Deportations to Bărăgan (1951-1956)
On the night of 17/18th of June 1951, on Pentecost, a total of 12,791 families, 40,320 people respectively, were removed from the present counties of Timiș, Caraș-Severin and Mehedinți, from 258 localities situated near the border with Yugoslavia and were deported to south-eastern Romania, in the Bărăgan plains. Social and ethnic groups considered to a risk were targeted: wealthy peasants, merchants, former industrialists, refugees from Bessarabia, Bucovina and Herța, Romanians, Germans, Serbians Bulgarians, Aromanians, Jews and others.
A family only had a freight wagon available for their own transportation and for the transportation of some food and household goods that could fit. After a journey of several days, the deportees got off in the middle of the field, where the land plot for each family, for building their house, was marked with stakes.
The photographs included in the album below, from Banat Swabians, represent irreplaceable documents of the life of those people in those times and places.
A map of the settlements can be found here:
http://www.afdb.eprocom.org/img/hbarag2.jpg