BOSNIA & HERZEGOVINA: A Personal Walk Back in Time

My mother was born in 1925 in a German settlement in Bosnia, which at the time was part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

In 1930 her family emigrated to Canada.

She said many times how grateful she was that her father’s footsteps took her family to Canada, in reference to both WWII and the Baltic War in the 1990’s.

I decided to do some exploring while I was in Bosnia and my footsteps took us to NE Bosnia and a small village called Franzjosefsfeld.

 

My mother’s father was born in Franzosefsfeld, Bosnia in 1899.

I Googled Franzjosefsfeld to find information on the settlement and came up with basically nothing. Until I found the missing link – the name had been changed, numerous times. When I discovered the new name, Novo Selo, I was able to find more information.

 

It was a German settlement established after the Austrian-Hungarian Empire drove the Turkish Ottomans out of the area. The Austrians offered land incentives to German settlers to farm the fertile land and to discourage the Ottomans from returning. It became a very prosperous farming community.

And then there was WWII. 

After the war ended the locals destroyed the village in retaliation for what the Germans did during their occupation of Yugoslavia.

The few remaining German settlers fled. Some tried to go back to Germany, but they were ostracized in their former homeland. They were not granted German citizenship and they had never received Yugoslavian citizenship. Some fled to North America, South America and Australia to start new lives.

Other displaced refugees took shelter in what was left of the village. 

What remains of the village is haunting.

This church was completed in 1913 and the settlers would have been very proud of it. My grandfather would have been 14 at the time. His father died when he was 3 and I don’t know if my grandfather and his brothers worked on the church.

After the war, at one point the church served as a warehouse.

For some bizarre reason the floor fascinated me. Over 100 years later and all that it has been through, it is still pretty.

The village is near the city of Bijeljina. My research showed their museum had an exhibition of the Germans in the area. 

I went to the museum and found that the exhibition was held in 2007. The museum curator and other staff were very kind and shared info from their research. They were very proud that the exhibition's opening hosted dignitaries from Germany and over 200 people attended. They then suggested I go to City Hall to check for birth records.

City Hall had nothing. They suggested I go to the Catholic church because they kept records of all the Christians. 

At the Catholic church I met the new priest. Together we went through old leather-bound books. We found nothing.

The next day we were on a walking tour in Banja Luka and I mentioned my search to our guide. He told me that he had a friend in the government offices (Banja Luka is like the capital of the “province/state”) and that he would take me to him.

His friend then took me to someone else who looked in the files. No success.

I was ready to end my search, again, but the friend told me he’d get his counterpart in Belgrade, Serbia to look for the records in Pancevo, Serbia for my Grandmother and uncles’ records. He messaged me later with no success. I figured this was the end of the line and all records had all been destroyed in the war.

Then I got an email a couple of days later from a lady in the museum asking me for more details and she said she would see what she could find. Fingers crossed.

Fortunately, during WWII my mother was a teenager in Canada. She left school at 16 to work at the Westinghouse factory in Hamilton where she contributed to her family's finances and the Canadian War Effort by making radio tubes.

My mom at 16 with her parents, 2 younger brothers and her younger sister.

On April 19^th, 2023 my mother died in Ottawa, Canada, 6 weeks short of her 98^th birthday.

I am also grateful that my grandfather’s footsteps led his family to Canada in 1930.