Permission to leave Veliko Mraševo came early in the morning of May 8, 1945. It had been expected with rising anxiety for days, especially after it became known that the Russians were on the outskirts of Berlin and Hitler was dead.

- - - -

The preparations had started in earnest some weeks before, after one of the meetings held by Karl Tschinkel the village representative of the Heimatbund. They included the assignment of those who were without transport to those who did. Father agreed to take Johann Krisch and his Slovene forced laborer Frantze, the nineteen-year-old Slovene who had been assigned by the DAG to Johann after his mother died in 1943. The two became very friendly and Frantze stayed with Johann even after most of the other forced laborers in the village had disappeared in the past few months now knowing they would no longer be pursued.
 
On Father’s wagon was to be Katharina, her husband Alois and their essentials.  Both Katharina's sons were now in the military; Albert had been called up two years ago at sixteen and had not been heard of since. Anton, who became sixteen only a few months ago, was taken into the Volkssturm, the final call-up of the Reich now desperate for anyone capable of holding a rifle. It included all boys sixteen or older, while at the other end of life there was no age limit, providing the man could still walk and not fall down after his crutches were knocked away.  Anton was still somewhere in the area, where he was being trained to fire a rifle and operate the German Panzerfaust, a shoulder-held anti-tank weapon similar to the American bazooka.

For days, the wagons had been on standby, ready to be loaded with provisions on short notice.  Hoops of slender birch saplings supported the canvas covering, carefully tied at the sides to keep out the rain and the driver’s bench dry. At the meeting Karl had recommended rations for two weeks and feed for the animals to last until we got to Austria, about 80 miles north-west.  Beyond that only the most essential items: clothing, blankets and some valuables which very quickly produced a row with Katharina, who insisted that her china was valuable. And when permission to leave finally arrived that morning, it took only a little time to get moving.

Our first destination was Krško town and by noon, the slowly moving caravan of horse and oxen drawn wagons was rolling through the fields. But it came to a standstill not long after it reached the paved road and after that it was moving only in short intervals followed by long stops. By late afternoon, we had covered eight of the twelve km toward Krško, a journey which on prior days had taken less than an hour.

- - - -

Few if any in the wagons now clogging the road had an inkling of what destiny had in mind for us. No one yet knew the war had come to an end and with that our promised future in the Reich. The journey that began in 1941 was now on an unpredictable final stretch toward an unimaginable future. The folly of having pulled up, only three and a half years ago, the anchor to a place established centuries before, was still to become fully apparent in the tumult of the terrifying days yet to come.

It was then that the news, flying from wagon to wagon, reached us. Germany had capitulated, the war was over and the once promised future at an ignominious end.  The initial impact of the news, while expected, was a shock not unlike that upon hearing of the death of a loved one who had been dying of an incurable disease. But in such a case the shock gives way, sooner or later, to a returning normalcy and realization that life goes on.

This was not the case here. The brutal reality was one of total abandonment, no longer under the shield of any community, authority or state, now homeless with nowhere to go. The Reich, the state that had tricked us in 1941 was no more and there was no way back. For those of us now sitting in the stalled wagons or milling aimlessly among them, there was no prospect for a future, now a fearful unknown, offering at best survival and possibly death.

In late afternoon, dense black smoke from burning tires of abandoned military vehicles along the roadside and in the fields was playing tricks with the rays of the setting sun. The distant thunder of explosions accompanying the retreating, but yet not surrendered army was getting louder and nearer, adding yet another dimension to the prevalent fear. Men swore, women and children cried as did I, inconsolably and for a long time. “Why did we leave and get into this?” was heard all around.  Would it not have been wiser to stay in Veliko Mraševo and wait for our destiny there? The braver went beyond that with “we should have remained in Masern”, but this new found wisdom offered no comfort; there was no way back to either place.

When, eventually, after many starts and stops, we reached Krško, it was dusk with black smoke giving way to black night. But there was no end to the thunder of explosions, nearer now, and the darkening day began to compete with the tracer bullets and flares that were lighting up the evening sky.

- - - -

Our route beyond Krško was to be the east-west highway along the south side of the Sava river to Zidani Most (Steinbrück). Zidani Most is a little town but a major intersection of road, rail and the place where the Savinja River from the north joins the Sava flowing eastward toward Krško and beyond. Zidani Most took the name from the bridge over the Savinja just before it spills into the larger Sava. It was constructed of stone, hence Stonebridge, or Zidani Most in Slovene. At Zidani Most we were to turn northward along the Savinja toward Celje, Maribor and the Austrian border, then defined by the river Mur.
 
At Zidani Most all west-east traffic linking Ljubljana with Zagreb via Krško, be it rail or road, branches off toward Maribor and further north. In all of these three directions, rail and road tightly follow the river, each at the bottom of a narrow valley with steep banks on either side. In most places along these parts, the rail-bed hugs the river while the road-bed had been hewed into the steep mountain side high above the railroad tracks, there being no room at the river level.
 
After about two kilometers downriver from Zidani Most the space widens and the Sava river flows in a wider valley. Since there is more flat space on the south side of the river, a wider, less sinuous road was constructed at the start of the wider part on the south side and a narrow steel bridge was built in the early 20th century to ease the increasing vehicular traffic on the north side. With the wider road now on the south side, the narrow road above the tracks was thereby relieved of major traffic and served local needs only. The railroad tracks along the Sava remained on the north side and continued to be the major rail route.

After 1945 the traffic congestion caused by the narrow steel bridge was relieved by a new, wider and more easily accessible stone bridge about one kilometer further down river. Now, the steel bridge is for pedestrian crossing only, its wooden roadway suspended from a graceful arch, painted a pleasant green.

- - - -

As we approached Krško to get on to the road on the south bank, the reason for our slow progress during that afternoon became clear. All lanes of the wide asphalt highway were packed with mostly German military vehicles of all shapes and sizes, all rushing north-west toward Austria to get out of the Balkans, out of Yugoslavia, ahead of Tito’s army of Partisans following the vanquished and now fleeing occupier/collaborator of the past four years.  This was the traffic we were to join with our covered wagons drawn by horses and oxen and even cows, to escape the so-called “Communist hordes”, urged to do this by those who had kept tight control over the gullible and misguided new citizens of the Reich; citizens, who since 1941, were no longer allowed to call themselves Gottscheer.

