livestock and so on. The unimaginable conditions of everyone hating everyone, racial and ethnic culture clash. Fascist, Communist, ethnic, religious, and political turmoil but with a touch of some human kindness of strangers thrown in. In a word, CHAOS!
The family was overtaken by perhaps Yugoslavian Marshal Tito sympathizing partisans or others who took all their possessions and threw Hank's Dad into a concentration camps near Rann. The women and children were "free" to live the uncertain gypsy life. Hank's father recounted later that certain prisoners were shoved alive into open dirt pits and buried alive by a bull dozer.
After a few weeks, Johann was released and the family was escorted by the Partisan guards via train to Marburg (aka Maribor,Slovenia). The bridge to cross the Drava River was ( bombed?) out . Partisans on horseback escorted and somehow got across river. Eventually ending up in Styria County lower Austria.
Hank being only 3 years old at the time doesn't recall much of this exodus other than a plane being shot down and some dead cows in a pool of blood, but was filled in later by family members. Edwin Stalzer, who was a few years older and with more vivid recall had life experiences closely paralleling Hank's. He wrote that none of the Gottscheers under the age of 2 years old made it out alive from the concentration camp at Sterntal. A few paragraphs of the Stalzer book are excerpted here:
1945-1946:Spurning the squalor of the Russian-British refugee camps of Styria the southern district of Austria, Johann Samide set out to find nearby farm work. By chance they met a sympathetic Gottscheer woman on a farm south of Gamlitz, a few miles from the border, who took the family in for the first winter. After her refugee relatives arrived, the Samide family had to leave and find another place.
1946-1952: They found another farm west of Gamlitz where they lived above the Austrian border and worked for minimal wage for the next 7 years. They lived in the farm building upper right containing a fruit press . One side had the press for grapes and apples for making juice and wine. In the other side the family of 7 resided in a single room of maybe 24 by 20 foot . Two beds one for Mom and Dad with a sheet hung up for privacy. The other bed held all the siblings: 2 brothers and 2 sisters. Another brother Edward was born in 1947 but the two older sisters may have moved out by then getting house servant work 50 miles north in Graz, Austria by then. No bathroom. There was an outhouse a bit of a distant walk, so the ground behind the press building was used with a privacy wall fashioned out of corn stalks.
They had a woodstove for cooking and for heat in winter. Water had to be fetched in wooden buckets from a nearby spring and well.
This video shows the exact valley south of Leibnitz and 2Km west of Gamlitz covered with vineyards now. On top of the hill where Hank found a German Luger and some unexploded bombs while playing in some farm shacks now resides the restaurant Erikas Buschenchank.
1952: After leaving from the port of Bremerhaven, Germany on the American troop carrier or Liberty Ship built during WW2, the USAT Blatchford. Hank (lower right) turned 10 on the trip to NYC.
These Gottscheer web sites one and two were particularly useful for background information, but you need a little German and the ability to navigate a web layout that can be a little balky.
2008 Gottscheer Volksfest with Miss Gottschee
2010 everyone has a survival story, some a little more intense than others