Mitzi remembered that Friday in the winter of 1931 when grandmother Gera sent her into the new snow to get the midwife Josefa Kresse from across the square at number 52. Mitzi, my older sister aged seven, knew what was about to happen, whereas seven years later when brother Paul was to be born in the summer of 1938, I had not the fraction of a clue.

On the way back, Mitzi and Josefa stopped at the Schaffer house to ask mother's friend Maria to come in case more help was needed. After the three of them came back to the house and in the hallway stomped the clinging snow off their boots, Mitzi was ordered into the kitchen while the two women disappeared behind the door to the large bedroom of my parents. In the kitchen, Gera was heating extra water in pots on the stove and feeding, through the arched opening, the fire in the massive tiled oven in the bedroom on the other side of the wall in which Mother was bravely struggling to open a way out for me. Her panting, interrupted by screams did not bother Gera, no friend of her son's wife, but frightened Mitzi who clung to the step-grandmother and tried to seek refuge under the many layers of her billowing floor length skirts.  No longer able to control the little girl, Gera climbed into her snow boots and dragged her to the parsonage next door where she was left with the housekeeper.

When Gera returned, I had been born. Sometime later Maria Schaffer, on her way home stopped at the parsonage with the news and told Mitzi to return home.  At the door of the centuries old stone house of my father's family in Grčarice (Masern), the little girl saw Gera tossing out water from a basin, leaving a pink cavity in the white snow which renewed her fright. But in the bedroom of the parents she saw her brother for the first time, red, crinkled, and ugly.

- - - -

I got to know these details years later when Mitzi and I were again reminiscing about the place we used to call home. She recalled that Friday morning of February 28th, 1931 after I reminded her of the afternoon of June 29, 1938, when she came to fetch me from the square saying that I had to come home for a surprise.

Earlier that warm summer afternoon, the holiday of St. Peter and Paul, Father and I were lying on a blanket spread out in the shade of one of the apple trees in the orchard behind the house. Some of the blossoms had already given way to little balls, the first evidence of the fruit to be, while others, lagging the cycle, were being visited by noisy bees.  I had dozed off and when I woke up, I was alone with no one in sight. Being hungry I wandered into the house but in the hallway on the way to the kitchen I heard voices from the parents’ room. As I opened the bedroom door, Josefa, known as Zefo, her hands bloody, flew toward me and motioned me out of the room saying mother was very sick and that I should go to Mattl, our neighbor.  He would give me something to eat.
  
Outside the house I climbed on to the bench underneath the window to the parents' room and through the panes watched Mother being sick. She was on her back on the bed, alternately screaming and whimpering with her legs held high by Father and Maria Schaffer while Zefo was somewhere in between. I soon got bored; Mother had been sick before and always got well again. Mattl assured me that Mother would be well soon and, after some bread, I went to seek playmates on the square. Mitzi found me on the stone benches under the big linden to bring me home for a surprise which turned out to be a tiny baby next to my recovered and smiling Mother.  Sitting on the bed near her was the grinning Father who insisted that I put a finger into the curled up hand of brother Paul, born that afternoon.

- - - -

With such auspicious beginnings, my brother and I arrived in a village settled sometime in the 14th Century with people who were part of a group that came from a distant land. For over six centuries thereafter, they maintained their uniqueness and resolutely clung to an unfriendly earth which they loved but nevertheless abandoned in the winter of 1941/42. And throughout these centuries, they were part of a tribe that struggled to maintain its identity until its ultimate dissolution in the spring of 1945.

For ten years after Mitzi fetched the midwife from across the square, I was a part of a place called Grčarice (Masern), insignificant in history, but not to the inhabitants of this village at the edge of the world.  It is on the western edge of the Kočevje (Gottschee) forest of Slovenia, south and east of Ljubljana, the capital of the country. It can be found on the map about half way and slightly south of a straight line between Trieste and Zagreb, ancient cities in the neighboring countries of Italy and Croatia.

In spite of its proximity to the three cities - 51 kilometers to Ljubljana, 80 to Trieste and 90 to Zagreb, all in existence before the Middle Ages - Grčarice (Masern) was bypassed by time. And even in the early 20th century, most of its 260 or so inhabitants lived isolated from the world since few, excepting the desperate or ambitious, seldom ventured beyond a radius of twenty kilometers.

The German settlers arrived there in the early 14th century. They came from the north-western part of Europe at the invitation of Count Ortenburg, the local noble and landlord of the region. At the time of the initial settling, Grčarice was a hamlet or perhaps only a clearing in a dense primal forest and a collection point for lumber used by builders in the lowlands of Carniola, the present day Slovenia.  The hamlet and its surrounding forests belonged to the Ortenburg counts who were pressed by their Germanic king for more taxes. To attract settlers, the count offered ownership of parcels of the forest which could be cleared and made into arable lands, in exchange for taxes which would help him to satisfy the needs of his monarch.
 