Slowly, the wagons merged into this traffic but were, after only a short stretch on it, diverted by a still functioning German military police on to the road leading to the bridge across the Sava to the north side of the river. They were keeping the slow-moving stream of refugees off the main road and directing it out of the way to the inferior road on the other side.

Our wagon, now separated from some of the others, made it across the bridge but got stopped on the rail tracks just beyond. Not far to the right was the station where a parked locomotive was coughing steam at irregular intervals and an apprehensive Father, on the wagon bench but unable to move his team and wagon either back or forward was casting worried glances in that direction. Sitting tightly next to him, a petrified me was getting ready to jump off should the locomotive come our way. Eventually it began to do just that and blew a whistle, as if to tell us to get out of the way. It was only maneuvering to get on to parallel tracks at the station, but how was I to know that!
 
So I jumped off just as the tired but still alert horses, petrified by the huffing engine and the shrill whistle, strained backwards, pulling with them Johann Krisch who was holding them by the head harnesses up front. As I jumped, the backward motion of the wagon disturbed my balance and I landed under the trampling horses. Johann, who saw the coming disaster jumped to catch and drag me to safety out from under hoofs of the agitated animals and away from the still approaching but now slowing locomotive that came to a stop at a safe distance and then reversed direction. This was the first time this close friend of the family pulled me out of harm’s way.  The second time, only four days later, I was not so fortunate.

After that we moved just beyond the tracks to the village called Videm and stopped in a meadow already packed with other vehicles, but Johann found a spot where we settled for the night. The horses were uncoupled, watered and fed, a small fire heated soup and the women handed out food.  Soon I was asleep as were most others either on the wagon or on blankets spread on the now dewy grass. But few slept soundly that first night away from home. Sleep, if any, was continually disrupted by the endless thunder of explosions arriving from all directions while bursts of light from tracer bullets, rockets and flares lit up the horizon and a moonless sky. Was it the ceaselessly retreating army lighting its way, or the approaching Partisans blasting relentlessly to keep the enemy scared and moving, or perhaps a combination of both?

- - - -

It was still dark when we started to move again.  Paul and I were shaken awake by Mother but were allowed, after protest, to continue sleeping for a while longer.  When we were finally awakened by the motion of the wagon, the light of early dawn had replaced the artificial light of war, bringing with it the awareness that the nightmare had not been a dream, but was only continuing with renewed vigor.

The traffic on the wider highway across the river, now mostly military, was flowing more swiftly than that on our side, so heavily slowed by the refugees and their animal-drawn wagons. On our narrower road, the faces of the soldiers jammed into their stalled trucks, all grim and silent and partly hidden by unshaven stubble, had the gray of their uniforms. Some were still clutching their weapons which by now they should have discarded. But in the morning of this day of May 9, all humanity and the surrounding landscape was gray, excepting the brightly colored flares and the streaks of the tracer bullets now being dimmed by the emerging sun.

On either side, however, the traffic was mostly uncovered trucks and half tracks of the German military not yet abandoned at the side of road. Invariably, these vehicles were soon to join the other discards of this no longer retreating but now fleeing army, as soon as they too ran out of gas. The narrow spaces off the road were already littered with field kitchens, workshops, howitzers and the trucks to which they were normally attached.  In many places, where there was little or no embankment, these items, as well as machine guns, rifles, handguns, grenades and other similar hardware had simply been pushed or dumped into the river by the fleeing soldiers so as not to be caught armed by the victorious and shot. While on May 9, the density of this abandoned materiel was still relatively light, it increased over the next few days to such an extent that all spaces along the road and in the river near the embankment were filled and soon to be joined by the bodies of animals and human beings, who, for various reasons, could not or would not go on.

On our side of the river, the wagons of the refugees were moving again and with less interruptions than yesterday, but at a pace not much faster than those on foot, all carrying bundles of varying sizes, be they soldiers or civilians with bewildered children in tow. All traffic on the still level and not yet overly winding narrow road was in one direction, with the slower, animal-pulled wagons on the right, forced there by the military vehicles on the left.

Our progress during the day of May 9, while slow, was somewhat better than the day before. By late afternoon we had passed Brestanica, a small town, and stopped for the night near the little village of Blanca, in a field just off the road where Johann found a spot amid the already tightly packed multitude of humanity and its belongings.

The distance covered during the day, since we left the field at Videm in the early morning was approximately eleven kilometers, just short of seven miles. This was due, in part, to the relatively straight even if narrow gravel road on mostly flat land along the still unencumbered river and also the still somewhat orderly flow of military traffic. At this rate we were going to reach the Austrian border in approximately fourteen days.
 
The uncoupled and secured animals were fed and resting and small campfires heated pre-cooked meals. The fire from burning bits of wood collected by men was shared by women from surrounding wagons, each carefully positioning her pot to prevent spillage of the precious contents. Later on, when the cool of the late evening displaced the heat of this unusually hot day, the fires were kept alive until the wood ran out. Again, as the night before, few except the smallest children slept soundly, given the tumult of vast humanity continuously on the move on the nearby road. While the wagons of the refugees filling the valley were camped for the night, motorized traffic, mainly trucks, loaded to capacity with now unarmed soldiers, continued to flow, pressed on relentlessly by tired drivers.

And again, as on the night before, flares and tracer bullets lit the sky while the constant and ever nearer explosions illuminated the horizon like distant lightning. The endless thunder and brilliance from all directions continued, numbing the senses of the bewildered folks from Veliko Mraševo and before then, the peaceful and placid Masern.
 
- - - -

On May 10, on the mostly flat road near the river, we covered another eight kilometers. As on the morning before, we started to move before dawn, but had to wait for an opening in the slower right lane of the one way traffic, not inclined to have its progress slowed by vehicles trying to enter the queue. But both Johann and Frantze persevered and finally got us in.
 
Both lanes were again packed and moving, with the motorized vehicles still trying to move more rapidly in the left lane. The wagons in the right lane were now drawn by horses only; all of those pulled by the slower and less agile oxen or cows had been abandoned and the animals let loose in the fields along the road. The former riders were now walking and carrying bundles, while those unable to walk were taken on by kindly owners of wagons still in motion. Those who still could had joined the ever growing multitude on foot, now including hurried soldiers, many in civilian clothing, all trying to get ahead in the narrow spaces between the lanes or along the side of the road. And later, when the full power of the midday sun had quickened the inevitable fatigue and exhaustion, the quest for a resting space in the shade of a tree on the hillside away from the road was no longer orderly or civil.

