EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published in Heart of Ohio Magazine. It is being reprinted in a cooperative effort with Richland Source. To read more stories from Heart of Ohio Magazine visit the website at www.heartofohiomagazine.com.
Some people plan to leave family heirlooms to their children — china, crystal, jewelry. Erna Schuster Becker had none of those things left from her family to pass down to her daughters. Instead, she wrote the story of her early life in Yugoslavia.
As she chronicled the events she was encouraged by a friend, Mary Jane Henney, to go all the way and make this story into a book. In response to that encouragement and the proofreading by her friend, Nancy Hall, Erna wrote From Franzfeld to Mansfield: A Journey Through Tito’s Death Camps.
The war was over, but by 1945 the nightmare lived on for Germans living in Yugoslavia under Prime Minister Josip Broz Tito’s reign. Erna Schuster, her mother, grandmother, grandfather and her brother, Adam, were driven from their home in April of that year. With only the clothes on their backs and the few things they could carry, they were herded into a concentration camp.
Tito’s troops took a quarter of the town of Franzfeld, surrounded it with barbed wire and armed guards, and the Schuster family was taken there to be imprisoned along with other German families in the village. The process was repeated throughout the country, creating countless work camps and five notorious death camps for extermination.
“We slept on straw on the floor, so a blanket or extra clothing to lie on or cover yourself with was a luxury,” she said.
Before the war the Schuster family enjoyed a middle class life. Franzfeld, Yugoslavia was a farming community where farmers lived in town and rode their horse-drawn wagons to work in their fields surrounding the village.
Erna’s father and grandfather, a business man, grew and exported sugar beets. After their imprisonment, the adults and teens would work in the fields or take care of the cows and other animals that were left in the empty houses, then returned to the camp in the evening.
Erna remembers how her mother and the other women would smuggle food and needed items into the camp.
“The women sewed their aprons up to create a pouch, which they filled with anything they could find. Sometimes they were able to sneak back to their homes in the village to recover things. Then they would wear the apron under their long skirts, covering it so no one could see.”
As long as she could stay with her mother, Erna says she wasn’t frightened.
“Everyone was in the same boat. Soon it just seemed normal.”
But even that small security was ripped from her when she and her grandmother were separated from the rest of the family.
“Then I was often frightened because my grandmother would leave me to wander off talking to people or looking for someone she knew, and I couldn’t find her. She was not a nurturing woman. That was when I was most fearful,” Erna recounted in a quiet voice.
Erna was reunited with her mother only to be shipped by box car to a death camp. The young children and their mothers were selected for this trip. Her new normal became fear and hunger and death.
“Our food was a soup-like thin gravy and coarsely ground corn, and not much of that. People starved to death every day, it was just the way things were. My mother became very ill with typhus. We were living in a small room with two other families, and a woman named Mrs. Weidle cared for my mother. There is no doubt my mother would have died without her help,” Erna remembered.
In 1947 Erna, her mother, grandmother and brother finally were able to escape to Hungary and travel on to Austria, where they were reunited with Erna’s father.
By 1952 the family was preparing to come to the United States.
“In the camp where we waited to come here they told us about America. Our guide said some people owned two cars! We couldn’t believe such a thing because no one we knew could even afford an automobile,” Erna chuckled.
Sponsored by a relative who had come to America before them, the Schuster family arrived in Mansfield, Ohio. They became part of a large group of German immigrants who lived in the north end of town; their social clubs — the Sons of Herman and the Liederkranz — still exist today.
In that newly formed community Erna met and married Frank Becker in 1957. They shared a history of horror; Frank lost most of his family in the death camps, and Erna’s grandfather had died there as well.
Ultimately, nearly 60,000 civilians died in the death camps. Erna Schuster Becker says it is a story that has really not been told.
“There are not a lot of books on the subject, and so much of what happened has never been told. I wanted my daughters to know what we went through,” Erna explained.
From Franzfeld to Mansfield is available at Main Street Books in downtown Mansfield, from Amazon.com.
