The following text is not a historical study. It is a retelling of the witness’s life story based on the memories recorded in the interview. The story was processed by external collaborators of the Memory of Nations. In some cases, the short biography draws on documents made available by the Security Forces Archives, State District Archives, National Archives, or other institutions. These are used merely to complement the witness’s testimony. The referenced pages of such files are saved in the Documents section.

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Ferenc Kohlbach (* 1941)

The interviewee was only four years old in 1945, yet he was able to give a very interesting recollection, as he put together and revived his father’s story based on family stories. K.F. was born in 1941 in a village in Baranya, as a native speaker and national. The first memory the reminiscences can recall from his life is the tanks marching through the village. „I am standing with one of my father’s nieces… The tanks are coming, the Soviet tanks, in an endless line.” And the little children’s stories connected to this. „The Soviet soldiers just made friends with me, we got chocolate.”

Soviet soldiers in Baranya

„The commander, the commander of the unit, was staying at my grandfather’s place. (...) A soldier who broke the plates and kitchen utensils of the second neighbor was tied up in the main square for I don’t know how many hours as a punishment. (...) It’s also unexpected because the village was a Swabian village. (...) The commander knew German very well.”

„There was a death, by the way, but not in battle, but from a serious misunderstanding. Well, the soldiers were drinking, and there was someone who had had a bit too much, and there was a sick man who was lying in bed. Of course, the soldiers went through the houses to see if anyone was hiding, and there was a sick man lying in bed in the house, and so the Russian somehow asked what this was, who this was, and explained to him in Swabian that ‘Kann nicht essen, essen’. He misunderstood that it was SS, and let a series of shots go through him.” It could have been even more tragic because there were two little girls under the bed, one of whom was related to the speaker through marriage. „I don’t know about other things, I don’t know about rape, or at least I wasn’t told.”

 From a Swabian (ethnic German living in Hungary) to a Hungarian soldier The reminiscencer’s father was a border guard in Szombathely, but when Northern Yugoslavia was re-annexed to Hungary, he was transferred there because he could ride a bicycle. He had the first bicycle in the village, he could ride a bicycle, and so with this knowledge he ended up as a bicycle border guard on the banks of the Drava. When he received the telegram that I was born, on November 23, 1941,” said his superior: “‘a future soldier for the homeland was born’. If he had known that I would never shoot...” The reminiscencer’s father then served as a Hungarian soldier, and lived through the Don Bend as a Hungarian soldier. “My father never told me stories,” says the speaker, who knows everything from his grandmother and mother. He also knows the memory of the Don Bend from them: “The Russians came, they came out of the forest…”; his father was not in the trenches because he was carrying sick people to the rear. “They were captured, they were kept in a cellar.” Many Soviet officers knew each other, and it turned out that his father had not taken part in direct combat, he was a medic. “Look, they managed to escape. He said whether it was true or not, I can’t guarantee (...) And so it happened, and they went to hell across the snowfield.”

Not everyone survived the escape from the Don bend. There were only three of them when an airplane machine-gunned them from above. His father was slightly injured, one of his comrades died, the other was wounded. “He laid the wounded man on the dead man’s coat and pulled the coat’s sleeve and dragged him across the snowfield.” According to his father, as he was pulling his comrade, he suddenly turned around and saw only one dead soldier left, and he dragged him along. From there he walked alone across the snowfield. He ended up somewhere in the swamps of northern Ukraine, and was picked up there by the Germans and handed over to the Hungarian command; then he was brought home. Here they got into trouble again, caught in the crossfire of a Soviet attack, and then again, further back, in Transcarpathia, they were attacked by an airstrike.

Forced conscription: Swabians in the German army

The reminiscencer’s father was stationed in Central Hungary (Székesfehérvár) when the Swabians (ethnic Germans from Hungary) were rounded up and transferred to German units. “I can say that only a fraction of the Germans from Hungary joined the SS”; they did so mainly for the money. They received a relatively high salary (200 Hungarian pengoes). The interviewees also had two classmates whose fathers had volunteered for the SS; they were also in combat on the Finnish-Soviet border; they did not survive the war. “This was also a topic in our family, that it was good that they did not.” A third SS soldier, who was sent to Greece for medical service, escaped to the West: “he lived well because there were many paid courtesans in that country”, the speaker notes with a laugh. He was the only father among his classmates who survived the war, but due to his defection, he did not remain in Hungary either, and his family was deported, just as all Germans whose family members had “escaped” to the West were deported.