- - - -

But on this second day since the end of war, the military traffic on our road as well as the traffic on the road across the river had slowed significantly, now moving no faster than the wagons of the refugees. In the desperate effort to outrun Tito's Partisan forces which were soon to appear, groups of this military had become increasingly less tolerant of the slowdown caused by the refugees. In this, soldiers of the SS and the Ustashe, the Army of the Croatian pro-Nazi satellite state, established after the occupation in 1941, were particularly brutal.
 
Their desperate attempt to escape the Partisans was not unjustified.  The SS soldiers were part of the SS Divisions "Das Reich" and "Prince Eugen", both having been particularly active in enforcing Hitler’s edict of September 6, 1941. According to this edict, 100 civilian hostages were to be shot for every German soldier killed and 50 civilian hostages shot for every German soldier wounded. The Germans resorted to this form of retribution after they realized their impotence, even with their overwhelming forces, in combating the hit, run and hide guerrilla tactics of the Yugoslavs. However, this form of retaliation during the next four years of occupation only helped to increase the hatred of the population toward the Germans and solidified their support of the Partisans.

Both of these SS Divisions were heavily staffed with ethnic German volunteers, citizens of occupied Yugoslavia who were, as such, considered to be traitors by the resistance forces. Even more to the point, the "Prince Eugen" division was formed after the occupation and, except for German officers, consisted mainly of ethnic German-Yugoslav volunteers, technically still citizens of Yugoslavia. Now with the war lost and at an end, these fleeing soldiers, aware of a hatred accumulated during four years of brutal occupation, were not counting on forgiveness and mercy by the victors who considered them to be traitors to their country.

Forgiveness and mercy were even less likely for the Ustashe, the soldiers of the Croatian Nazi Satellite State. Not only were the Ustashe considered traitors by the largely Serbian Partisans; they had also been the enforcers of a brutal anti-Serbian policy practiced by their Nazi Puppet State toward its large Serbian minority and Serbs in general. In the period after the establishment of the "Independent State of Croatia" in April 1941 and the following October, the Ustashe expelled 120,000 of the Serbian minority by ejecting them over the border into Serbia. The Croats also established the Jasenovac Concentration Camp in which nearly 100,000 members of the Serb minority, as well as 35,000 Jews were exterminated in ways that even the SS officers described as barbaric. (Vladimir Žerjavić, UN Expert. See Wikipedia for references.)

In this stream of desperate military were also Slovene anti-Communists, the Domobranci or Home Guard who, on April 20, 1944 and again on January 30, 1945 pledged allegiance to Hitler.

- - - -

This is not to say that all Croats or Slovene were allied with the occupier.
 
While the existence of the Croatian fascist state is a historical fact, it is equally accurate that a majority of the deeply nationalistic population never accepted this state which was imposed on them by the fascist allies of the German occupier. They joined, in thousands, the ranks of the anti-fascist Partisans, especially after the brutal edict of executing hostages by the German military was brought also to the Croatian villages in eastern Croatia into which the bulk of the Partisans had withdrawn after the great if ineffective German offensive in the fall of 1941.
 
The Slovene, at first only hostile to the occupier, soon rebelled against the forced resettlement, forced labor and germanization of the remaining population countered with armed resistance and increased Partisan activity. This generated a sharp response by Himmler who on June 25, 1942 issued the edict to the German forces battling the Partisans in the territories of Slovenia annexed to the Reich. The edict directed that all captured Slovene male supporters of the Partisans were to be executed, their wives sent to concentration camps and their children sent into the “Altreich” for reorientation and to be raised as good German 'Janissaries'.
 
- - - -

In the four years of liberation struggle against the German occupier and its supporters, the State of Yugoslavia suffered immense casualties. According to the U.S. Bureau of Census, war related deaths were 1,067,000.
 
According to the study by Vladimir Žerjavić, 1.027 million people died; the number of dead being 6.67 % of the total population of the country, in 1938 equaling 15.4 million. Another study by Bogoljub Kočović places the number at 1,014 million; nearly the same. Of these, 446,000 were military and 581,000 were civilian; 67,000 of them Jews.  More than 95,000 of them were Slovene.
 
The total estimated number of killed, wounded and prosecuted (in prisons and concentration camps, displaced and pressed into forced labor) was almost 3.75 million, nearly 25% of the population of the country.

However, on May 10, 1945, none of us knew any of this. Nor did we know that Hitler had tasked Himmler, in addition to giving him the assignment to mass murder the Jews, also with the gradual destruction of the Slavic people through starvation and forced labor. But our prejudice had been shaped by effective indoctrination to believe that the Germans and their allies were resisting the mostly Slavic Communism on its mission to destroy the German defender of western civilization. These defenders, losers now, were trying to escape the vengeance of those they had brutally suppressed over the past four years and to escape the Partisans who were “in the service of Communism controlled by Jews, whose ultimate objective was world domination”, as we had so often been told and made to believe.

It was not surprising therefore, that these collaborators, clad in German uniforms with only minor insignia variations to tell them apart, were running for their lives. This included men who had shed their uniforms for civilian clothing and now mingled with and pretended to be part of the refugees.

They all were aware the Partisans considered them to be traitors to Yugoslavia and as such, were likely to be shot if captured. .Knowing that their time was rapidly running out, they pushed any obstacle out of their way and off the road.  Unfortunately, these obstacles were, apart from the trucks that had run out of gasoline, the wagons of refugees that had become stuck in the left lane when they tried to overtake a stalled vehicle in front of them whose wheel or horse had collapsed and could not move on.

However, we did not yet know that the Partisans would make little distinction between the fleeing soldiers and the fleeing civilians; all those on the road were enemies, more or less.  All this would become apparent soon enough.
 
- - - -

Fortunately, our wagon, tended and supported by the able Johann and willing Frantze, remained intact and connected to the remaining few of the others who left Veliko Mraševo as a column two days ago. Staying together was recognized as necessary for moving on since it meant that help was on hand when needed by anyone in the group.

By now, each wagon had discarded all now obviously excess baggage, to be replaced by tired children, the elderly and the infirm.  On our wagon, in addition to Father and Paul, was the wounded Anton, Katharina's 16-year-old son. Anton had been hit by a stray bullet after he left his Volkssturm unit on May 8 to look for his parents somewhere on the road to the North. He lost some blood, but had been bandaged up by a medic who said that the wound was not serious. Later in the day when the horses became tired, he too had to join those of us who could still walk. Father was on the bench up front holding the reins; Johann was leading the horses by the bridle while Frantze, Mother, Mitzi, Katharina, her husband Alois and I trailed behind or walked next to the wagon. The seven-year-old Paul at times left his spot near Father and joined us in walking, but usually not for long.
  
