I got to know Josef in the spring of 1943 on the way home from school.
 
On our way we grouped, as in class, according to age but the older boys walked with the girls. Half way home our paths split, the older group taking the more direct and paved road since they had to return quickly to help their parents with farming chores. We the younger ones preferred paths through the birch woods, to walk along the Krka and jump over streams feeding the river with runoff water from the fields.
 
Trailing our small group was Josef Tramposch, another six grader in our school. Josef trailed because he was not yet accepted as one of us partly because his family came from some other part of Gottschee and also because his manners, his language and his walk were strange and different. His family had arrived in Veliko Mraševo later than we and was assigned a farm on the edge of the village, some distance from the center. Due to this, the family had little contact with other settlers and kept to themselves. Apart from his parents, Josef had a teenage sister no longer of primary school age. Although clearly with a typical Gottscheer family name, his manner of speaking had a strange accent and his walk a waddling strut.
 
Early that spring, on one of the walks home and eager to make friends, he bragged about how he caught fish in the stream leading to his house and offered to show me. As we walked along the water he pointed to barely discernible shadows amid the patches of grass growing over the water’s edge or below the willow branches hanging over the stream. It was obvious that he had a particularly keen eye for finding fish in places I had not bothered to look before. We agreed to meet later that day with our spears to test our skills.
 
- - - -

The streams, as was discovered in the spring following our arrival in the village, were spawning grounds for pike, sharp toothed fish that sought refuge away from the swiftly flowing river. On their journey up the streams they hid in covered spots and rested on their way to a place in quieter waters where they could safely deposit the eggs they carried in their swollen bellies.

This discovery revealed the purpose of the spears hanging on the walls of tool sheds of most houses in the village. Their purpose was for catching the pike and other fish in the streams and the river.
 
The spear was similar to a hay fork except that the prongs were closer together, each resembling an oversized straightened fish hook with a very sharp point.  The fork was mounted on the end of a long, straight and slender wooden pole, smooth and polished for accurate thrusting. Its purpose got around quick enough, but the villagers, who over centuries had become accustomed to red meat, had little taste for white meat full of nasty little bones. And after it became known that it was illegal to spear spawning fish anyway, interest in developing a taste for this kind of cuisine diminished altogether. But not for Father who had acquired a taste for fried filets at the Isonzo front in Italy.
 
- - - -

When later that afternoon I met Josef with my spear, the fish we saw earlier had moved, but Josef soon found others hiding elsewhere. I kept missing but after Josef showed me how to compensate for the bent trajectory in the water, my aim began to find the target. It seems Josef, as an eleven year old, had already discovered some of the laws of Physics, laws which I learned only many years later.
 
After that initial expedition, Josef and I walked along the streams together.  On the way home we marked the spot hoping the prey would not move, and returned later with our spears. But I had to ask for permission to go on this always exciting hunt and if allowed to, was told not to bring back more than one catch since catching spawning fish was forbidden. Having Josef, with his keen eye as a companion, made virtually certain this was the case. Nevertheless, many a fish escaped until I learned the proper aim and thrust and how to pull the flailing catch, some two feet long, from the water.
 
I became proficient and was successful even after the spawning season when other species arrived from the river. These fed on the now abundant harvest hatched from the eggs of those who had previously avoided or escaped our spears. The new arrivals were swifter than those burdened with eggs and required more accurate aim and sharper reaction.  But again, Josef had a knack which he patiently imparted to me, though I never learned to be as good as he was.

While fish started our friendship, rabbits brought us closer together.  His family like mine raised domestic rabbits as a supplement to chicken and pork, the staples of our rural existence. Rabbits multiplied, grew rapidly and provided us with tender and delicious meat, a succulent alternative to the otherwise monotonous daily fare. Mother would roast them as she would a chicken or boil them with various vegetables and herbs, and the broth, with barley added, became a delicious soup.

