Tamo daleko (There, far away)

A Serbian prisoner of war during World War One

“The bread you sent, every Serb took it, they crossed themselves and kissed it and then we all started to cry happy tears”.

This is an excerpt of a letter which Djordje Vukosavljevic, who was mentioned earlier in a blog, sent to his wife on 28/02/1918 from the Prisoners of War (PoW) camp Soltau near Hannover in Northwest Germany. Djordje was a non-commissioned officer of the Serbian army during the First World War and he died 22th January 1919 in a PoW camp in Nieuw-Milligen near Garderen in the Netherlands.

Thus, he never returned to his home country, Serbia. His letters give a small insight about the life of a Serbian Prisoner of War during the First World War in the PoW camps in Germany. These letters are now also available on the Europeana 1914-1918 website, with an English translation and they can be found here. Lately it was also discovered, thanks to the great-granddaughter who keeps the letters in the best state as possible, that his brother-in-law, Konstatin Mladenovic, died during the Great War too. The last sign of life was a postcard dated 18/08/1914 written in Klenje near Sabac, Western-Serbia. Here the allies won their first victory when the Serbian army defeated the Austro-Hungarian army during the battle of Cer (15-24th August 1914).

The great-granddaughter also has a letter from Dragomir Rajicic, a tradesman from Gornji Milanovac. He wrote a letter on 19/08/1919 to the wife of Djordje Vukosavljevic to inform her that Djordje died in the Netherlands. It had taken him half a year to get home from the Netherlands. With the kind help of Museum of Rudnik and Takovo Region and with special thanks to Ana Jelic from this museum in Gornji Milanovac the team could also identify Dragomir.

It turned out that Dragomir’s brother, Sreten Rajicic, also died in the Netherlands on 22/01/1919 in Enschede. The funeral of Sreten was reported by the Dutch newspaper Tubantia on 24/01/1919, where it was written that a family member, who was also a PoW, attended the funeral. On Sreten’s death certificate (Enschede 1919 No. 63) it is not written where he is from, so the team of researchers was not aware that Dragomir and Sreten had been brothers.  Only when various sources from Serbia and the Netherlands were combined and analysed, it turned out that they were brothers. Sreten and Djordje were exhumed in May 1938, with 86 other Serbian WWI soldiers who died in the Netherlands and transported to the mausoleum in Jindrichovice which is in the Czech Republic. After the war Dragomir Rajicic continued his father’s business with a bookshop and publishing house for postcards in Gornji Milanovac (the shop on the right on the postcard below, which was published by him).

Tamo daleko is the title of this blog and it is inspired by a famous Serbian song about WWI (link). It is important that those who died “tamo daleko” (there, far away) are not forgotten. The authors of this blog also created a permanent digital remembrance place on the website www.secanje.nl and will continue with their voluntary research to the fate of the 91 Serbian WWI soldiers who died in the Netherlands.