Long before the arrival of the settlers, the Kočevje forest and the surrounding land was part of the “Land of the Slavs” (Provincia Sclaborum), which was settled by heathen Slavs who had arrived from the East.  Out of this land emerged, among others, the area described as Carniola which the Slovene called Kranjska.  Later on Carniola expanded into Upper Carniola (Gorenjska), Middle Carniola (Notranjska) and Lower Carniola (Dolenjska) which, together with other parts populated by Slovenes, merged into the present Slovenia. Grčarice was and still is part of Lower Carniola.
 
In Carniola, all formal names of settlements, be they towns such as Ljubljana or smaller and lesser settlements were initially in Latin, later in German and after the establishment of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1918 in Slovene. Ljubljana was Emona to the Romans and Laibach to the Germans.  Over the years, however, the Slavs of the local population continued with the names established by their ancestors when they arrived in the area over 1,500 years ago.

Grčarice is a Slovene name derived from Grča, which describes a piece of gnarled wood.  The initial German settlers arriving in Grčarice changed the name to Masern, hardly a coincidence since the German equivalent for a piece of gnarled wood is Maser. Most likely therefore, the settlers simply translated the already existing Slovene name into German. They also brought with them a curious German dialect which they kept alive for the next 700 years.

But the Slovene in the neighboring Rakitnica, four kilometers on the other side of the steep hill that was the divide between the linguistic enclave and other parts of Slovenia, continued to use Grčarice. The new inhabitants of Masern on the other hand used Rakitnitz, the official German name for Rakitnica when they talked about their neighbor. The two villages and their inhabitants coexisted peacefully for the next seven centuries. And they continued to do so even after 1918, when Slovenia became part of Yugoslavia and the official name of Masern reverted to Grčarice.  But the village and the enclave continued to use Masern, a name that had long ago become an established habit.
 
- - - -

Topographically, Grčarice (Masern) is in a clearing at 519 meters altitude in a valley surrounded by a dense pine forest. In springtime when the sap begins to flow, the pollen that appears on the pinecones produces a heavy fragrance that dominates the village, a fragrance that is captured in a thick whitish honey, harvested by swarms of busy bees.  In my time, the village was home to 260 souls living in 63 houses. It had a church and an adjacent parsonage for the resident priest and his housekeeper, a one-room school, a general store, a saw mill, three pubs and a cemetery. It also had its own smithy and smith, a midwife, a shoemaker, a saddler, a seamstress, a game warden and a fire brigade instantly ready to respond. And high up in the church tower, a slowly rusting clock announced the time of day by striking two of  the three bronze bells suspended on wooden beams.

This self-sufficient village however lacked a mill for grinding the grain and a bull for fertilizing its cows.  But all were within easy walking distance as were the occasionally needed doctor or dentist.
 
The church stood at one end of the village square, its portal in the bell tower facing the open space in front. The parsonage was behind the church next to the adjoining stable and barn, all at the level of the square. And behind these three structures was a sharp drop off leading to the lowest level of the village and the cistern bowl.

Opposite the bell tower, at the other end of the square stood the ancient village linden tree, surrounded by a circle of stone benches.  From the base of this tree one could see, through the open double doors in the tower, the altar at the far end of the church.

While the portal in the bell tower dominated the square, the big linden at the other end attracted with fragrant blossoms in the spring and a welcoming shade on hot summer afternoons. Its circle of stone benches invited villagers for a cool evening of gossip and occasionally the tunes from the Primosch harmonica emerging through the open windows of the Jaklitsch inn.  Some women and older men brought cushions to soften the seat. Younger men usually stood in groups and when not talking, carefully rolled their cigarettes for the next smoke.

The square was the main intersection of all roads, be they from neighboring villages, remote houses or surrounding fields and forests. The main road from Dolenja Vas entered the village at the linden end of the square through an opening between two houses, one of them the Jaklitsch tavern at number 11.  It skirted the canopy of the big tree and crossed the open space toward the church.  After passing the church, it turned right toward the Kren tavern and the cemetery beyond and left Masern toward Gotenica (Göttenitz) and other villages in the deeper forest.
 
Two other roads entered and left the graveled square at different points. The church, the square, the roads through it and the houses surrounding were all part of a symmetrical arrangement except that the houses on one side of the square were at a slightly higher elevation than those on the other.
 
The early priests of the eighteenth century were supported financially in part by the parish in Ribnica (Reiffnitz) and in part by the villagers through the mandated annual tithe. Apart from that, they were self sufficient, maintained their livestock and cultivated the land allocated to the parsonage.  In this the priest had help from a live in housekeeper and the villagers whenever he was in need of it.
 
- - - -

The inner village houses were clustered around the large square whose perimeter resembled an open ended rectangle. Most of these houses were elongated boxes, close together on narrow but deep parcels of land. They stood next to one another, with the narrow part facing the square.  The main entry door to each house was on the long side facing the back wall of the neighbor’s house and in between was adequate space for passage of a carriage or wagon to the courtyard in the rear.  Usually, another door in the rear of the house also led to the stable, barn, vegetable garden, orchard and other structures further in the back.  All were built with local materials, stone walls three feet thick with hand crafted pine shingles resting on roofing beams hand hewn in the local forest and left there to dry out until ready for use.
 
