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In the summer of 1970 it was my privilege to spend the summer in Cologne, Germany, supposedly on a student work exchange. I’d been lucky to land my work assignment there, as I had relatives in that city, Donauschwaben cousins of my Mom’s who, like my parents, also lived in Batsch until they moved to Tschepin near Essegg in the late 1930’s. It turned out to be a true blessing indeed that I was in Cologne, as the arrangement at the hospital and the lodging there did not work out as planned, and I would have been left in a real bind had these relatives not rescued me and taken me into their home.

As it was, Tante Nani and cousin Veronika literally took me by the hand to the employment agency and I was instantly working at a great department store near their home – and in the music department, of all places. What an ideal job for a 20-year-old! They also lent me one of their bicycles to ride to work and back each day, fed me like one of their own, and generally made me feel right at home.

Naturally, however, I did feel bad about intruding into their lives this way, especially since I was occupying their living room, so I decided to cut my work time to five weeks from the originally planned eight, and made plans to do some traveling with the remainder of the time instead. This would allow me to see some relatives in Geislingen bei Balingen in the south of Germany, visit my Austrian home town of Bad Hofgastein for a few days, and perhaps even take a few days to make a side trip "across the Pond" to see London, England, for the first time.

I wrote home about my change of plans – and soon had an answer – from my Oma. I was very fond of Oma, and was delighted that she had written me. It was wonderful that my Mom and two younger brothers had been writing regularly, but it was something special indeed to hear from her. The contents of the letter touched me deeply as well. She asked that perhaps, since I did have flexibility with my plans for the three weeks in question, would I consider going to Batsch, Jugoslavia, to visit her brother who still lived there with his family?

How could I refuse? This was the first time she had ever asked anything of me, having given and given to us all since I was born. None of our family had been back to Batsch since leaving during the war. Although I was apprehensive about not speaking any Serbo-Croatian, my grandmother reassured me in her letter that surely many of the older people in the Batschka must still speak German, so I shouldn’t find myself totally at a loss …

When the time came to start my trip, I sadly took leave of my newfound family in Cologne. My route took me south to Geislingen for a few days where the Swabian dialect is only slightly less difficult to understand than the Kölsch in Cologne. I was ever so warmly received by another of Mom’s cousins, Tante Leni, and her husband Julius who is local there. There was also Peter, an exceptionally handsome second cousin once removed who had caught my eye on a trip there with my parents in 1968. Nevertheless, I only stayed a few days, as I had a tight agenda planned. I did promise to be back for a few days on my return trip, and left a suitcase there so as to have an excuse to do that.

My next stop was Bad Hofgastein, just south of Salzburg in the heart of the Alps. That was my birth town – and I was fiercely possessive of it even though I left it for Canada with my parents when I was just three. That’s why I understood all too well my parents’ and grandparents’ attachment to Batsch. My parents were adolescents in the 40’s – a time in one’s life that one tends to cherish more than any other.

In Bad Hofgastein I spent a couple of days with my own childhood friend Ridi who was now a cook at one of the hotels in this health spa town in the Gasteiner Valley. The day I was scheduled to take the night train to Jugoslavia, I foolishly agreed to spend the day on the mountaintop and then walk the last part of the way down instead of taking the lift. Ridi was used to this, and was swift and agile as a mountain goat, but I was much slower and clumsier – and wearing the wrong kind of shoes for such a hike. By the time we got down, my feet bled and I was looking forward to a good long sleep on the train, preferably with my feet up …

I boarded the train at the station at 9:00 that night, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing … The car I got into was jam-packed, shoulder-to-shoulder jam-packed. And the very first thing I encountered was a table with border police. These fellows weren’t the friendly type, so I was pleased when they stamped my passport and handed it back to me without a problem. Then I realized that all of the passengers were men speaking in languages I did not understand. Mind you, they almost all grinned widely at a 20-year-old blond and spoke words to me I could not for the life of me decipher.