The war had ended two days ago, yet the thunder of explosions continued relentlessly and was getting nearer while endless flares and tracer bullets continued to compete with the sun. The constant starting and stopping in the heat of this again unusually hot day tired the body, while the senses, stretched to the limit by the sharp extremes of sight and sound, surrendered to a translucent perception of the surreal. To the nostrils now clung, ever stronger since this morning, the sweet, never to be forgotten smell of decay from the bodies of animals and humans decomposing in the broiling sun.
  
Later in the day word spread that the Partisans had arrived. They had been observed in small groups off the road and identified by the red star on their caps and tunic collars of the original Yugoslav army uniform. And, of course, they were heavily armed but apparently not yet ready or in sufficient numbers to enter the traffic and take control of the fleeing masses. They started this in the half-light of the following morning.

- - - -

Toward the evening of May 10, we passed Sevnica and Frantze found a spot for the night, a night no different from the last two. The sounds of explosions and gunfire continued to dull the senses and the perpetual lighting of the sky kept interfering with the dark of the night. To this was added the numbing fear of the imminent arrival of the dreaded Communists, among them surely those from Veliko Mraševo who came to take revenge on us for causing the brutal disruption in their lives and the loss of their homes, three and a half years ago.

That evening, our now small, but still connected group was confronted with a decision on how to proceed the following morning. Just beyond the village of Sevnica and across the Sevnična, a small tributary to the Sava River, there is a fork in the road. The left continues toward Zidani Most along the Sava, while the right follows the Sevnična into a broad valley more directly toward the north, albeit on a secondary road.

It was decided to continue along the Sava, in retrospect perhaps a mistake since the road on the right along the Sevnična, while unpaved, was not only less winding but also leading more directly toward Austria, our goal. Our group was not deterred by reports that the Partisans had blocked the most constricted part of the road beyond Zidani Most along the Savinja toward Celje and that there was considerable fighting with the Ustashe trying to force their way beyond that point.
  
So, next morning, the 11th of May, we started on what was to be the most difficult day since leaving Veliko Mraševo. Particularly for Mother who had little sleep, kept awake by constant anxiety and worry about Father and Johann, who were both roaming about and secretly observing the Partisans in the woods off the road, getting ready to take over. Father, with his fluent Slovene, overheard one group discussing their plans. Apparently, he had come away from that with the impression that their plan was to kill all the escapees on the road.

- - - -

Almost immediately after starting toward Zidani Most, the road began to get narrower as it climbed into the steep hillside above the tracks that hugged the winding river. And soon after we had climbed a distance on this steep road, one of the reasons for the constant firing and explosions during the past few days and nights and the aftermath of these endless sounds, became gruesomely apparent.
 
The ever steeper hillside down to the river was littered with wagons, trucks and all sorts of military hardware large and small. Mixed into all this were the bodies of animals and humans in various stages of dismemberment and decay, now adding desperation to the anxiety and fear that was with us in increasing measure since we had left, two and a half days ago. We had entered a stretch of the escape route from Croatia that, due to its geography, was particularly vulnerable and exposed to the Partisans and which had, especially in the last few days, become their unopposed killing grounds.
  
It was now obvious that we should have taken the other road after all, but how were we to know, some said. It had been known, however, that all rail and road traffic between Zidani Most and Zagreb had, for many months before the end of the war, been hampered and finally shut down by the strafing planes and Partisan activity, particularly on this stretch by simply disabling the steam locomotive pulling a train. But we heard nothing about the traffic on the road. What really had been happening, and especially so in the last few days, now became visible to our eyes. The full extent of this was not apparent until much later when it became known that this killing range extended all along the steep embankments along the Sava to Zidani Most and along the rivers in both directions for miles beyond that.

Years later we learned that during the war and particularly in the days leading up to the end of it, the Partisans had used this approximately fourteen kilometer stretch between Sevnica and Zidani Most to harass the military traffic not only on the rails but also on the roads on either side of the Sava River. On our side, the narrow road, in parts  carved into the steep terrain, offered an ideal spot for the Partisans from which to target their defenseless enemy below. From a convenient perch above, this road as well as the one across the river could be strafed at will and if attacked, the strafing party could easily withdraw to still higher grounds from which to pick off the attackers. The Partisans had perfected this tactic in the mountainous terrain of Macedonia and Montenegro where they prevailed against the vastly superior forces of the Germans, including their Luftwaffe air power.  But during this final phase of the war, there was little effective resistance from the retreating armies and the only break in the firing occurred when the Partisans ran out of ammunition or decided to take a rest.

In the last few days of the war, the German soldiers and their allies, in a desperate attempt to move on and escape being picked off, resorted to the only option available to them when facing a blockage caused mostly by Partisan fire. They cleared the road by pushing the obstacle, whatever that may be, over the edge of the road, where it continued to roll down the steep slope to be either stopped by a tree or land on the ledge near the tracks.
 
This was even more so the case in the two valleys of the fork beyond Zidani Most, where the steep slope starts almost immediately at each of the two river banks. This constriction continues for at least ten kilometers in either direction, giving the Partisans total command over the traffic below.

However, we never got to Zidani Most.

- - - -

Since the morning, we had moved very slowly uphill, all in short bursts of constant start and stopping. And after having climbed to some height above the river, the road leveled out to a constant up and down. To limit the burden on the horses straining to prevent the wagon from rolling either forward or back, Frantze and Mitzi were tasked to block the wheels with stones since it took too long to engage the rim brake by turning the crank.
 
But now the traffic came to a complete standstill for extended periods. The jam was undoubtedly caused by blockages similar to those of the past few days, except that here was no room to get off the road other than over the precipice.
 
Now the dreaded Partisans appeared, identifiable mainly by the five pointed stars on their caps and tunic collars. Small groups of them slid down the embankment from above, while others came on horses on the road behind us.  Most were quite young, in their mid twenties or less, all heavily armed, ready to shoot at any resistance or obstacle and firing occasionally into the air to get attention. They moved in groups among the civilians and fleeing soldiers most still dressed in their uniforms, clearing the road as they moved by and on, tolerating no blockage in the left lane. Unless room was quickly found in the right lane for a vehicle on the left, the young Partisans, with their assault weapons at the ready, uncoupled the horses and pushed the wagon off the cliff.