Three pubs in a village of 63 houses was certainly excessive during the final years of the community when modern transport in the form of fuel powered trucks came of age. But in past centuries they all were welcoming places for the drivers of columns of horse drawn wagons who needed a place to eat and rest, water and feed their horses and even spend the night before continuing a journey lasting several days. And the same was the case in reverse when they passed through again for their next haul of lumber, all part of a non-ending cycle in which the tireless forest was forever a willing participant. In the thirties, two of the three pubs were idle except for the occasional traveler, the annual local festivity or the occasional wedding.  But not the Jaklitsch tavern which, due to the increasing prominence of its owner Franz in the 1930’s, became a magnet not only for the locals but also for visitors from foreign lands, particularly the new Germany, the Third Reich. These visitors passed through the village with increasing frequency in the late thirties to stay for the night or for a few days.
 
My father’s house at Number 15 was adjacent to the church on the other side of the road leading from the square to the cistern basin behind the parsonage.  The road sloped gently downward to the cistern level passing on its right the church grounds that used to be the cemetery prior to its being moved to the end of the village. Our house was already at a lower level and therefore, our courtyard gate faced the embankment across the road. Embedded into this embankment was a narrow footpath leading diagonally up to the front of the church.  This path shortened the otherwise much longer walk to the church via the square.

Similar to other houses in the village, the narrow wall of our rectangular house was along the sloping road while the long part, containing the entry door, faced the large and level courtyard. Along the courtyard wall of the house was the long wooden bench, part of which was under the window through which I watched the birth of Brother Paul.

Dominating the left view from the bench was the bell tower of the church.  Each of its four walls had its own Roman numeral clock face above the opening to the chamber of the bells. The view of the clock face from the bench was up so high it strained the neck.

I sat on this bench when my milk teeth started to loosen and waited for the clock to strike while holding the end of the sewing thread Mother had tied to the loose tooth.  I was determined to pull the string at the stroke of the next quarter. Usually by then the will had weakened and the action postponed for another fifteen minutes. Many quarters passed, and the tooth, loosened by constant checking and wiggling, usually fell out by itself.

I often climbed the steep narrow stairs that hugged the inside of the tower wall, up to the bells in spite of the concern of sexton Michitsch who was worried about my safety. But ever since I became an altar boy, I had access to the church and getting into the bell tower was, in spite of the sexton, not difficult at all.

On the way up, after entering the tower at the choir level of the church, I had to pass the storage space of burial implements of picks, shovels, ropes and stretchers used in funeral services. Leaning against the wall was the black cross, its intersection painted with the white skull and crossbones, carried high by the sexton in front of a funeral procession from the church to the cemetery.  Small openings in the thick stone walls of the tower allowed only a little light, adding to the eeriness of the place.

Getting past this part in the tower always gave me a fright. Climbing the narrow stairs, past the suspended stone weights of the clock, past the platform that held the clock with its greased and slowly rusting wheels was also scary but once up there with the bells, the view from any of the four openings in the belfry made it all worthwhile.
 
Staying up there had to be timed so as not to be there when the hammer of the clock struck the large bell to tell the hour. The intensity of the sound was unbearable.  The quarter hour ring from the smaller of the three bells I could just bear, but only if I covered my ears.

The sound of the bells telling time was heard in the remotest part of the village and the surrounding fields.  It was loud on the square and at our house so near the church especially so, but years of conditioning had long ago desensitized our ears.

- - - -

News from the municipality in Dolenja Vas was delivered to the village by an employee on a bicycle. It was read to the villagers on Sundays after Mass when they had assembled under the big linden tree at the village square opposite the church.

The municipal authorities required that the village select an elder fluent in Slovene who could read the announcements and translate them for the villagers.  They did not require that this person be a village official. Normally, the resident priest, when we had one, would perform this function. In the 1930s after Father Klemenčič died in 1934, this elder was Albert Tschinkel, a distant relation and one of few villagers who spoke Slovene. In the later ‘30s, the village official was, if informally, Franz Jaklitsch the tavern keeper at Masern No 11 but he did not know Slovene well enough to meet the requirement of the municipality.
  
Albert Tschinkel read the notices and decrees, all in Slovene.  He stood on the stone bench surrounding the linden and with a raised voice proclaimed "Official Announcement". After he finished reading in Slovene, he gave a summary translation in the dialect of the Kočevje (Gottschee) enclave, the only language the villagers understood well.  He explained the essence of the notice and answered questions. Throughout the year, he made these "announcements" in all kinds of weather since this was the required way for bringing official information to the public.

Mail was delivered twice a week by Jula Bojčeva, on foot from the post office in Dolenja Vas. The middle aged postwoman brought the post in a leather bag strapped to her shoulder which she took to the house of the village smith at Number 7 where she also picked up the outgoing mail.  Afterwards, she took what looked important or official directly to the address where she asked if she could rest a bit and perhaps even learn what was in the mail she delivered.  She often came to our house even if there was nothing to deliver and exchange gossip with Mother over a cup of chamomile tea.

But Jula came only if there was mail to be delivered and if the road was passable. Often during the winter months, the village was cut off from the outside for days if not weeks by the snow, which fell regularly from early December through late March, at times up to three feet high.

