The story of Ignacz Szoka was found in the documents of the history of Napoleon I.

He was born in 1784 in the village of Virovitica on the right bank of the Drava river. At the time, that place was part of great Hungary, under Austrian rule, and there was a substantial minority of Croats. Many of whom joined Napoleon's Croate division of mercenaries.

Ignacz SZOKA served in the 9th division under General Merle, in the 3rd provisory Croat brigade before the battle of RAAB (Kaptalanpatona, later Rabapatona) near Gyor, on the shore of the Raba river in Hungary, where the Hungarian Graf Istvan Szechenyi defeated Napoleon's attacking army.

Later he rejoined his regiment and stayed with the 2nd army until August 12th 1812 when he was wounded in the battle of Gorodeszno (Grodno). He settled closeby in the village of Indura where he married a Polish girl. That region was then Polish; later Lithuanian and even later in 1944 it became Belarus, as per the treaty of Moscow, when Poland accepted the Cruzon line.

Last updated on Friday, March 5th, 1999

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