THE SEIBERT FAMILY HISTORY

Helena Seibert Kapp Gayk

---My mother, Helena Seibert (Magyar:Szeibert) (b. 5-20-1907; d. 2-28-1988) was born a Roman Catholic in Gakowa, or Gakovo, in the Federative People's Republic of Yugoslavia, (Austria Hungary) (the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Banovina Dunavska). She married Ignatz Kapp, of Backi Brestovac (Brestovitz), two years after Ignatz immigrated to New York City with her and her parents, Matthias Seibert and Catherine Bergmann Seibert.

---Helena had two brothers and a sister who also migrated with the family; Martin, Tom, and Katherine (b. 8-27-1897; d. 1-1975) who later married Fred (Fritz) Schnittger. After the move to New York, Helena and Ignatz had two children, John Joseph Kapp (b. 5-19-1924; d. 1-8-1995) and Mary Katherine Kapp Crowley (b. 1-12-23).

---Circa 1928, when his son John was about 5 years old, Ignatz returned to Brestovitz with John to visit his parents. John stayed in Brestovitz with his father and paternal grandparents until late 1929 when he sailed back to New York City on the "Bremen" alone. Ignatz was refused passage back to the United States and died on January 23rd, 1934, never to see his wife and children again. Matthias Seibert's mother's name may have been Helen also. Catherine Bergmann Seibert's parents were named Margaret and Thomas.

My historical information comes from excerpts of Bela Pomogats' book "A Short History of Hungarians and Serbs - Past and Present."

---The Banat is a region in southeastern Europe, which includes the Batschka region where our Seibert ancestors lived, and extends over an area that is present day western Romania, northeastern Serbia, and southern Hungary. It is approximately 100 miles by 100 miles. The name "Banat" is derived from the word "ban", the local name for a provincial governor.

---The Banat is bordered by the Danube River on the South, the Marosch River on the North, the Thiesse River on the West, and by the Carpathian foothills on the East.

---Because the Banat was a vast plain, and because it was bordered by the Danube River, the primary river of central Europe, the Banat has had the misfortune of being a primary route of transportation, and as a result, has been historically a cultural crossroads. From it's complex history, we find that even before the region was known as Banat, this plain was known as a place of long-vanished people.

---The earliest unrecorded history is imagined to be a wave of nomadic tribes first settling and then being pushed off the plain by other nomadic tribes that were either greater in number or stronger in battle. The Romans used Banat as a staging area to launch attacks against the Dacian Empire. The Romans were forced to leave by an influx of Germanic tribes, who themselves were never able to establish permanent residence.

---In 100 AD, the Hungarian King Saint Stephen established dominion over Banat making it a part of the Hungarian monarchy; however, after approximately two hundred years of relative peace in the area, Banat was invaded by Ghengis Kahn and the towns and villages were destroyed. The region barely had time to recover before it came under the threat of the expanding Ottoman Empire.

---The rest of Europe thought of Banat as a defensive wall of Christianity against the warring Turks, however, in 1526 it fell to the Turks in the battle of Mohacs and remained under Turkish control until freed by Prince Eugene of Savoy in 1718. The rebuilding of the land was then entrusted to the Imperial General Count Claudius Foorimund Mercy.

---Mercy executed a plan developed by Prince Eugene to transport German Catholics into the invasion corridors and establish Banat as a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Between 1722 and 1726, 15,000 settlers were transplanted into 46 German villages. Those people who chose to migrate to Banat did so because of the extreme taxes imposed by Germany to support the frivolities of the nobility. Also, the benefits of the move were exaggerated to the people. But by far the strongest incentive to migrate was the promise of a free homestead, free passage, and three years free of taxes and assessments.

---It was during this time frame, probably early in the 1700's according to family oral history, that the Seiberts migrated from Alsace Lorraine in Germany to Gakova in the Batschka region of Banat. During the next decade the Germans in the Banat established a thriving civilization; however, in 1738 the Turks returned to the area, setting off yet another siege of terror. The non-German populations joined the Turks in pillaging the German towns along the Danube during a period of time when the settlers were already experiencing an epidemic of the plague that reaped additional devastation upon the settlers. Following this destruction, it took another decade to reestablish security and initiate another German migration.

---In a new colonization decree, Maria Theresa also invited commissioned and non-commissioned soldiers to settle in Banat. The Theresian settlement proved successful for the next 125 years. During that time the Germans drained swamps, worked the land in the fertile regions, and built villages. They succeeded in establishing many farming communities, while suffering through major epidemics of swamp fever and cholera in the process. In Gakova, where the Seiberts worked the land, they eventually became wealthy farmers, owning threshing machines that were used to thresh wheat on farms throughout the region. In 1788 the Turks returned once again and destroyed over 100 villages. ---In 1777, the total population of the area was 320,000, of which only 43,000 were Germans. There were approximately double that amount of Serbians, and the majority of 181,000 were Romanians. During this entire time period, the Austro-Hungarian Empire held things together in the Banat, but during the next 40 years the Empire began to turn more governing responsibility over to local kingdoms.