And there also was no mail in early spring when the water from the melting snow in the surrounding hills found its way through underground channels to the cistern, overflowed the basin and searching for lower ground, covered not only arable and sometimes already planted fields but also the main road to Dolenja Vas.  Again there was no mail, sometimes for many days until, eventually, the waters drained away.

The only item of mail that came regularly, absence of snow or water permitting, was the enclave newspaper, the weekly Gottscheer Zeitung. The newspaper was in German and published in Kočevje (Gottschee City), 15 kilometers away.

There was no electricity, no telephone and until 1936 not even a battery operated radio. The Jaklitsch tavern on the square had a wind up record player with a huge horn and about half a dozen records, most of them with grooves long robbed of their original melody by overused steel needles.  In one of the songs, a melancholy female reminds her lover that the raindrops knocking on the window pane are a greeting from her.
 
"Regentropfen, die an das Fenster klopfen, daß merke dir, sie sind ein Gruß von mir".

- - - -

Some 600 years after Grčarice was settled and became Masern and then Grčarice again in 1918, the villagers, my family and I, now ten, traveled the road out of the forest, for the last time on the 7th of December 1941 . The destination was a place in the Third Reich where, as Franz Jaklitsch the new village leader promised, “milk and honey” freely flowed.

I returned more than a quarter of a century later in 1974 to see that much had changed while much had also remained the same. I was accompanied there by Janez Pahulje the husband of Angela, my maternal aunt. He and his family lived in Dolenja Vas, the birthplace of my mother 6.5 kilometers away, the second Slovene village on the road to Ribnica.
 
A short summary from him the day before prepared me for the return.

“It still snows as it used to and the basin still fills and overflows in the spring when the snows melt in the hills. But the cistern in the basin behind the church, once the main watering place for the livestock and the fire pump, is no longer used and is crumbling away.  Weeds cover the ruins.

“The mail now comes regularly in spite of the snow. Engine powered plows clear the way over the improved road from Dolenja Vas across the hill. It was rerouted away from the steep parts to gentler slopes and on lower grounds it was moved out of the way of the water overflowing the basin collecting the melted snow from the hills. Diesel powered trucks have replaced horse drawn wagons hauling lumber to distant mills.  The gravel paving you walked as a boy is now buried permanently under black asphalt.

“The church is no more and green covers the ground where it stood. The parsonage is neglected and empty, aware of its lost purpose for existing. The church was destroyed in the fall of 1943 during the three-day battle between the Partisans and their opposition, the Plava Garda, the Blue Guard. The ferocious battle included howitzers and other weapons left behind by the retreating Italians who, until the collapse of Mussolini in the summer of 1943, had been the occupier of Kočevje and a large part of Slovenia. The church was the main hold-out of the doomed Garda, the local opposition to the Partisans of the National Liberation Front.

“Many of the houses around the square, including those of Schaffer, Jaklitsch and the Auersperg hunting lodge were extensively damaged during the battle in 1943. Most of them have been renovated with attractive improvements made by the new occupants.

“The ancient linden tree in the village square, opposite the Jaklitsch tavern still blossoms with luscious fragrance every spring. But the stone benches surrounding it in a continuous circle which once encouraged the gathering of the young and provided the old with a shady place to rest and gossip, are no longer there.

“Your centuries-old family house at number 15 still stands and has changed very little. The present occupants, Slovene made homeless elsewhere during the war, would be glad to let you see the house. They now call it their home, but know little of its centuries-long history.

“And the ghosts of your ancestors are waiting for your return”.

- - - -

We set off in the morning and after leaving Dolenja Vas, I was about to make a right, a turn the settlers made some 600 years ago and get on the road which the settlers and their descendents used until their departure in 1941. But Pahulje directed me further along the main road toward Kočevje to another fork to the right and on to a very modern asphalt road now leading toward Grčarice (Masern). He explained that this more direct route, bypassing Rakitnica was built by the Slovene government in Ljubljana in the early 60's as a high speed highway into the mountains beyond Grčarice where the state government had created an underground complex to be used by its officials in case of war.
 
Thus, instead of the arduous trek up and down the steep hills on the winding graveled dirt road I walked as a boy, we sped comfortably toward Grčarice which we reached in a few short minutes.

Pahulje stopped at the former Jaklitsch house, now no longer a tavern or an inn.  The house had suffered badly in the 1943 battle between the Plava Garda and the Partisans, being directly on the village square but had since then been fully restored. It still housed the small grocery store that used to be part of the inn and since the door was open Pahulje bought a bottle of wine. With that we walked the 200 meters toward the house which I called home for the first ten years of my life.

The house, with its three feet thick stone walls and slate roof, resting on one-foot square beams hand hewn from local lumber, received little damage in spite of being only a short distance from the church. It is the place in which Father, Paul, I and most, if not all of my ancestors were born. Entries in the parish books, now in the archives of the Dolenja Vas parish, prove this to the beginning of the 18th century. Records of earlier dates were kept in Gotenica (Göttenitz), the parish further into the forest, but were unfortunately lost or destroyed during the heated battles between the occupying Italians and the Partisans in 1941 to 1943.  Nevertheless, later on I discovered a good many of these ancient dates in the archives of the Archdiocese in Ljubljana.
 