Word arrived that the Partisans were shooting resisters, now mostly refugees who were still trying to hold on to their few treasured possessions. But the Partisans were determined to clear the road for their trucks and armored vehicles and keep it that way. To make this stick, they subdued any resistance to their hard-won supremacy with terror and death.

This was brought home to us, the remaining group of wagons from Veliko Mraševo, mid morning when the left lane again stopped moving. Johann and Frantze went up front to have a look and I followed at a distance in spite of Mother’s command not to wander off. One of the refugees’ wagons, not one of our group, had moved out of the right lane into the left one but came to a stop behind the stalled wagon in front of it, also blocked from proceeding further.  Immediately, a small group of Partisans arrived and ordered the wagon to be pushed over the edge of the road.
 
Frantze, who knew the owner of the wagon, began to argue forcefully with one of the Partisans on his behalf, asking for a few moments of delay to get the wagon back into the right lane. The soldier soon discovered that Frantze was a Slovene and obviously on the wrong side of the war. The young Partisan pointed his sub-machine gun at Frantze and pulled the trigger. The burst propelled Frantze, who had been standing near the edge of the road, over the cliff and I watched the body of this simple young man, whose humanity by far outweighed his ideology, tumble down the steep embankment.
 
There was no further arguing from the stunned family owning that wagon. The horses were quickly uncoupled and the wagon, with the few and only remaining precious possessions of its owner, pushed off the barrier-less road, spilling its contents as it tumbled the distance down to the tracks, coming to rest not far from the body of Frantze.

This was by far the most numbing event since we left Veliko Mraševo and it confirmed all reports of the brutality of the Communist Partisans we had heard so much about in the past few years. How much more of this was waiting for us, vulnerable participants in this nightmare of seemingly unbounded proportion, was still unknown especially since we were still so far away from our destination on such forbidding and dangerous terrain and now under total control of the “brutal barbarians”, as described by the VGL. None of us was aware of the even larger scope of such happenings all along the way and in both directions beyond Zidani Most, and that for the young Partisans, this “brutality” was part of their final act of retribution and revenge on the German occupier and his allies. However, it is unlikely that Communism, at least in these young avengers, played the primary role.

- - - -

How the blockage that resulted in the death of Frantze was cleared, I no longer remember, except that it was cleared rapidly for no one was willing to tempt fate and bullets. Words arriving from front and back, told us that the Partisans were using similar tactics all along the road to clear one lane for the vehicles that were to follow their forward groups. As the day progressed and we inched our way toward Zidani Most, the result of this tactic was clearly confirmed by the discarded evidence; material, animal and human, that was accumulating at the bottom of the precipice adjoining the road. The Partisans had made known their method for clearing the lane, not just in our vicinity but all the way along our road as well as on the road across the river. And after the killing of Frantze, no one wished to become the next victim.

- - - -

During the remainder of that day, the heat, together with fatigue mostly due to a lack of sleep, food and especially water produced a sense of the hopelessness in which only the strongest and the most determined such as Johann and Mother still functioned with some degree of normalcy. Reports of suicides were becoming more frequent, one of them of a woman from our village. Most affected by this was Father, who had the least amount of sleep since we left. This was not apparent to me but was obvious to Mother who recalled the events of that day in detail later on.  For me, the day passed in a sequence of surreal sketches that ended when I fell asleep after we descended the higher terrain. Toward the evening we were commanded by a Partisan to camp on the flat land next to the Sava just before the green steel bridge across it.

But during the day when we were still on the higher part of the road and mostly standing still, Mitzi and I were sent into the embankment above the road with buckets to find water, especially for the horses who were near collapse for the lack of it. Had this occurred, our wagon would also have been sent over the edge by the ever near and watchful Partisans all making sure that no blockage stopped the traffic in the left lane now used by their vehicles only. The two of us were sent because Johann was leading the horses by the bridle up front while Mother was dealing with the brake and the blocks under the wheels during the next two or three meters of forward motion. Father, limited by his crutches and worn out with fatigue could not contribute to any of this and even the horses ignored the tugs and pulls of the reins and no longer responded to the whip.

We did find water, but on one of our returns to a trickling brook, Mitzi was accosted by an armed man who began to wrestle the screaming girl while trying to lift her skirts. Our screams, which brought Mother and Johann, intimidated the attacker who released her and took flight.  This time I knew that my sister escaped rape for the second time, the first time being six years ago by the smith of Masern when he accosted her working alone in the fields. Her screams, then as now had stopped the assault.
  
- - - -

The steep and wooded, but occasionally field-like grounds above the road were full of fleeing civilians and soldiers bypassing the blocked and treacherous road below. On these open slopes Mitzi and I witnessed many tragic scenes, but one became firmly imprinted on my mind which even many decades could not diminish in clarity.

- - - -

A solitary elderly woman, in the typically dark and billowing skirts of a peasant, her head covered with a kerchief and carrying on her shoulder a stick to which was tied a bundle, is limping across the steep ravine above the blocked road. Catching up from behind her, but at a higher level, is a soldier leading by the bit a horse pulling a small, two rubber wheeled cart of the type used by the German infantry to transport munitions over rough terrain. The cart, its load hidden by a canvas cover, is barely clinging to the steep grassy slope and very near its tipping point.
 
I watch from above, mesmerized by a clear perception of the tragedy about to happen. Sure enough, just as the cart is about to pass, it starts to tip over. The soldier and the horse, both pulled backward and down, stop the rolling cart, but only after it rolls over the unsuspecting woman.

The soldier lets go of the horse, runs to the immobile woman now sprawled out on the slope, falls on his knees and lifts her head just as I get close.  She seems to be dead but her eyes are open. Holding her head, the soldier, with a pained apologetic expression looks up, burdening me forever, with the indelible impression of two sets of petrified eyes staring at me. But not for long.  He lowers her head into the grass, gets up, rights the cart and continues on his way.

- - - -

It had taken most of the day to get to Breg, a village half way between Sevnica and Zidani Most. From this point forward, the road is no longer hewn into the steep hills directly above the tracks and the river, but follows a less tortuous and more direct path on flat terrain toward Zidani Most a short distance away from the winding Sava and the tracks.
 