---In the case of the Batschka, this meant Hungarian rule, and an increasing influence from, and friction with, the Hungarian Kingdom. The Hungarians instituted a Magyarization attempt, which tried to replace German city and region names with Hungarian names. The Hungarians also tried to suppress the use of the German language in the Hungarian Banat including the Batschka region and replace it with Hungarian. The Germans struggled against Magyarization and even petitioned the Empire to have their own German Count assigned and to be placed under the direct protection of the Empire. For the German people to make this request was unusual and extreme, because the Germans had a tendency to avoid politics and focused primarily on village life and the day to day business of farming.

---In 1920, at the end of World War I, the Treaty of Trianon officially broke Banat up into parts of Romania, Yugoslavia and Hungary.

My information about Gakowa comes mainly from the autobiography of Katherine Flotz.

---Large numbers of South Slavs - Serbs, Macedonians, and Montenegrins - were settled in the Vojvodina in the inter- war period. The end of the Second World War saw a huge influx again, and the population grew to over 2 million. The Serbs quadrupled in number while the number of Hungarians fell to nearly half of the 1910 figure. At the end of the Second World War, when the Wehrmacht withdrew from Yugoslav territories, almost all the Vojvodina Germans fled with the retreating troops. Tito’s Partisans largely massacred those remaining behind.

---Some members of the Seibert and Bergman families, and Katherine Flotz and her family (see the Katherine Flotz homepage listing in the links section) were among those Germans who remained in Gakowa after Tito's forces arrived. After the end of the war Tito and his supporters, after massacring not only Germans and Hungarians, but also Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Bosnians, simply turned over a new leaf and forbade any public mention of the blood-stained past. The Germans were practically wiped off the map of the Vojvodina. No mention was made of the tens of thousands of Serbs in the Krajina either, whom Ante Pavelic's Ustasha had massacred.

---For those who have an interest in the ethnic cleansing during this period, "Barefoot In The Rubble" by Elizabeth B. Walter, Pannonia Press, is a story of those Donauschwaben who stayed on in Yugoslavia. It is the true story of "surviving the detention camps, the hunger, the forced labor, the destruction of villages, and the attempt by a brutal Communist regime to erase all ethnic Germans as a people, to scatter them to the winds."

---Gakowa was a small farming town on the Hungarian border. On a current map the area can be located in Yugoslavia or Serbia, just Northwest of Sombor, but the town exists no more. Prior to World War II, life in Gakowa was filled with tradition and custom. The Seiberts were Roman Catholic and feast days such as Corpus Christi, Epiphany, and also elaborate weddings and feasts held to honor the Saints and Mary, were traditionally celebrated. According to second-hand accounts the town of Gakowa is in ruins at this time but up to about 5 or so years ago the local cemetery still contained the headstones of Seibert ancestors.

---My mother, when reminiscing of her childhood, spoke about the farm once owned by her family and the prosperity they enjoyed. She told us of her religious family life there and taught us how to cook the traditional German and Hungarian food she was accustomed to eating as a child in Gakowa. She also told of a lake near her home in Gakowa, between the Tisa and the Danube Rivers. According to Magdelene (Lenchi) Erg, my mother's second cousin, this was a small man-made lake near Gakowa. It was formerly a sand and gravel pit and all of the children of Gakowa went there to swim. Life was filled with hard work and rich rewards.

---Circa 1918, one branch of the Seibert family emigrated to America; Gertrude Bergman, Matthias Seibert his wife Katherine Bergman, and their children Helen, (my Mother) Katherine, Thomas and Martin. Later, Gertrude was to marry Martin and raise a family in New York. Other relatives, including the family of Magdelena Seibert, my Mother's first cousin, and Barbara Seibert, who married a son of Stefan Seibert, Matthias' brother, remained in Gakowa. Prior to 1944, the town was prosperous and harmonious.

---In 1944 the Russians along with some of Tito's Partisans arrived in Gakowa and the town soon became one of the most inhumane yet unpublicized concentration camps in the history of Southern Europe. In December of the same year, all men and women from the ages of 17 to 35 were transported to Russian labor camps, leaving the children and elderly at the mercy of the Partisans in the newly formed concentration camp in Gakowa. In the early months of 1945 Donauschwaben from the Batschka and Banat were driven out of their homes into Gakowa like herds of animals with only the belongings they could carry on their backs. The once-peaceful town of 2,500 inhabitants soon grew to 20,000 or more.

---As the town became filled with more and more people, Typhoid Fever struck and soon the corpses outnumbered the available gravesites and burial was done in mass graves, about a half a block long, six feet deep and six feet wide. Every morning corpses were wrapped in sheets and laid in the yard until a horse-drawn wagon came around to make its collections. During this time 75-100 people died each day. Eventually the cemetery could not hold any more so it was enlarged. Soon afterward, filled to capacity, the cemetery was closed. Church services were not allowed and religious life was discouraged although some services were held in private. Suicides abounded with women attempting to commit suicide by jumping into the 25' wells. Rats and mice were prevalent and malaria soon swept through the area. There were no doctors for the Donauschwaben and no medicines were available.

---In August 1947, a group of approximately 100 people, including Katherine Flotz and her family, gathered to make their successful escape into Hungary. There, thousands of other refugees were also attempting to travel into Austria and Germany. Some of the previously detained Donauschwaben, including Barbara Seibert who had been sent to a Russian prison camp, were eventually allowed to go back home, but "home" was not there anymore. The Seiberts who did survive found refuge in the United States, Germany, Austria, and other countries. The Donnauschauben would never return to the Vojvodina. Tito's liquidation was complete, however the ethnic cleansing continues today.