After an introduction and having presented the wine, the new occupants willingly let us see the inside of the house.

- - - -

It was with suppressed emotions that I walked through the rooms that revived so many dimming memories.
 
Nothing significant had changed in 30 years except that the furniture was different and no longer occupied the familiar spaces. The house was not yet electrified and kerosene lamps still hung from the ceilings. Wood still fired the ancient tiled masonry kitchen stove with its six cooking spaces of overlapping concentric rings. The rings, from the smallest to the largest, were for lifting off successively with a handle to accommodate the bottom of different size pots and to expose them directly to the heat and soot of the flame.  In addition to heating the kitchen, the stove also heated the built-in copper water boiler, the only source of hot water in the house.

Most of our indoor living had taken place in the spacious kitchen, while the other three rooms were used mainly as bedrooms.  Our meals were taken on the heavy pine plank table in the center of the room.  The soft parts of the planks were worn away by generations of scrubbing, excepting the harder knots which protruded from the otherwise smooth surface like the moles on grandmother Gera’s face. We would usually eat from a common central bowl except on high holidays and some Sundays when individual plates and bowls were necessary to deal with slices of smoked ham and vegetables and to begin with, the soup made from the liquid used to boil the ham. This is when the protruding knots really got in the way.

The weekday meal was from a common bowl in the center of the table, made and glazed by the potter in Dolenja Vas.  The large bowl was heaped with Ganzallein, cornmeal boiled in water on the stove. After most of the water was boiled away, the cooked cornmeal was stirred to a fluffy consistency and transferred into the center of the terracotta bowl. There, the mountain of yellow was liberally covered with cooked sauerkraut, itself covered with melted drippings, including the tasty cubes of pre-cooked pork from the vats in the adjacent below ground cellar. Finally, boiled milk was poured into the bowl to surround the heap in the center which now resembled an extinct volcano sticking out of a sea of white.

There were many variations on this; mashed potatoes or other grain substituting for the cornmeal. And as the year progressed toward the next harvest and the stores of sauerkraut and solidified drippings neared the bottom of the barrels, the peak in the center of the bowl got less and less of a covering; in lean years, very little of anything or nothing at all. Then, there was only the island in the center surrounded by milk.
 
The word Ganzallein has a curious origin. It comes from joining two German words 'ganz' and 'allein' meaning all and alone which, when joined together, aptly describe a solitary dish devoid of any enhancement. This, most likely, was the daily fare of older settlers for centuries; the fluffy consistency being an easy meal for the folks who in their mid forties had already lost most, if not all of their teeth.

On special occasions, when Joseph Kren, the village butcher and owner of the Gasthaus near the cemetery, slaughtered a cow, mother would buy some beef, providing the cow was not too old or too skinny or too muscular.  She ascertained this from Johann Krisch, a neighbor across the square, a bachelor, good friend of the family and a particularly close friend of Father. He was also a neighbor of Kren and helped him with the butchering.  After that, he revealed to Mother, under promise of secrecy, the quality of the beef.

Anyway, when mother did buy the meat, she would produce the most delicious boiled beef known as Tafelspitz.  It translates from the German into 'peak of the table'. She learned to make it in her mother’s gostilna, or Gasthaus in Dolenja Vas.  I accidentally recognized Mother’s dish many years later in Vienna where it is known as a delicacy.  The version at the Haas Haus restaurant there was nearly as good as Mother’s, even with nostalgia pushed aside.

Johann Krisch continued to play a major role in our family, even after the resettlement to Veliko Mraševo where in 1943 he asked father for permission to marry the now eager twenty year old Mitzi, a request denied since both parents believed that Johann, with his forty four years, was too old for the tender girl.  In spite of this, the friendship continued undisturbed into the traumatic days of May 1945 when he stood by his friend’s family during its most trying times and on the morning of May 12 twice saved my life.

- - - -

The old table is still in the center of the kitchen, under the flypaper spiral suspended from the ceiling, but now serving other diners.  It was too large and too heavy to be taken with us when we left in 1941.

The metal gates next to the stove still cover the waist high vaulted opening to the large cavity deep in the masonry oven in the large room on the other side of the wall, nominally the bedroom of the parents, but which, especially in wintertime, doubled as our living room. Inside the cavity of this oven, on its glazed clay baking surface, also at waist height, mother would feed a lively wood fire. The smoke, like the smoke from the stove, escaped up the central chimney or, when required, was diverted by a gate in the attic, to the smokehouse to cure the hams, sausage and sides of bacon placed there after the slaughter in late fall. When this was the case, the usual pine firewood gave way to seasoned oak, kept separate for this very purpose.

