Reference Type:  Book
Author: Milin, Miodrag - Steponov, Ljubomir
Year: 1996
Title: Sârbii din România în Golgota Bărăganului : monografie 1951-1956
Translated Title: [The romanian serbs in the Golgotha of the Bărăgan 1951-1956 / A romániai szerbek baragani golgotája 1951-1956]
City: Timișoara
Publisher: Uniunea Democratică a Sârbilor şi Caraşovenilor din România
Number of Pages: 304
Language: Romanian
Keywords: Serbian, history, monography, politics, migration
Abstract: (RO) Sârbii, înșirați prin satele de-a lungul frontierei, autohtoni pe care jocul celor ce-au trasat hărțile i-a făcut să existe în afara hotarului național, îi hrăneau spiritual existența și în continuare în lumea de
dincolo. Tragedia deportării în Bărăgan s-a abătut asupra lor cu puterea unui urgan atotnimicitor. I-a rupt de rădăcini, de trecut, de nație și i-a zvârlit într-un pustiu, pe care l-au resimțit ca o Siberie a României". Au fost așezate pe pământ gol, un vid material; dar pentru viețuitorii acestei lumi rurale, legată mistic de satul natal, fiecare o mică Serbie sufletească, a fost mai mult decât un cutremur devastator. Nici nu mai realizau că sunt pe pământ românesc. România era pentru ei lumea cosmopolită, multietnică, a satelor prospere bănățene. Aici, s-au înspăimântat de ce au văzut. Erau numiți "coreaneri", bandiți, hoți și criminali periculoși; nu li s-a permis nici măcar să bea apă de la fântâni, ca nu cumva să le otrăvească... Lumea primitivă, străină, aspră și ostilă cu timpul însă s-a deschis și spre sârbi; treptat, dușmănia și neâncrederea s-au preschimbat în mirare și apoi în compasiune și chiar admirație. Cartea de față este o astfel de secvență, din povestea unei etnii, adânc zdruncinate de tragedia deportării; este încercarea ei de a-i tălmăci propria "vinovăție fără de vină "și căutarea cu asiduitate a firavelor raze de speranță, spre a dăinui
și pe mai departe.

(ENG) Looking as follows, the recent history proves us, through its tragic side, the totalitarian regimes made use in a unsurpassed manner of the massive dislocation of people. In fact, it represented a way of settling accounts with "disturbing" ethnic groups (Jews, Gypsies...) or social categories (intellectuals). The communist chiefs in Romania, as eager Stalin's apprentices, experienced, too, the "hostile elements" deportation. In such a strange and tragic distruction of the essence of what it represented the summit of pre-communist Romania material civillization, they acted following also the native "national features": Others ones, firstly identified the enemy and, only after that, cautiously, metodically, exterminated them; "ours" were acting pell mell, with no zeal, flimsinessly, as an immitation act could be. While the deportation, the punishment act of "fascist elemnts", of "titoists" and of other "enemies" of such sorte of the new regime, was started with no legal basis, without support of constitutional norms; and followed with wiping off from the archives of any written traces that were mentionning the names of authors or of actors of the criminal repression against the most distinguished householders in frontier area. They were destroyed material things symbolising prominent civillization into a 25 km large earthen border strip with Tito Yugoslavia.
Wealthy people of the Banatian and Oltenian frontier was defined, without discrimination, as enemy of the equallitarian systhem of under culture and human misery. In suffering they felt togather sollidarity, all the distinguished people of Banat, no matter of ethnic descend or social condition. If it is allowed to give an oppinion, the suffering of Romanians, dislocated however into a Romanian territory, was less tragic; as, let's say, the Germans, who turned up, in order to bring to civillization, the fertile Western plain - and now, suddenly, they were thrown, up and down, all
over Siberia, Donbass and "at the best" - in Baragan, by the rulers of the day; or, the case of Serbians, the yesterday allies of Stalin who, allmost over night, find themselves turned into the
most "ferocious" enemies of a "new order". The Serbes, wasted through the villages along the border, a native people, determined by the hazzard of the map-drawers to exist outside of
their national state, spiritually feeded, further on, their existance from the abroad world. The tragedy of deportation in Baragan rushed upon them with a power of a devastating hurricane: it uproated them, from their past, from their nation; and hurled them into a real desert, that was felt as a "Siberia of Romania". They were settled on empty earth, on a material emptyness; but for the inhabitants of a rural world, mistically connected with the native village, every village a little spiritual Serbia, it was more that a devastating earth-quake. They realised no more they are still on Romanian land. Romania was for them a cosmopolitan multiethnic world, of prosperous Banatian villages. Here they remained astonished by what they saw; they were named as "Koreaners", bandits, robbers and dangerous criminals; it was not even allowed to them from wells to take water, for the reason of not poisoning it... Such a local primitive world, strange, rough and hostile toward them, after time passing, started to change. Gradually, the hostility and enmity were transformed into wonder and then compassion or even admiration. The present book gives such a still, a story of an ethnos that is deeply shocked by the tragedy of deportation; it is the effort to explain the own "guiltiness", of one who is not to blame; and the anxious search for the feeble shines of hope, in or der to further lasting.