“There were no men. Widows remained widows. I can’t suddenly say anyone who had remarried. That age group was practically wiped out.” Finally, those who did not volunteer were also conscripted. His father, now a German soldier, was ordered to Budapest. “He was bilingual, he was an interpreter, he practically didn’t shoot.” So he also experienced the encirclement and siege of Budapest as a German soldier. “Somehow very low, I don’t know how many floors underground.” He was an interpreter, an officer’s servant for a general in Hamburg. “The general promised that after the war he would take the whole family to Hamburg.” The general did not survive the siege. During the outbreak, it turned out that the general’s dog had been left down in the catacombs; his father was sent back to get the dog. The speaker’s father then set off somewhere from Úri Street and tried to leave the fenced-off castle somehow towards the Déli railway station. “The dog was hit, they shot at them and it died, and it turned back. (...) I don’t know the details and I can’t say anything false... (...) it didn’t reach the Castle”. He went into an apartment building, where he received the clothes of her fallen husband from a teacher in one of the shelters. The Russians checked everyone. “If they had looked at his arm, he would have fallen and been shot dead on the spot because the SS members were shot dead immediately, there were no prisoners of war.” Since he had malaria, he was thin, he looked bad, in such a condition that they didn’t recognize him as a soldier. He stayed there for three days, then he went home to Baranya. On the way home, the Soviet army still put him to work, but as a civilian. They were locked in a building, but at night a drunken Russian guarded them, who started talking to the civilian prisoners: “He will release them, but they must swear not to hurt him.” He went home along the railway line. The village is 12 kilometres from Mohács; a comrade stepped on a mine there, and died on the way home.

Escape from the front; hiding at home

“My father came home at four in the morning. I refused to pray that my father would survive in the evening; I was a little kid, three and a half years old, I refused, even though they had taught me to.”

Because, in his childish fantasy, he kept saying that the father was already coming home, so there was no point in praying. And he came home that evening. “He was hiding then. In the attic. They didn’t tell me he was my father. Leaf frog, that’s what they told me. Our leaf frog is up in the attic.

In Swabian, Laubfrosch. If I’m being snarky. And really, I told the neighbors that we had a frosch in the attic. I didn’t know it was my father. And then he was hiding in my uncle’s cellar too. There was no wine in one of the barrels and they took out the back and hid in that barrel in case anyone came. But there were times when my grandfather and my sick uncle would come and go there on purpose with one or two guests, so that no one would suspect that someone was hiding there. (...) I don’t know how long he was there.” It was a cellar hole, there was no door. “I don’t know how they brought him food… I don’t know, I forgot.” Then finally the reminiscing father was caught; the former German soldiers were being sought by the authorities. “Some of them were executed. Those who were caught by a certain service may not have survived.” But the police did not harm those they found. “They took my father to Mohács, he was there for a long time. He was locked up for five months, then somehow they were pardoned, but their citizenship was taken away.”

Here the memories are vague. “Only those who were party members were really deported from our village.” They were lucky because deportations were stopped when before their village would be “cleansed”; many surrounding villages were deported. His father’s non- military position as an interpreter and army munitions officer helped to escape from deportations. “He didn’t get into any trouble later, he got his citizenship back.”

 

Coexistence in Baranya before and after the war

The Volksbund was active as a cultural association in the region, but “it degenerated during the war.” The interviewee’s paternal grandmother was a Volksbung member who didn’t even know Hungarian, “she knew Croatian better”. “I questioned her. They gathered at the reading circle, in the evenings they knot warm clothes for the front-line soldiers and sang songs.” The village was multi-ethnic, but with a German majority: “There were hardly any Hungarians. There were Serbs, Swabians, and Gypsies.” With the introduction of the new (communist) constitution, they could become Hungarian citizens again, the wartime punitive measures were no longer in effect. German classes were also returned to school, but in small numbers, as a foreign language. It was an absurd situation, because the teachers were Swabians, the students were too, everyone knew German. “They call us Swabians, but we from South Baranya are not Swabians, we did not speak Swabian but Rhine Franconian. In a Franconian dialect.” Based on the village names, it is easy to determine where their ancestors came from: near Fulda. However, Swabian is the universally accepted name.

 

Was there an after-effect of participating in the war?

“There was. Not much, but there was. The Swabians were sometimes beaten in the street, just for fun.” But not by the local Hungarians; the Hungarian doctor in Slovakia protected them, “some say he was Slovak. I tried to clarify and check his origin.” Relations with the Szekler people of Bukovina were worse, who were then deported from the territory of Romania and lost everything there: “There were problems with the Hungarians in Szeklerland for a long time.” They did not know how to grow grapes, but they were given grapes. “There were hardly any craftsmen among the Szekler people.”

“These were not big clashes, they were just individuals, not groups.” A settler from Szeklerland, with whom “we were no longer schoolchildren, we were such brats, he came towards me on the street, two others caught him from both sides since he was totally drunk, and then he called me a f*cking Swabian. We never had any trouble earlier, and he was my classmate, we sat beside each other.” “There was another case, I hit him back so hard that he fell back into the snow.” “A Hungarian refugee family from Croatia took us in,” who were given a Swabian family house; he sympathized with those who had a similar experience. But not everyone was so generous, there was a lot of mistrust and resentment between the ethnic groups. He had no problem with the Swabians from the Uplands and vice versa; the first marriages were also concluded that way. Marriages also took place between Székely settlers and Swabians. He also told about the first Székely-Swabian marriage. “I also have a Hungarian wife, my sister too, although I think she is half-blood, because I think her mother is a Swabian. But it doesn’t matter. These ethnic groups have reconciled.”