When the oven was sufficiently preheated, she swept aside the glowing embers with a long handled broom to expose the terra cotta slabs on which she baked the large round loaves of bread in quantities to last for days if not weeks. She deposited the soft loaves, their knife scarred round raised by sour dough and brushed with egg white, on to the smooth surface with a long handled wooden spatula and retrieved them after they showed a uniform light-brown crust. The loaves cooled on the shelves of the ground cellar where the crust hardened to keep the inside of the loaf soft and moist for weeks.  This cellar, behind the heavy door on the kitchen wall directly opposite the stove, also stored in large vats the fat, melted into liquid during the seasonal slaughter of pigs. The fat solidified into a white paste preserving in it the floating but now captured small cubes and random bits of cooked pork, to be scooped out with a spoon and melted on the stove for the tasty drippings that were part of most meals. The paste was also scooped for spreading on slices of bread which together with cool spring water made for a hardy and satisfying lunch in the shade after a long morning’s labor in the fields.  In addition, the frost free cellar stored, in large barrels the indispensable sauerkraut and in separate bins, all the farm and orchard harvest, essential for survival and hopefully adequate to last the year.
 
In the depth of winter, the oven was fired continuously, heating the "Big Room", the largest room of the house, and with the doors open, even the two smaller adjacent rooms, one of which was the room of grandmother Tschinkel. This big room, while also the bedroom of my parents, became the main family room when the activities in the kitchen had slowed, its stove cooled and no longer a source of comfort. The primary attraction was the warmth from the oven in the corner, banishing from the “Big Room” the subzero of the howling wind outside that was driving the direction of yet another foot of large flaked snow, being released from the seemingly unlimited supply above.

The oven was a five foot cube stuck to the inner corner of the nine foot high room. It was flat on top and along each of the two sides there was a wooden bench, firmly fixed to the base of the oven. The backrest of the benches was the oven wall, tiled with glazed squares with a blue design on a white background, tiles that had radiated comforting warmth to the backs of many generations.

But the special attraction was the smooth and flat masonry top, covered in its entirety with a wooden platform of narrow planks, slightly separated to let the warmth through and over which were spread layers of woolen blankets.  The top was accessible via a narrow stepladder and used at any time of the day not only by the three siblings but the grown ups as well. Often, and on especially cold evenings, when moving to a cold bed was a particularly unpleasant prospect, Mitzi and I would spent the night up there in spite of reservations from Mother who was worried that we might roll off in our sleep and get hurt.

Late in the evening, the fire would receive a final batch of wood spread apart to burn slowly and last deep into the night. After that, the embers remained glowing until morning and required no more than a little kindling to light the new armful of wood from the shed.

- - - -

Other parts of our former home were less emotional than the main house except for Father’s workshop opposite the main house across the courtyard, now used as a storage shed.

Gone was the six inch thick wooden work bench with the wooden vise that held the planks he cut, planed and nailed into coffins for departed villagers which he and I measured for size, with me holding the other end of a folding rule. This was also the vise that young Karl Schaffer used to cut frames from curved shapes of lumber around which he constructed, as village saddler, the softer parts of a horse’s harness he was commissioned to make. I helped him with the cutting by pulling on the two handled saw until the time when I nearly lost the index finger of my left hand when he pulled the saw toward him and I let my finger get in the way. Karl was (in 1939) the twenty eight year old second son of the fire chief and my very best friend, even then already marked by a tragic destiny which, in only a few short years, was to end his life.
 
It was also the vise that held the drum of Mattl’s Italian revolver into which I was trying to force an oversize cartridge until it exploded.  It was the vise that held the boards I was shaping into a box including knobs and a dial to resemble a radio which I had promised to build for the dim witted fourteen year old live-in helper of the wife of the village smith. All in return for lifting her skirt for me to see what I had never seen before. It was the vise that held the bits of wood I shaped into the small ships I would launch into the floodwaters that flowed past the lower parts of the house and under the raised barn and beyond every spring.
 
This and much more, all with tools too large and difficult to handle with my small hands, tools Father had brought with him on his return from America in 1914 when he answered the call to join the Austrian Imperial Army or else lose his inheritance.
 
The shop was also a warm place where men of the village came to gossip for a few hours during the idle and cold days between late fall and early spring.  Congregate here and avoid spending precious coins for wine at the Jaklitsch tavern; an unwritten requirement for congregating there. Here they were always welcome; their only task feeding the potbellied cast iron stove with the leftover bits that had come off the workbench. Here I heard many a story, but much resented being sent outside by Father when he sensed that what was coming was not for my ears. So I went into the adjoining frosty cold woodshed and listened to most of it as it came through the knotholes of the planked wall.
 
And finally, it was the place where father made the crates for those items of our household that we were allowed take with us to our future home in the Reich.
 
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The stable, part of the main house beyond the living space, restored visions of Yiorgo, our unforgettable, above average horse, an intimate member of the family, the engine of our transport. Yiorgo shared the space but had nothing in common with the two cows who went through their predictable annual cycle of the bull, calving and giving milk. Now the space was empty, the new residents using a small car for transportation and getting their milk from other sources.

Yiorgo was a small good-natured Siberian pony with a Greek name, conjuring up an ambiguous origin and interesting past. Father had bought Yiorgo from a band of Gypsies that had stopped in the village on their periodic trek through the region.
 
Father acquired Yiorgo in the spring of 1919 to pull a very light four wheel hackney seating three on its front bench with a small platform in the back, bordered by an eight inch high railing to keep any cargo in place. Both Yiorgo and the hackney cab became a necessity after he lost his right leg in the fall of 1918.  It was the only way for him to get around.

