ETHNIC CLEANSING - NOW AND THEN:
Pictures of the daily trek of expellees from Kosovo brings back horrific memories of my own youth when I was one of the more than 3 million Sudeten Germans who were "ethnically cleansed" after World War II. I identify with those Kosovo refugees and commiserate with them. Their faces express the same angst which befalls all expellees: of not knowing which direction to go to find a roof over their head; of hunger and thirst; of feeling rejected and a deep sense of loss of identity and of alienation. Being deprived of citizenship, and with only our clothes on our backs (we were allowed to take a maximum of 30 kilos from our ancient homes), we were cut off from our roots, one of the great needs for all human beings. With the loss of all human and constitutional rights one feels devoid of any social and judicial protection. Ethnic cleansing leaves a deep-seated scar in the expellee's soul, a wound that will never quite heal, as one feels alternately rejected, guilty, humiliated, ashamed, and angry at the perpetrators.
A comparison of the fate of the ethnic Germans living in the Sudetenland and the Balkans, collectively called the "Donauschwaben" (Danubian Swabians), who were expelled or forced to flee after World War II, with that of the current Kosovo refugees clearly shows that the forced exodus and mistreatment of the German minorities were executed on a much greater scale than the current one. There are now about 6-700,000 Kosovar refugees, and about 2,000 died over the past 14 months. But between 1944-47, 1.6 million Danubian Swabians lost their homeland, with about 250,000 dead. Incredibly, the media fails to compare the events then and now. At present, NATO is at war in Europe, but no one cared about the atrocities committed on German civilians in 1944-47. The only crime they were guilty of was that they spoke the language of their ancestors.
After World War II, between 12-14 million Germans were fleeing or driven from their homes where they had lived for centuries; about 2 million were killed during this forced exodus. This includes about 240,000 Sudeten Germans (approx. one seventh of the German minority in Czechoslovakia) who lost their lives during the expulsion, either by being brutally murdered (by a minority of Czechs--mostly Communists) or by perishing en route. (Ironically, the Czech Republic is one of the new members of NATO, fighting Serbia for expelling Kosovars). The Danubian Swabians met a similar fate: of the 250,000 who lost their lives during the exodus, many died in Marshall Tito's concentration camps or they starved to death in Russian labor camps.
The methods of expulsion used by the Serbs are strikingly similar to those used by the Czechs, such as burning homes; separating men from women and children, etc. Sadly, after expropriating our homes, they left most of them to decay. Hundreds of villages disappeared from the map. Adding insult to injury, most history books ignore this ethnic cleansing; no documentary was made of it; thus we are also forced out of European history. To date we received no restitution nor are we allowed to return to our former homeland. Equally important, not a single Czech was punished for those heinous crimes because amnesty laws protect the perpetrators. However, there is now some hope for the Sudeten Germans living in the U.S.: the House of Representatives passed a Resolution last October, urging the Czech Republic to return expropriated properties or to pay compensation to its rightful owners.
If some of your readers wish to help our cause, please write to your congressman and refer to House Resolution # 562.
For more information on historic and present relations between the Czech Republic and the Sudeten Germans, please visit our web-site at
http://www.freeyellow.com/members7/sudetengermans
OR, in German,
OR write to the President of the
Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft,
Mr. Hubert Kostron,
166-51 17th Rd.,
Whitestone, NY 11357
Phone: 718-352-5041.
Regina LeRoy, Lake Placid, NY