I squeezed through to the next car – and the next – and the next, and so on to no avail. There were absolutely no places free in the entire train. I did, however, finally find a young couple squeezed up against one of the train doors. They were speaking English to each other while sitting on knapsacks and reading. I stayed close to them, and found out that this train was one of the Orient Express trains that was transporting the itinerant workers from Germany and Austria home for the month-long holiday to Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and other locations. How lucky could I get?

Much of the rest of that train trip is a blur. What I do remember is the following:

The men on the train were almost all drinking to celebrate the beginning of their holiday and the anticipated joyous time with their families back home. Each time the train stopped at a station, men would get off, some would come back on with more wine and beer and schnapps, and new men would get on. They smiled at me, talked to me, sang to me. I understood not a word, perhaps for the best?

I tried asking the conductors questions about where I was to get off, but they just smiled and drank more of the alcohol offered to them by the train’s passengers, so who knows if they could have answered even if we had spoken a common language. Finally, there was a seat free in one of the compartments, and I moved quickly to go to sit there as I’d already spent many hours leaning my large upright suitcase against a free wall and trying to just doze and not fall asleep.

As I sat down in the compartment, a conductor approached me and asked for my ticket. I handed it to him, whereupon he asked me for some number of dinars in the thousands, which by my conversion calculations was some hundred dollars or more. I did understand that he was telling me I owed extra money because this was a first class compartment, but there was no way I was paying that much more to sit, so I took my suitcase back into the hallway and sat on it once more. The conductor and the other passengers gave me strange looks, but I only found out why once I got to Batsch. Apparently the currency system had just very recently been changed to be rid of the high numbers, and while the conductor was quoting the price by the old system, the difference I was asked to pay was in fact under ten dollars.

It was very early morning by now, and a thick fog such as I had never seen covered the countryside. When it finally started to lift, I breathed a sigh of relief, because with that eerie cover of mist, it had looked more like how I pictured legendary Transylvania than I cared to admit. Now I could finally see the bottoms of what appeared to be cornfields. Soon vast stretches of nothing but sunflowers became visible. That was breathtaking – and very much like a storybook garden. It felt like I was on a miniature train in the Jolly Green Giant’s back yard.

When I saw most of the passengers preparing to get off the train at the upcoming station, I decided to disembark with them. Perhaps the people at the train station could direct me better than the conductors on this train.

The station was Vinkovci. Showing him my ticket, I asked an official-looking man there where I should go next. He just shook his head, but did point me to the side of the ramp opposite where I’d just gotten off. There was an elderly couple standing there waiting for the train, and I immediately remembered my grandmother’s advice to try to speak to the old people in German.

No such luck! Instead of answering me, the man held a bottle that looked like one of our plastic bleach containers. I’d seen him and the woman drinking from it earlier, and now it was clear he wanted me to drink from it as well. I was certainly thirsty, so I threw caution to the wind, and I took a good, long swig. Oh my goodness! What I assumed to be water was in fact slivovitz, a very strong Serbian home brew made from plums. I turned very, very red choking as the liquid burned my insides and I thought I would surely die then and there while they had quite a chuckle at my expense.

At that point I saw a second man in train uniform, and asked that one where I should go. He pointed at another track, and I was only too glad to escape the old people with the booze, so off I went. To make a very long story somewhat shorter, I landed up back in Vinkovci again later that day due to one confusion after another. I was put on yet another train. When everyone got off that one, I still wasn’t in Batsch, but in a much larger train station.

That was the absolute end of my endurance and my courage. After everyone else got off the train, I just sat in my seat – and cried, sobbing so loud that a man who was passing by stopped and entered the train car. He took a little schedule booklet out of his pocket and searched for a page, and when he found it, he showed it to me with a questioning look on his face. When I looked down through my tears, I saw a list of towns, and sure enough, Batsch was one of them, and I gladly pointed it out to him.

Now I’m thinking that I’ve met my savior at last, but what does he do? He takes off and leaves me sitting there alone again. I was stunned … However, after another 10 minutes or so had passed, he came back, grabbed my suitcase and began to run with it. What was this? Now he was stealing my clothes? I didn’t think it could get any worse!

