Not
all casualties of war die on the battlefield. In the wake of
World War II, Yugoslavia purged its territory of the ethnic
Germans who had formed a part of its human mosaic. Tarred with
their ethnic origins and the conscription of their
fighting-age men into the Waffen SS, the Volksdeutsche, as
these settlers were called, were rounded up at the war's end
and herded into concentration camps. Those who were not
murdered or did not die from the harsh conditions were
expelled from the village homes their families had known and
loved for three hundred years. Nine years old when she entered
the concentration camp in 1945, author Luisa Lang Owen
survived the persecution of the Danube Swabians, eventually
finding herself in America, where she made a new life for
herself, a life that nonetheless held within it the memories
and lessons of the atrocities she had experienced in her
homeland. Like thousands of other Germans in the Danube Valley
at the end of the war, Luisa and her family were chased from
their home, lodged in a sheep stall, and resettled in camps
with other Germans from her village. Shorn of their
possessions, given little food or fuel, pressed into hard
labor, beaten by guards, and separated from their families,
many despaired and many died. Luisa barely survived as others
succumbed to malnutrition, disease, and exposure. Her haunting
memoir provides a window into the ethnic cleansing that
preceded the recent exterminations in Bosnia and Kosovo by
fifty years—an episode of horrors that has not appeared as
even a footnote in descriptions of the more recent atrocities
practiced in that region. Her testament, as a casualty of war,
bears historic witness and gives insight into the personal
experiences of ethnic cleansing. It stands as witness to a
massive crime that has been conveniently forgotten, a
corrective to a bit of neglect that did away with its victims
as a people, and a personal depiction of what ethnic cleansing
is really about. “The problem was not just that they did not
want us to have or to be,” Luisa Lang Owen writes, “they
wanted us not to have been.”
Luisa
Lang Owen, born in Yugoslavia before the war, came to America
in 1951. A practicing artist who lives in Yellow Springs, she
is a professor emerita of art education at Wright State
University, Dayton, Ohio. |