Our rabbits lived and multiplied under the feeding troughs of the livestock stable where they romped freely, having learned to stay out from under the hoofs of the towering animals. They fed on the hay and oats overflowing from the troughs above, a diet heavily supplemented with grain, carrots and lettuce or any other available vegetables from Josef and me, their caretakers who also kept their watering dishes clean and full. Together we built shelters for them, wooden boxes that fit under the troughs but were removable for cleaning outside the stable. The box had an opening at one end big enough for a fully grown rabbit to enter and exit.  Through the same opening, an arm could pull out by its long ears a resisting occupant hiding at the far end of the box.  But the rabbits got to know their handlers and allowed themselves to be lifted and stroked with only minor protest, but when strangers entered the stable, they all scurried for the openings and struggled to get inside.

When pregnant, the females dug tunnels into the soft ground below the feeding troughs where they deposited their litter. The tunnels were big enough for our arms and soon after the female appeared after having given birth, we would count the litter with our fingertips, while the mother next to the intruder stomped her hind legs in protest. When a few days after birth, their naked skin became covered with soft fuzz, the blinking creatures would emerge from the tunnel and learn to drink the cow’s milk waiting for them in a dish at the entrance. They soon got used to the outside and to prevent them from wandering under the deadly hoofs, we created a fenced-in safety space around the opening which contained them, at least for a while. But they grew rapidly and with the fence no longer much of a barrier, some of the litter was crushed, but most survived.
 
As they grew and the cavity at the end of the tunnel became too small, they soon found the boxes, their half way house to maturity.

The abundant litter could easily have gotten out of hand were it not for the demand of Mother’s kitchen and the dominant male who never allowed rivals to reach maturity and become large enough for a family meal. He would wound or even kill them as soon as they threatened to become rivals. The females, on the other hand, got pregnant as soon as they became fertile and therefore untouchable for a meal. The only way to stop this was to separate the sexes in separate fenced-in areas under the troughs. This allowed for control of the procreation process by returning only a select few of the females to the dominant male.

- - - -

Soon after we became friendly, Josef persuaded me to come to his home to see his dominant male called Adolf. This beautiful rabbit with his smooth and shining gray fur was twice the size of any other in any stables of the village. It was fascinating to watch him dominate his flock, his perpetually mounting the females while terrifying subordinate rivals. No male in the village demonstrated equal prowess. Adolf did not mind being lifted up by his long ears and stroked. He especially loved being fondled by his testicles, which made him show his pink penis emerging from its protective pouch.

On this first visit I not only met this beautiful specimen but also Josef’s parents and sister. The father and sister were typical Gottscheer, but it was clear that Josef had inherited his unusual features, mannerisms and peculiar gait from his mother.  Soon thereafter we would walk home apart from the others, talk about fish and rabbits, meet with our spears to fish or make for the stables to watch Adolf dominate his flock.

Josef did not segregate his females to prevent impregnation and his total population was, therefore, much larger than mine. Adolf was definitely a more virile male, of which there was ample proof in his stable. And when one day Josef suggested that we exchange our dominant males for a while, I quickly accepted since I was eager to increase and diversify my flock.
 
But we made the mistake of releasing Adolf before we removed my dominant male. In no time there was a bloody turf battle when Adolf starting mounting, in rapid succession, the females of my flock. It took our combined efforts to separate the two frothing males and Josef carried back to his stable my wounded and bleeding male, leaving Adolf behind.
 
During the next few weeks, we came directly to our house to watch Adolf rule. He tolerated no competition and asserted his dominance by wounding even the immature young males who had to be separated out. All able females became pregnant immediately. Since this reduced the number fit for slaughter, Father soon complained about the reduced frequency of rabbit stew at evening meals and the exchange was terminated.

- - - -

While the fish and the rabbit brought us together in that spring of 1943, our common difference cemented the friendship during the following summer. This difference was because both our mothers were outsiders. My mother was a Slovene who had married a Gottscheer and who after years of living in Masern, was finally accepted by most of the residents as an equal in spite of her persistent Slovene accent. The acceptance was helped by the fact that she had been allowed to become a citizen of the Third Reich in spite of her Slavic background.