Naturally, I forced myself to gather my strength and pursue him. That’s when I saw that the train station was raised over the town below, and that down the very long set of steps we were descending, there was a low but extensive building where many buses were loading or unloading passengers – a bus terminus! The stranger made sure I was behind him and entered the building, found a counter and asked the clerk for something in what I assume was Serbian. He turned to me and I realized he needed money from me, so I just held out some Jugoslavian currency, of which he handed some to the clerk and then obtained a ticket. He took me outside again to what was the appropriately numbered bus and indicated I should board.

I had no choice but to trust him, and something told me I could, so after the driver put my suitcase on the bus for me, I handed the kind stranger a piece of paper and a pen and did my best to ask him for his name and address. He understood and complied with my request. And I was off to Batsch! I had no idea how long it would take to get there, but my ticket did indeed say Novi Sad to Batsch, so I knew I was on the last leg of the trip.

For about an hour, I believe it was, we drove through miles of flat dusty farmland with the ever-present corn and more fields of enormous sunflowers until at last we stopped in a village where I immediately spotted an elderly face that hauntingly resembled the grandmother back home in Montreal who had sent me on this journey. Despite the unfamiliar surroundings, it felt like being home!

I was welcomed like royalty – and like family – by Toni Batschi and Marisch Neni and their widowed daughter Katiza. Katiza’s son and daughter, Feri and Marta spoke only Serb-Croatian, no English, and precious little German, but their smiles were huge and warm, and we managed to communicate anyway. It turned out that the agony of the trip was well worth it, as I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of the next four days.

Among the highlights were having Donauschwaben home cooking like I was used to at home, but with the added touch of having all produce fresh from the garden, and all meat from their own back yard. Huge melons were plentiful, as it was August, and there was more sweet corn than anyone could want to eat. I was taken to visit at least a dozen or more homes during my stay, and everywhere I went it was expected that I accept at very least a glass of wine or a sweet schnapps. My favorite was a lovely pear liqueur called kruschkovatz.

I’ll never forget one particular evening after an entire day of visits – and several too many alcoholic beverages. Marta and Feri and I began to walk home from the last of the homes, and it suddenly began to rain ever so slightly. To my absolute horror, something slimy jumped up and hit me in the forehead. When I screamed, Marta and Feri burst out laughing because I had been taken by surprise by one of Batsch’s many, many frogs who come out into the streets to enjoy the rains during a drizzle such as the one we were having. Soon there seemed to be hundreds of them jumping at us, and I too was laughing uncontrollably. Arm in arm we finally made it home safely, but soaked to the skin by the warm summer rain and behaving like very silly children.

Certain conveniences were missing from the Dornstaedter home, you understand. Yes, I had to get used to using the outhouse in the back yard – and that was a little inconvenient overnight when their little dog, recognizing me as a stranger, growled ferociously whenever I attempted to use the facilities. The city slicker in me was also a little taken aback at finding a slug on my bed cover when I awoke in the morning. No one else batted an eye over this, as they were used to having the doors open on a hot night – with just a curtain for privacy from the world outside, thus welcoming in whatever of God’s creatures cared to enter. For me it was scary enough just seeing the slugs clinging to the watermelons that were piled in the yard.

But my initiation was quick, and I loved seeing the corn growing tall and abundant just behind the house. Feri called me from the cornfield one morning to show me something I had never seen before. It was just a litter of naked baby mice, but I found it so moving that he had taken the trouble to share this find with me. I also had the chance to borrow one of their bicycles and was surprised to find myself competing for the dirt road with the cattle coming home from the pasture.

I was taken to visit the two churches in town and also the Festung, the ruins of a former great fortress that Batsch is so famous for. At the cemetery I was shown the children’s graveyard where siblings of my parents that didn’t survive to adulthood are buried, as well as the graves of other relatives who died there. Unfortunately, four of my great grandparents’ graves are not in that cemetery, as they died in Gakowa and Filipowa, and are buried in those towns instead of in the towns where they lived their lives.