Now, Yiorgo was past middle age, had infinite patience, most of the time in good humor and incredibly smart. He knew us all and followed all commands, be they from Father or any other member of the family, myself included. And when in the middle of a wet night in 1937 he was forcibly pulled out of the stable by a gypsy horse thief, he made enough of a fuss to wake up both Father and Mother. At the front door they saw the thief ride Yiorgo out of the courtyard. When father yelled his name, Yiorgo bolted and shook off the gypsy who ran off to join his accomplices who were rallying the few other horses in the village.
 
Next morning, the gendarmes from Dolenja Vas examined the footprints left by the barefoot thief in the mud of our courtyard. They also found the trail of the stolen horses in the soft ground leading southwest into deeper forest toward the Italian border. The gendarmes formed a posse to follow the trail and recovered all three horses two days later.  When the thieves heard the approaching gendarmes, they abandoned the horses, disappeared into the forest and escaped. The grateful owners of the recovered horses treated the proud but tired Gendarmes to a decent meal at the Jaklitsch pub. That gypsy column, one of several that came through the village every year, however, did not come back again.

As I said, Yiorgo was smart. On the way home from the market in Kočevje or Ribnica, Father would stop in Dolenja Vas at the tavern/gostilna of his mother-in-law, Grandma Ilc.  While Father would have a few quarter liters of her wine, Yiorgo would munch on hay in the courtyard outside.
   
When it was time to go, Father was usually wobbly and soon asleep after he, with Grandma’s help, maneuvered the horse and carriage on the road home. But Yiorgo knew the way, even in the dark. He managed the light carriage safely up and down the steep hill, avoiding the treacherous embankments along the way. At the stable door, he would bang a hoof against the door signaling the arrival to Mother who came running to take care of the two tired travelers.

At one time in the summer of 1940, when for some undetermined reason no one else was around, brother Paul and I, aged two and nine respectively, decided to visit Grandma in Dolenja Vas. An obliging Yiorgo allowed me to lead him from the stable, mount the harness while standing on a stool and couple him to Father’s carriage.  As we rolled toward Dolenja Vas, curious villagers working the fields became alarmed seeing the two small boys on a carriage pulled by a lone horse on a tricky road. To my great annoyance, they turned us around and brought us back home. Of course, Father was angry at me but even more at Yiorgo for participating in such a foolish adventure.
 
There were times when Yiorgo's coughing woke the family in the depths of the night.  He was colicky and asking for help. But it took a while for Mother to brew up the cure: chamomile tea.

First, a fire had to be lit in the kitchen stove and water with a generous amount of dry chamomile flowers and a helping of sugar was brought to a boil and allowed to steep. After cooling, a soft drink bottle was filled with the brew and while Mother held the head of Yiorgo high, Father helped the horse drink the liquid from the bottle inserted into the side of the mouth away from the teeth. Not that Yiorgo would have crunched the bottle. He knew what the drink was for and did not resist. 

Chamomile tea was not only the medicine for Yiorgo but also the standard cure for most ailments of man and beast. It was also reputed to prevent ailments especially if fortified with a generous portion of slivovitz, the brandy of Slovenia and other parts of the Balkans. For the children, a spoonful of sugar had to suffice since, according to Mother, slivovitz only worked for adults.

Harvesting the chamomile flower was an important spring event when the meadows were an ocean of white and yellow.  The flower was clipped off where it joins the stem and ample quantities, large enough to last the year were dried in the sun on wooden trays, a process that required frequent turning and care for several days.  When dry, the "tea" was stored in round wooden containers resembling a hat box but made of thin sheets of wood, a specialty of lower Slovenia, and kept in the dry attic among other similar items required throughout the year.
 
- - - -

All the other buildings were as we had left them. There were no pigs running about, but there were some chickens, including a rooster demonstrating with obvious pride his reason for being.  In the orchard, the blossoms of the apple trees were again giving way to tiny balls of the new crop and in the fenced in vegetable garden, the lettuce was bulging and the budding strawberries were showing their first blush.
 
What had changed, however, was the outhouse. The rickety wooden convenience, attached to the end of the house beyond the stable, had been replaced by a brick structure of uneven and irregularly placed brick oozing mortar from between the joints, displaying the amateur in the mason. The door, made of coarse planks, was neither square nor plumb, but the latch was lockable on the inside, guaranteeing privacy as did the cardboard strips covering the large gaps between the unevenly edged boards.

- - - -

Pahulje and I sat on the old bench in front of the house, hand hewn from a tree trunk and after a while, emotion gave way to answer questions posed by the anxious new occupants. Were we planning to return? Clearly relieved by the answer, we were asked to visit again, anytime.

For much of the remainder of the day, Pahulje and I wandered slowly through the village, stopping occasionally to allow past events to emerge from buried memories.  Many of the less central houses were empty and turning into ruin. We stopped at the cemetery where all the old gravestones, reminders of those who found their resting place there before being abandoned by their descendants in the winter of 41/42, had been removed and replaced by markers for those who died since. We did locate our family plot, now the resting place of others, only because I remembered the surrounding concrete border poured in place by Father in the late thirties.