We got near the steel bridge, two and a half km this side of Zidani Most before nightfall. We had covered the distance from Breg in a fraction of the time it took to get to Breg from Sevnica and without further highly dramatic events. The constant thunder of explosions and black smoke from burning tires seemed to have abated somewhat, the nostrils less offended by the pervasive smell of rotting flesh. Or was it that the deepening fatigue had dulled the senses to the point where only survival mattered?

Instead of proceeding into the again-tightening cleft of encroaching and even steeper mountains just beyond the steel bridge, pushing the road up to the tracks and the river, we were directed on to a field alongside the Sava near Loca. From here there was a clear view of the traffic on the steel bridge just ahead and on the other side of the river.
 
From this vantage point, it soon became obvious that all traffic, on the bridge as well as on the river opposite was now in the other direction, opposite to that during the days and nights until now.  Since this traffic included the wagons of refugees, it became plain that our planned escape route to Austria was, if not forever at least for now, closed. Father’s impression, gathered when he overheard the camping Partisans the night before that they planned to kill us all, took on a frightening reality.

The memory of that evening and night is the view of the bridge with its curved arch of steel keeping the flat roadbed suspended above the swiftly flowing river. This view, coming into focus with each flash of a new explosion remains clear to this day. Adding to that scene is the pleading of Mother to Johann to find her husband who had disappeared again and was lost if not dead. All this was vividly refreshed when, decades later, I re-visited that very spot.
 
- - - -

He still had not returned at dawn of the following day of May 12th, when a frantic Mother sent Mitzi and me to look for him. She was now convinced that he was dead and told us to walk toward Zidani Most; "maybe you will find him in the river on the way there". Johann had already gone to look for him elsewhere.

The two of us walked past the steel bridge and then along the bank of the Sava toward Zidani Most. We stopped often to make our way among all the military debris to the very edge of the river to see if any of the bodies at the bottom of the water was that of Father, but to get back to Mother more quickly, we soon decided to look for a body of a man with only one leg.

At Zidani Most we crossed the stone bridge over the Savinja and walked north along its bank. This is when we were stopped by a very young Partisan.  He put his handgun to my head and with the other hand loosened the clasp in the buttonhole of the collar of my jacket. By the leather strap he pulled from the breast pocket my precious confirmation watch and after looking at it, walked away with a grinning face.

Since Mother had cautioned us not to go too far, we turned to get back to our wagon. Along the way, we joined the thickening traffic of orderly groups of disarmed military, escorted by their Partisan guards, all now walking with us in our direction. When we reached the campsite, our wagon was gone, but we heard from the few remaining there that those who left were told to cross the Sava on the steel bridge just up ahead.

On the steel bridge, the wagons of the refugees were again kept sharply to the right, making room for the vanquished soldiers on their left as they were being escorted by their guards in a continuous stream to the other side. The wagons were moving in short spurts between halts and we caught up with ours in the middle of the bridge. Johann was leading the horses by the bridle and to our surprise, on the bench was a disheveled Father who immediately asked me to sit next to him but told Mitzi to join Mother and Paul who had gone on ahead.

- - - -

I was immensely happy to see him alive but quickly noticed his unusual behavior. Strange talk, flashing eyes, jerky movements; all unfamiliar and frightening. The mostly incoherent talk had great urgency and with unusual conviction in his shaky voice he explained that we were being turned back to be taken to a place where we were to be killed. "I heard this again last night when they were talking about us".  “.. the young are to be sorted out and re-educated into loyal Communists",  "…you don't want to become a Communist, do you. I don't want you to become a Communist; I’d rather have you dead…"

We inched toward the far end of the bridge where, due to the steep embankment just beyond it, the main road took a sharp turn to the left. The much narrower road to the right was blocked by guards. And when we and the silent prisoners on our left finally reached the end of the bridge, there was no choice but to turn to the left.

But even before we made that fateful left, proving the first part of Father’s contention, he kept up his verbal onslaught, made ever more urgent that he did not want me to become a Communist and that he would rather have me dead.

- - - -

The distance from the steel bridge to the village of Radeče is no more than a few hundred meters. But just before the houses start, there is a fork in the road with the right leading into the village and the left continuing along the Sava, in effect bypassing the village center. And as it was visible, all the wagons of the refugees were directed on to the village road while the prisoners and their guards took the left fork.

The fact that the refugees were being separated from the military was further proof to Father that we were being led to the place of slaughter and that we should kill ourselves beforehand. He did, of course, not know that he had it in reverse and that it was the prisoners, the captured Ustashe and Domobranci who were being led to slaughter while the refugees were separated out and led to a holding camp in a field just beyond Radeče. On the other hand, how was I to know that Father had reached a state of extreme depression in which delusion overwhelms any logic and coherent thought. Nevertheless, he was persuasive and even before we got to the fork, I had succumbed to his verbal barrage and no longer argued with him.

It happened on the narrowing road into the village just a few houses beyond the fork. Passively, I watched him make the preparations. He reached back to get a section of strong cord, a kitchen knife, the knife-sharpening tool and lastly, a hammer.  He was going to kill me by smashing my skull.

The first blow broke the bone and made a shallow dent. He swung again, but I instinctively covered my head with both hands and now the blow fell on my protecting right hand, crushing the knuckle of the middle finger but saving the skull.
 
Before the third blow reached its target, I was yanked from the wagon. Johann, who was busy with the horses but saw the beginning of the tragedy, raced around to the right side of the wagon and pulled me down and into the gutter just before the third blow connected. I passed out for only a moment and as I recovered, while still lying in the gutter, I saw Father attempting to fasten the noose he had made from the cord to the hoop above his seat. But he gave that up and now was sharpening the knife by crisscrossing it with the sharpening tool as he had in the past before carving a roast. After that, he tried to stab himself and then cut his wrists.  I passed out again.

- - - -

I only vaguely remember what happened immediately after that. Apparently, Mother appeared and led me away, covered with blood oozing from the hole in my head. She left Johann to struggle with Father and pull him off the wagon, now seemingly dead. The commotion stopped the wagons behind us, but some Partisans showed up and forced Johann to move on with the wagon insisting that he leave the dead body in the gutter, a not uncommon sight in those days.
 
All this was too much even for my stoic mother. Not only had she lost her husband, her home, her possessions, her lands, her country, all, and now was walking with a seemingly dying son into the further evolving nightmare. She also reached the conclusion, if for different reasons than Father, that there was no further point to living. I had already been convinced of that earlier and did not protest.