But the state had also accepted Josef's mother and made her and her family citizens of the Reich. She, like Mother had also married a Gottscheer, and had been accepted into her village in the enclave.  She also had a strange accent, but in the eyes of the state was very different from my mother, the Slovene.

Unbeknown to most, if not all villagers, Josef's mother was a Gypsy.
 
- - - -

After the resettlement, the Gypsy caravans that once passed through Masern were no longer to be seen. But in Veliko Mraševo, neither Josef nor I knew of the hierarchy of Nazi racial profiling in which a Gypsy was little different from their “detested Jew”, a remark heard so often in the last few years. Neither of us had ever seen a Jew and so the image of a Jew, created for us by VGL officials, was not much different from that of Lucifer painted for us in Sunday sermons by the priest in Masern.

But while we heard that the Jews were a menace and like the Communists, dangerous to the Reich and western civilization, we never heard that Gypsies were useless parasites, unworthy to be among civilized humanity. Therefore, the real reason for their disappearance could not be imagined in the remoteness of our existence and became known to us, as did the reason for the other tragedies, only years later.
 
The Slavs on the other hand, deemed by the Nazis a cut above the Jews and the Gypsies, were not dangerous to the state but were to be subjugated to provide the manual labor needed by the superior master race. In this, the Slovene Slavs were a unique exception mainly due to the long exposure to Germanic culture of the Austrian bureaucracy which, since the establishment of the Empire in 1273, had dominated their existence. The centuries-long undisguised effort by the Austrian Germans to assimilate the Slovene, the continual mingling and extensive intermarrying of the Germanic and Slavic residents of Carniola and the later Slovenia had produced a racial ambiguity that favored their integration into the Reich.

As a loyal offspring of such intermarriage, I was the typical example, with the indignities heaped on me due to being half Slav now a thing of the past. My inferior half was not visible; I was blond, blue-eyed and indistinguishable from the others.  I was accepted as an equal; Josef was not that fortunate.

- - - -

Later that fall, on a day when there was no school, Josef arrived breathlessly, having run the two kilometers from his house, to offer me Adolf since his family had to leave on short notice. I paid little attention to the reasons for their leaving as we ran back to Josef’s house. The prospect of calling Adolf mine was displacing any other thought.

This changed as soon as we entered the courtyard of his father’s house, where two serious looking men in black leather coats were milling around the open end of a canvas-covered truck, into which Josef’s sullen father was loading bulging suitcases.

Another man appeared from the house, and so did Josef’s crying mother and sister, each carrying bundles of clothing to the back platform of the truck on to which they climbed via a small ladder. Josef was ordered to join them on the benches and after a teary-eyed handshake he climbed the ladder to sit next to his sister. Yet another Gestapo appeared from the house with Josef’s father, who joined his family on the benches. The Gestapo closed the house door, turned the key but left it in the lock. He and his colleague leapt on the truck, the other two closed the swinging gate, got into the cab of the truck and drove off. I waved to Josef as the truck moved away and disappeared, leaving me standing alone in the middle of the courtyard.

But not for long. I had come to get Adolf who was as usual, under the troughs in the stable together with the restless animals who had not been fed that morning and were making their neglect known with audible complaints. Safely holding Adolf by his long ears and clutching his smooth body against my chest, I ran from the otherwise deserted and eerie place that only a short while ago had been the safe and comfortable home of my friend Josef and his family.

Later that day, a man from the DAG administrator’s office in Brežice (Rann) came to explain to the villagers the reason for the rapid departure of the Tramposch family. Apparently this family had been negligent in its duties to Germany and therefore unreliable as citizens and guardians of the border of the enlarged Third Reich. The SS man noticed unease among the assembled villagers and talked at length about the importance of reliable border farmers. When asked where they were taken, he explained that they were being resettled into the safety of the "Old Reich" where they were to receive an equivalent farm, and that their possessions were to follow them immediately. He pointed out that while he was speaking, the Tramposch possessions, including their livestock, were being loaded on to trucks which were to follow the family. This apparently was the case since on the following day I found only a few stray rabbits in the stable, and the house, now accessible through the unlocked door, emptied of most belongings.