Returning from the cemetery we passed the house that once was the Kren Tavern. Pahulje was not pleased when I began to talk of his confrontation with Father in the public room over 30 years ago and he became visibly angry when I mentioned his broken thumb. But when I tried to pass off the episode as a humorous remembrance he soon recovered.  I did not mention Aunt Johanna's still empty house, the upheaval it brought to our lives and the split it produced in Mother’s family.  Neither did he.  But much more about that later.

We passed the school house now empty and no longer used. It brought back memories of the day when I carefully repackaged, again, the new little rucksack, given to me by aunt Grete on her visit that summer, with notebooks, pencils and erasers, leaving room for the little sandwich Mother was going to give me in the morning as lunch for my first day. The school house also reminded me of the three children of Alojzij Dežman, the last teacher in the village.  All three were special playmates with whom I shared a common language, they being children of not only one, but two Slovene parents. Dežman and his family, in the village since 1933, left in 1941, driven out by the animosity of the villagers now fully conditioned to be hostile to anything Slovene. The description of the Slovene as “inferior humans of an inferior race” was a useful tool in the arsenal of the self appointed young Gottscheer leaders who had been promoting Hitler’s racial ideology throughout the enclave since 1938.

Using the trail that skirted the village behind the houses, we continued in the westerly direction, passing the drinking well which was still delivering a lively overflow from the cavity in the rock wall. A well, which in 1939, had led to the major embarrassment when the new fire pump was being tested.
 
Continuing toward Masereben, we stopped at the abandoned smithy, its interior no longer illuminated by the white hot coal in the hooded forge kept at high heat by the air from the leather bellows being pumped by the foot of the smith wearing his blackened leather apron. Also the space no longer lit up by flashes of sparks flying off the anvil in all directions as he was shaping the cherry red metal into a shoe for the horse waiting outside.

This done, he ran outside to fit it on to the previously shaped hoof held up by his helper. As the red iron burned itself into the hoof for a proper fit, it produced a cloud of pungent white smoke and rapid coughing from those who could not get away from it. And when after several such fittings, the smith slowly lowered the still hot shoe into the bucket of water; it produced a lively sizzle and a cloud of steam.

After 1939, Father discouraged me from lingering at the smithy, the reason for which I discovered only years later. Apparently the smith, who lived next to the smithy at number 7, had accosted the lone sixteen year old Mitzi while she was working in the fields. But she struggled and got away from him.  Father and Mother immediately took her to the gendarmerie station in Dolenja Vas to report the incident.  I do remember two gendarmes coming to see Father whom they found in his shop. But since I was not to hear the details, he sent me outside out of hearing. I also remember how shortly thereafter, the then pregnant wife of the smith came to see Father carrying one of her two children above the swollen belly with one arm while with the other holding the older boy.  Apparently to plead, but I discovered the reason why only much later. There was a hearing in the Ribnica courthouse later on, the results of which remain a mystery even after asking Mitzi who never wished to talk about the event.
 
We continued past the house of the village shoemaker who made robust footwear for all the villagers, be they men, women or children. As he was making my first pair I visited him daily, watching him cut the various parts from piles of pleasant smelling leather which he then stitched, glued and nailed together on the metal last in between his legs. His thirty something son had an eye on Mitzi and in 1940 came to ask Father if he would allow her marry him. The answer was no, the first of such replies to the same questions as years went by.

We walked to the house of the game keeper who with his family remained in the village after we left in 1941. After he died, it had become the house of his son Norbert Tscherne who now keeps a small tavern in the large room of the house.  He gave his account of the battle in 1943 which I will describe in a later chapter.

On the way back to the square we walked by the house once owned by Rudolf Tschinkel a distant relative and the owner of the local sawmill, the major employer in the village. The house, once the second tavern on the square, was used as one of the defense posts of the Plava Garda during the battle in 1943.  It was damaged extensively but is now fully restored. An engraved plaque of polished black marble commemorates the event. t is mounted on the wall facing the square and reads: 

V SEPTEMBRU LETA 1943
SO V TEM KRAJU ENOTE NOV
UNIČILE ZADNJO UTRDBO
PLAVE GARDE V SLOVENIJI

In September of 1943,
in this place, units of the NOV,
destroyed the last stronghold of the
Blue Guard in Slovenia.

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This visit of Grčarice/Masern was followed by many others, over many years.  Endless urging from family and friends, always eager to hear yet another tale from another time convinced me to put them in writing. In this I was helped by vivid recollections, renewed by these returns into a succession of scenes, not unlike the pictures at an exhibition. For decades, these scenes continued to emerge from memory scraps of less than 14 years into the mosaic of a distant past.
This mosaic is however part of a larger picture, one that represents centuries of history within which this village illustrates typical fragments. The following chapters describe the fragments of this and other villages and how they jointly evolve into a canvas that traces the six centuries of its being.

A summary overview, helpful in comprehending the overall historical evolution of the enclave, its progress through time and its final destiny, is contained in the following chapter.

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