It seemed an easy thing to do.  As she led me along the village street, I looked for a means and the first appropriate item I saw among all the discarded weaponry was a hand grenade. I was very familiar with the German version, a cylinder shaped explosive at the end of a wooden handle at the end of which was a cap that had to be unscrewed to expose the cord for pulling to make it explode after five seconds. But I knew nothing about this cross ribbed egg shaped foreign device, a blessing which just a little later saved both our lives.

We left the road and made our way along a house to the rear, the place of stables and barns. We entered a barn and agreed that we would stand close together, face to face, when I detonated the grenade.
 
Had it been a German grenade I would not be writing these lines now. Facing each other and Mother hugging me loosely, I fiddled with a pin, the only possible item that would make it explode, but the pin would not move. Then, when we heard the voices of Mitzi and Johann calling, I gave up and we left the barn. Johann took the grenade from my hands and put it down gently as we walked back to the street.  He had saved me for the third time in less than one week, saved my life twice in less than one hour.

- - - -

What happened immediately after the four of us got back to the street is not clear and those who could fill in the blanks no longer can. It may be that the depression in my skull had something to do with this. If so, I was indeed fortunate that the effect on my memory was limited only to that short period which in the future we discreetly referred to as the "event".  Out of Father’s hearing for sure.
 
Johann said that the Partisans had taken the horses and the wagon. Mother went back to find Father while Johann, Mitzi and I walked with the stream of people to find Paul who had been left with Katharina and her family. We found him and the others in a large field near the Sava, just beyond the village. On this slightly upward sloping field just outside Radeče, the Partisans had set up a holding camp to get the refugees off the road and keep them there. Mother caught up with us after a while and between sobs and streaming tears reported that Father was no longer in the gutter where she had last seen him and she could not find him anywhere. She assumed his body had been moved off the street perhaps to a grave.  The Partisans she asked would not give her an answer.

- - - -

Since orders from the Partisans were being spread around that we were to camp here for some days, the five of us found a spot in the already crowded field. Then Mother and Johann went to find the wagon with the hope of rescuing from it some essential items for our survival. They did find it, a short distance from the village and Mother pleaded with the young Partisan now in charge to let her have the tent, a few blankets and some food. That she was successful in this, is in retrospect amazing since the Partisans, including this one knew that all refugees on the road were, if not intimate supporters of the occupier, now fleeing with them from the liberator. Perhaps this compassionate young liberator, now on the bench and holding the reins, was not a fanatic and in his recent past swore allegiance to the side most likely to succeed in this bitter struggle, if only to survive. Or perhaps because his family (surely he had a mother not very different from the one pleading with him now) survived the hostage-taking by the Germans as a result of compassion from someone on the side of the occupier or his allies.  Any number of reasons, but compassion for sure.

After Johann helped us to set up the small tent and spread the blankets, we hid within, partly to avoid the stares of neighbors who heard of our plight and partly to cry in private. Then a kind soul came to clean the now drying blood from my head with disinfectant and cover the area with bandages, a wound judged not as deep as was feared. Not much could be done with the crushed knuckle except to firm it up with a splint and then firm up the entire hand with bandages around a longer splint.  Both damages healed rapidly without complications in the next few days and weeks, being looked after by the same kind soul if not another. But I was left for life with an enlarged knuckle and a depression in the skull, evidence for all to see on my right hand or feel below the covering hair of my head. Not visible was the damage to the psyche; the nightmares abating only after years. But the memories of the “event” remained intact.

It was two afternoons later when people came running to tell us that Father was sitting beside the road at the top end of the field. At first we reacted with disbelief, a joke surely, since we all were certain that he was dead. But then we ran up the hill and sure enough, there he was. He had been sitting there a while, suspecting that we were in the camp but either too weak to look for us or afraid to face us when he found us. Of course it was both, the latter obvious in his face which quickly turned from fear to surprise to joy. Our pleasure to see him alive erased any resentment or grief among all of us, now relieved by tears including his, one of only two times I saw my Father cry.

The long sleep that night in the tent helped him to recover his composure and revert to a semblance of his former self. The "event" and its aftermath appeared to have cured him of the depression for there was no more talk of grim foreboding in spite of the gloom still all around us. He and the rest of us who had already seen hell, now accepted our destiny, come what may.

Next morning, the person who had taken care of my wounds, took care of his.  The chest wound where he had stabbed himself was superficial and the cuts across his wrists were not deep enough to reach the veins. All were bandaged up and rapidly healed.
 
- - - -

What did not heal for many decades was a barrier that appeared between son and father, a son who never completely forgave his father for being a weakling at a time when a rock of strength was required for his family to lean on. "In a time of need he failed us", was justification for this invisible barrier that remained between us until his death in 1969 at the age of 76. This barrier remained with me for three decades after that, when I realized that any rock can crumble from depression, an overwhelming yet invisible force. It was this realization that for the fourth time, saved my life.

I too was crumbled by this force into a pitiable heap of misery, albeit by a matter insignificant to what Father faced in 1945 and which pushed him into the "event" that morning of May 12, 1945. My depression was over a trivial matter, temporary according to the treating physician, to disappear as soon as the matter was resolved. True enough, but until it was over, it was as severe as any depression can be, even if eased and controlled by medication.

Father had no such care or medication nor was the matter, which took him into clinical depression, either trivial or temporary. He had lost everything; all his earthly possessions, all anchors to a livelihood for himself and his family, all prospects for a meaningful future. And on that day on the steel bridge, having been forced into that ominous U turn, he was justified in believing that he was about to lose his family as well as his life.
  
Yes, "but why not let others do the deed" was my reasoning for decades thereafter. And "others, with similar losses did not despair". This logic crumbled, as did I, pushed over a threshold into mental disturbance by, for me seemingly insurmountable difficulties. And so I had my day on a steel bridge, a night in 2000 actually, when I reached for the bottle of tablets. But at that moment came to mind the "event" and its aftermath and I realized that I could not inflict on my family what he had inflicted on his. This awareness made me pull back and more than anything else, was the reason for my "cure". And had that "event" not been there to remember, I most certainly would, again, not be writing these lines.