The effort of the SS man to convince the villagers was only partially successful, as was apparent from the hushed discussions that followed after he left.  The rapid departure of the Tramposch family was unsettling and on the minds of many. Some said it was unfair to uproot a family, especially on such short notice, even if the husband had a strange and unfriendly wife.

The event was particularly unsettling on Father who knew that Josef's mother was a Gypsy. The Tramposch departure reminded him of the examination and profiling of all those who opted for resettlement in October 1941. It was now clear to him that it was this examination that revealed to the SS that Josef's mother was a Gypsy and that the children had inherited her features which determined their fate.  Father remembered that he and his family had also been processed, examined and profiled, in no way differently than the Tramposch family. His wife, while not a Gypsy was nevertheless an “inferior” Slav, which made him fear that the Tschinkel family might be next on a list.
 
Father’s fear was not without foundation, as I realized later in 1969, when I obtained the complete set of documents of my family as they had been recorded on the processing train. The records I found in the Berlin Archives clearly state that my mother was of the Slavic race, but that for the moment, this fact was not a barrier for citizenship of the Reich. But being a Gypsy had also not been a barrier for the Tramposch family including my friend Josef.
   
The processing of the resettlers had been done by SS staffers in the approximately one dozen special coaches of processing train "Heinrich" which was parked on a siding at the Gottschee city railroad station for the duration.  In this train they were directed from coach to coach in which their previously submitted application was reviewed and approved for accuracy, their bodies subjected to a thorough medical examination, including the measurement of features as part of documenting a racial profile. For the latter, the males were separated from the females, Father and I had to strip and our bodies were examined in detail by the staff in the coach. I remember being embarrassed not for my exposure but for seeing my father in the nude for the first time.

When I discussed all of this with him some years after the war, he admitted that he shared his fears about his mixed marriage with no one, not even with his wife.  But his fears were about being resettled again, this time to a “place safer” than the fragile border on the edge of the Reich. Surely, he could not imagine the destiny in store for the Tramposch family when they were moved there on such short notice.

- - - -

For me, the sudden loss of my friend Josef was in part balanced out by the joyous acquisition of the prize rabbit Adolf.  He quickly adjusted to his new environment and flock after his most threatening rival was slaughtered for a meal. The episode of the Tramposch family soon moved into the background as the villagers accepted the explanation given by the man from the DAG office, or suppressed doubts that the Tramposch were not dutiful citizens.  In any case, it was unpatriotic or even unlawful for a citizen to verbalize or even to entertain treasonable thoughts.

Doubts if any were fully dispelled by a picture postcard that arrived a few weeks later addressed to me and was passed around in the village. It was from Josef.

All was well and they were happily settled in their new house, identified by a penned arrow on the face of the card showing the residential part of a town. The arrow pointed to a corner house surrounded by a picket fence in what seemed to be a suburban neighborhood, judging from other houses nearby. The card must have been written by the sister, since the handwriting was not that of the eleven year old Josef who, I remembered, had difficulties in forming legible characters, much less words in Frau Schroif’s class. As with all postcards, it contained no sender address, except that the postmark imprint identified the mailing post office to be, according to Father, somewhere in Poland. No other mail came and the only reminder of my friend Josef was Adolf, the new master under the troughs of our stable.

But the more likely destiny of Josef and his family emerged only decades later.

