Bačka, the Autumn of 1944: Four Witnesses
Bačka, the Autumn of 1944: Four Witnesses

Summary/Abstract: For many long years Yugoslav historians and political discourse kept silent about partisan revenge during the last months of the Second World War and in its aftermath. The aim of silence and denial was, from the beginning, to redraw, purify and paint in heroic hues the history of the coming to power of the new partisan elite, and the genesis of their minority policy. The political message of this pseudo-history was that revenge and retribution were alien to the new political elite and to the Communist regime, and that the calling to account was just as it was directed exclusively against war criminals and the “enemies of the people”. At the time of the falling apart of Tito’s Yugoslavia, from the beginning of the 90s, works began to appear in Vojvodina which, partially based on documentary evidence in the registers of deaths and on oral history, studied how the partisans had acted against Hungarians. What is published here can be said to be typical of dozens of stories that are on record. They testify that the arrests were carried out in an organized manner, largely on the basis of denunciations by the local population, often motivated by personal quarrels, and that in the course of interrogations the prisoners were maltreated. The relatives learned only much later of the death of those executed, and the cause of death was falsely entered in the registers of deaths. The last of the recollections commemorates the tribulations of the Hungarians of Zˇabalj (Zsablya). They—just like the Hungarians of Cˇurug (Csorog) and Sbobran (Thomasberg/Szenttamás)—were collectively relocated and had all their property confiscated. They were not allowed to return to their villages even later, because, allegedly, in those villages Hungarians had directly or indirectly participated in the round-up of Serbs in January 1942.

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