In explaining her reasons for writing the book, Andor says, “Admittedly, the idea of a German victim of World War II is an oxymoron and a difficult concept for many to accept in a world in which we have been conditioned to just the opposite. However, I grew up in this confusion, and in the need to understand who my family was, why I was born to it, and what I was supposed to do, the topic not only chose me but pursued me relentlessly for years.”

Persecuted Danube Swabians: Reviewed by Doug Shepherd Here Ingrid Andor's memoir BREAD ON MY MOTHER'S TABLE is the engrossing story of the enslavement, hardship and expulsion of the Andor family, Danube Swabians, who lived in a settlement village in Yugoslavia called Kruschiwl. Danube Swabians were Germans who lived in the former Kingdom of Hungary, especially in the Danube River valley, and who spoke local dialects of German and were ethnic or pure German farmers not involved in Hitler's war to conquer the world. Nonetheless, they were despised as such, stripped of their property and forced to work for Tito's partisan soldiers who lived comfortably in the homes of their now captive owners. These captives serviced the soldiers at day and slept on the floors of deserted barns at night. Able bodied males among them were sent to labor in Russian mines and rock quarries for five years, a period which began in October 1944 and ended in December 1949 long after the defeat of Hitler's Germany. Of the 874,000 sent to Russia, 393,300 did not return. Ms. Andor has a wonderful ability to weave together a potpourri of viewpoints--those of her immediate family and their Danube Swabian friends--and passages of poetic beauty and obvious love in fleshing out the people of her memoir. These vignettes and vivid character descriptions work smoothly enough once the reader understands that this memoir is not a linear record of happenings, which can easily become a "ho-hum" chronology of events as they took place. Nor is it told from a narrator's single viewpoint (though the author's presence is felt in the placement and tone of each paragraph). Be prepared also to shift back and forth in time and place between roughly 1929, the year of Maria's, the author's mother's, birth in Kruschiwl, Yugoslavia and the present in Chicago, Illinois where the surviving expelled ethnic Germans are living safely and comfortably. The Andor family is no longer cultivating farms but in one instance maintaining a 13 unit apartment building doing themselves the everyday chores of landlords. The shift in time and place can come within a paragraph or after a page-long description of a family member. But Ms. Andor's ordering of "scenes" is not random. The shifts intensify the suffering and painful dislocation of the internment camps and later expulsion from the land that had been the Danube Swabians' productive and orderly communities. Looking backward from the present reminds us that these are recollected experiences presented as happening in the present. But now have the historical perspective of what they experienced and why perhaps in later years the family did not wish to talk about them. (I am reminded that most holocaust victims do not feel comfortable talking about the past.) In present time the reader sees the author sitting at a desk putting order to the wide variety of material she has gathered from interviews, conversations and what one "character" says about another or an action lived through in the seven years following 1944 and later in America to the final pages. A word or two about Ms. Andor's style. First, it is literary, unpretentious, open and personal, easily read throughout and enough varied in tone and content that keeps your interest. She never chooses a word for its impressiveness and prefers rather to avoid abstraction and stick to the concrete word that pulls its weight and paints a picture. Read the passage on pages 13-14 where she extols the bread making process of the Danube Swabians and makes you see and taste the bread out of the oven. Play with the possible interpretations you might make of the symbolism given bread making. What is bread anyway? What does it mean in the lives of farmers who work the soil in such honest and precise labor?.

Local Author Exposes Controversial Genocide of Germans in Post-World War II Yugoslavia   Chicago, IL - The subject of Serbia’s involvement in genocide is explored again in a unique, new family memoir recently published by local author Ingrid Andor.   The recent publication of BREAD ON MY MOTHER’S TABLE: A Danube Swabian Remembers reveals the controversial and little-known post-World War II ethnic cleansing and expulsion of ethnic Germans, called Danube Swabians, from Yugoslavia   Andor’s mother, Maria, then 15 years old, was held captive with her family in a partisan-run concentration camp in Kruschiwl, Yugoslavia from 1944-1948. Maria’s family’s saga  of denationalization, occupation, enslavement in concentration camps in Yugoslavia and deportation to labor camps in Russia, and their subsequent survival as refugees in Europe and immigrants in Chicago is featured in this thoughtful, highly personal, and sometimes, painful memoir by her first generation Chicago-born daughter who, through the writing of the book, comes to accept her own confusing ethnic identity and the involvement and victimization experienced by the Danube Swabians during the aftermath of World War II.

Author Interview on KUNM Listen to an author interview from public radio show KUNM, "Womens Focus," with host Carol Boss.   Click on the link below. File is 45 Mb and may take several minutes to download.

Continued from Previous column............ There is much to tell in this memoir besides the persons caught in the tragic subjugation by Tito's communist partisan soldiers and the Russians' free-wheeling, brutal occupation. This writer tries and succeeds in giving us a very full picture of her cultural heritage. She does so focusing on her family's survival through very difficult times and puts it down compassionately and lovingly. Finally, I must praise Ms. Andor's selection of the cover picture of the book. It is one of my favorite paintings, the Song of the Lark, by the French artist Jules Breton in 1884. The painting shows a peasant girl standing in a field at sunrise. She holds a sickle in one hand. Her face is besmeared with dirt from the work and her hair is disheveled, suggesting she has already been at work in the field cutting and gathering grain (perhaps wheat for making bread). Something catches her attention and she looks with mouth slightly agape into the distance to see where a bird is singing. She has heard this beautiful songbird countless mornings before. It is the Lark. In the dim light of the rising sun, one can make out that she is barefoot, taking a rest from her back-aching work, listening to the bird's singing. She could be a Danube Swabian of pure German ancestry going many generations back, cultivating the fields between the countries of Hungary and Yugoslavia with all her strength and uncelebrated doing of what must be done. Her name could be Maria, though I suspect the sound and spelling of the name might be unrecognizable to us today. The book Bread on My Mother's Table needed to be written and needs to be read. It is important for us to know that 2,000,000 Danube Swabians died during this time of captivity and expulsion. It certainly ranks among the major genocides of modern times. Ironically, no one seems to have known much about it.