It was a few very emotional minutes when I actually visited the homes my parents left behind as teenagers. The people who lived at my Mom’s house let me walk around the side yard, taking my time to look around and take pictures. They did not invite me inside, however. At my father’s house, the Serbian woman who lived there did invite me in. It was not a thing like they left it. The entire house was plastered with pages from movie magazines – film stars like Marilyn Monroe and Brigitte Bardot as well as singers. Naturally, Elvis took up a good amount of space. I almost wished I hadn’t been invited in, but I rationalized that it probably made me feel less possessive of the house having seen it this way instead of nicely kept.

I must say that the luckiest part of my visit to Batsch was the fact that I was there on the weekend of Croatian (Schokatzen) Kirchweih, the feast day celebration of the patron Saint of Batsch’s Franciscan church. The celebration included a gypsy band and there was dancing out in the open. It just so happens that if there was any activity in the world I loved best at that stage of my life it was dancing. And Hungarian gypsy music is the sound that most touches my soul and gives my feet wings. The locals were dancing their Czardash and Kolo dances – done in a circle and holding onto one another’s shoulders, something like the Greek dances. It didn’t take me long to catch on, and I didn’t sit down the entire evening.

My second cousins and I had a wonderful time together during that visit, and it didn’t take them long to get over their inhibitions to attempt to speak a little in the Donauswabian dialect. In return, I begged them to teach me a little Serbo-Croatian. Soon I was able to order the beers for us in the Gasthaus. Inspite of the wonderful ambience between us, however, I was always aware of the photo of Marshal Tito in every business establishment, including restaurants. That made me uncomfortable from time to time.

My Mom had told me that she only had one wish, if I could manage it, of a souvenir from Batsch. She wanted a "Plützerli". That was a water jug of the kind that she used to take into their fields when she helped her father and grandfather. In the fields was where she preferred to be as a child, rather than in the house doing women’s work.

I had told Toni Batschi about Mom’s request and he’d told me he’d see what he could do, but cautioned me that he couldn’t make any promises. However, on the second morning when I awoke in their home, he came back from market with some dozen "Plutzerli" of 

various sizes and colors. He put them down on my bed covers as I opened my eyes, and the entire family came into the room to see them.

We were all just so delighted that my Mom’s wish could be fulfilled.

There was another sad parting when I left Batsch. After all of my parents’ and grandparents’ stories about their home town, it was just too incredible that I had also come to know it to some extent. It was incredible to have come to know my grandmother’s brother and his family and to discover how quickly one bonded so naturally as family.

Only the separation from Feri was delayed a few more hours, as he came with me by train to Vinkovci this time. He taught me some of the Cyrillic alphabet on the train, and seemed amused when two young men sitting across from us made some comments about me. I asked him what they had said.

He answered in our dialect. "Er sagt du bist a Schoff."

This translates: "He says you’re a sheep."

Now, the word for sheep is a derogatory term in our dialect, implying that one isn’t all that intellectually capable.

"What?!!!" I protested. "That’s not nice!"

"Na, na, " says Feri, "A KLEINES Schoff!"

"No, no, a LITTLE sheep."

He meant a lamb, which is very nice in any language or dialect, I would think.

That’s when our train pulled into Vinkovci.

It had been a magical few days, and I was so grateful for all I had experienced. I had also been able to fulfill wishes for both my Koelbli Oma and my Mom – and whoever else in Montreal had their heart set on a Plützerli, as I had many in my suitcase. And, best of all, I had danced with the people of Batsch.

A few weeks after my return home to Montreal, my Oma received a letter from a friend in Germany. After reading it in her room, Oma laughed out loud and came into the kitchen. She read us the letter. It said that the woman had been in Batsch for Kirchweih, and what a wonderful celebration it had been. It was especially exciting, she said, because there was an American girl there who so added life to the festivities because she was able to do all of the local dances.

Oma glowed with pride.

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