- - - -

It came in the 1960’s on reading William L. Shirer’s book “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”. In chapter 27 under “The Extermination Camps”, Shirer documents the ongoing process of the Nazis to rid the Reich of Jews, Gypsies and other undesirables. Shirer also describes the selection process at Auschwitz where it was decided, on arrival at the camp, which Jews or Gypsies were to be used for labor and which ones were to be gassed immediately.  And Shirer writes:  “though there were heart-rending scenes as wives were torn away from husbands and children from parents", none of the victims realized just what was in store for them, as Hoess (one of the camp commanders) testified after the war. Some of them were even given pretty picture postcards showing a town called “Waldsee” to be signed and sent back home saying: ‘we are doing well here, have work and are well treated.’ ”

The above described a likely destiny for Josef and his family after he waved goodbye at me from the back of the truck in 1943. This even more so when my father now confirmed that Josef’s mother had been a Gypsy. Having learned that the Nazi exterminators regarded Gypsies no differently than Jews, the likely fate of my friend Josef, his sister and mother was extermination, the destiny of all Gypsies inside the Reich. After reading Shirer, it was now easy for me to imagine the horrible scene where Josef, his sister and mother were separated from their father and husband at some railroad siding inside a Nazi camp.
 
The fate of Josef’s father, the (racially pure) ethnic Gottscheer German who had fallen in love with a pretty and flirtatious young Gypsy girl wearing colorful and billowing skirts, a woman who perhaps came through his village as part of a traveling group as they had in Masern, was less certain. At best, he survived by being allowed to atone in a Nazi labor camp for his sin of polluting his race by marrying a racial outcast, a Gypsy. Perhaps he even survived the war, ending only two years after being hauled out of a falsely perceived security and mercilessly separated from his loving, but in the eyes of the Nazi state, parasitic wife and children.

- - - -

The fate of Adolf, named by Josef after the leader of the Third Reich, is far less uncertain. It came in the spring of 1945 when a part of the last batch of German troops retreating from the advancing Partisans arrived in our village for an overnight stay and some of their trucks pulled into our courtyard. But contrary to prior regular troops, this lot of very young SS soldiers was hostile, took over the house and announced that they wanted to sleep in our beds. Father was deeply annoyed but Mother was more forgiving and to accommodate them, she suggested that we all sleep that night in the upper hay loft of the barn. Mother’s point was that they were tired and had not slept in proper beds for a long time. She became less understanding when she noticed their leering at her twenty two year old daughter who was quickly ordered to keep out of sight.

Like all the other transient troops, they also wanted to be fed, preferably meat. Mother mentioned chicken or rabbits but told them they would have to catch and cook them on their own. They had little luck getting their hands on the free ranging birds who would take to the air whenever cornered. She did not tell them to wait until the late afternoon when they returned on their own to the hen house for the night, where they could be grabbed with ease. Unsuccessful with the chickens, they shifted their attention to the rabbits in the stable and immediately went after the biggest of them, my Adolf.
 
Clearly, these young SS were city boys, trained to capture and kill humans but not chicken or rabbits. Adolf kept evading them by running in between the legs of the animals and finally through the opening of the stable into the courtyard. They had not bothered to close the door.

They were even less successful in the open courtyard until one of them remembered how they killed enemies. A volley from his submachine gun slowed Adolf but did not kill him. The wounded animal scampered on, dragging his limp and bleeding rear with his front legs, leaving a trail of blood until another volley stopped him all together. He was still struggling when yet another burst partially severed the head from the body and the opened skull spilled the brains into the dirt.  A knife separated the dangling head from the rest.

After that they did what was normally done with slaughtered animals. They slit open the belly to remove the entrails, pulled the skin from the body, and washed the carcass with water from the pump at the trough. They cooked the meat in a large pot on Mother’s stove.
 
- - - -

I was deeply saddened over the loss of Adolf, a constant reminder of my friend Josef. The full impact of his end came only years later, (after having read Shirer’s book), in nightmares in which Josef merged into the body of the dying Adolf dragging himself across the dirt. But in April of 1945, I was disillusioned only by the brutality of this group of elite soldiers, the pride of the Reich, toward such a superior animal. I still believed that real Germans did not behave like that. But knowing that all was going bad, the end of the Reich so near and our future so uncertain, I instinctively envied Josef for having been moved into the safety of the inner Reich.
 
Little did I know!
 
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