- - - -

Another victim of this "event" was the friendship between Johann and father and by extension between Johann and the rest of the family. I never discovered the reason for this but I suspect that Johann was disillusioned over the character weakness of his friend, now a tainted man. And that Father was a "tainted person" was made clear to us by those who knew and now shunned us. Suicide, even under such trying circumstances was not looked upon with compassion, especially when accompanied by attempted murder of a son.

So we lost touch with Johann who remained in the camp but kept his distance.  We saw him, on and off for the next few weeks among the refugees until we crossed into Austria. After that he, like all others dispersed, free at last to go their own way. I did not see him again until several decades later at a public social event. There he reminded me of some of the painful moments during those four days but I was, unfortunately, not yet to ready to listen attentively or seek details. I was not yet ready confront that part of the past.
 
This came, but again only years later. Mother did not wish to talk about it, Mitzi had blocked it out of her mind as did Paul then only seven years old and not a witness to many of the gruesome details. Of course, I would never discuss any of it with Father, who had survived in spite of it all.

I did begin to think more often of Johann in the late 1980's and the crucial role he had played in our lives and especially in mine and I was getting myself ready to see him. He then lived in a remote part of Pennsylvania, some distance away.  Both Father and Mother were no longer alive.

But one night in 1988, I dreamed about him and woke up to an overwhelming urge to talk to him. The neighbor I phoned that morning reported sadly that Johann had had a stroke that night and was alive but unconscious in the local hospital.  And no, I could not see him. I tried, unsuccessfully, to contact his wife for several days thereafter to see if I could see him when he regained consciousness. The neighbor reported no progress until I had another dream and awoke the following morning with a similar urge to make contact. The same neighbor told me that Johann died that night. I could see him at the local funeral parlor and that he would be buried two days hence.
 
When I arrived at the parlor, the coffin was still open and I pondered the deeply lined but kind face of the man who played such a major role in my youth and the awareness that without his intervention my life would have ended fifty-seven years ago. The silent gratitude to him was also a sad reminder that I should have thanked him long ago.

- - - -

We were kept in the camp outside Radeče for three more days until May 17. We survived mostly from what had been rescued from the wagons, but the Partisans did set up a field kitchen and once a day a long line waited for thin soup and a slice of bread. Mother, clustered by her children, carried a larger cup and usually managed to persuade the Partisan with the ladle to put into it a little more, something for her sick invalid husband.

The reason we were kept in that camp for five days became clear only many decades later.
 
During the entire stay there, we could see from our slightly elevated vantage point, on the road between the Sava and the camp, a never ending day and night procession of columns of vanquished soldiers, taking up most of the room on the spacious road. All were guarded on both sides by Partisans, weapons at the ready and spaced so as to prevent any of their charges from fleeing. Night and day they walked south-east along the Sava. "POW's being led to a camp somewhere", was passed around.
 
It was clear, however, that this pitiful endless stream consisted of the very men who only several days ago, desperately and by desperate means, were making their way in the opposite direction, trying to outrun their approaching avengers. But the Partisans, their tactics honed by years of guerilla warfare, appeared from the woods of the steep hills on either side of the escape route along the Sava and Savinja rivers, making any resistance futile and capture certain. Some of the fleeing had, at war’s end, put up resistance with the hope of reaching the Austrian border, including a fierce if futile fight further up the Sevnica valley toward Celje. This contributed to the delays, including ours and was part of the distant thunder and flashes of light that we heard earlier during our way toward Zidani Most.

Now the captured SS, Ustashe and Domobranci were being escorted back in the reverse direction, most if not all to their mass execution as traitors, their bodies dumped into mass graves that dot the Slovene countryside. All were part of a brutal policy of the liberator which consisted partly in revenge and partly in the elimination of all opposition to the ideology of the new Communist State that had emerged out of this brutal war.
 
We, of course knew none of this. We only witnessed an endless uninterrupted flow of vanquished men, many no older than the young Partisan who allowed Mother to take the tent. Surely many in that uninterrupted flow had, like him, chosen or were persuaded to join their side of the conflict except that in their case, it turned out to be the wrong one. There were those who chose that side because they saw in Communism an evil ideology and were willing to do battle to prevent it from becoming their future. However, in doing this they became allied with an equally evil ideology, which had, under the pretense of destroying Communism, invaded their country and brutalized its people.

Securing this stream of thousands, led out of the confined spaces of the two congested valleys along the rivers north and west of Zidani Most, was of prime concern to the liberators. Only when this was more or less accomplished did they turn their attention back to the relatively benign mass of refugees, in our case those languishing on the sloping field near Radeče.

We had been given some notice that on the following day we were to be moved. By now the stream of escorted captives on the main road below had diminished to a trickle. And early in the morning of May 17, open trucks appeared on the narrow road above and Partisans with sub-machine guns started to herd the frightened mass emerging from the tents toward the trucks, allowing only the most minimal possessions to be taken with them. Other Partisans packed each truck to capacity, closed the rear gate and ordered the truck to roll off to an unknown destination. As our truck rolled away we all, including a silent Father, were resigned to our fate, all the more troubling, given the direction along the Sava.

The trucks moved southeast, opposite to the northwest direction only a few days ago and on the opposite side of the river. Now, in contrast to the northwest pace, we were moving rapidly toward where we started from and our fate beyond that.

We reached Krško, a distance of 30 kilometers from Radeče in less than one hour. And, as we did nine days ago at sunset on the 8th of May, we again crossed the bridge across the Sava and the place where Johann saved me from being trampled by the hoofs of our frightened horses. We passed Videm where we camped that first night and continued southeast along the river. After a few minutes and ten kilometers more, we reached Brežice where the trucks stopped inside a camp surrounded by a barbed wire fence enclosing wooden barracks built by the SS after the occupation in April 1941.

- - - -

We had arrived in Brežice once before, albeit under very different circumstances. The irony in our return did not escape most. The first time we got there was in December 1941. Then we arrived on the comfortable seats of heated railway coaches; not on the hard floors of uncovered military trucks. Then, as now, our destination was uncertain; but then the future was far less dismal and survival more certain. Then we stayed in the Brežice movie theatre cleared of chairs, on comfortable mattresses and fed good meals until taken to our houses in the Promised Land. Now we were behind barbed wire in barracks, the men separated from their wives and children, sleeping on bare floors thinly covered with crumpled straw full of lice, surviving on thin soup and a slice of bread once a day and hoping that we would be sent back to Kočevje where we came from just four years ago. Poorer for sure, but the land had survived and perhaps even the house, more than what awaited our ancestors when they arrived there some six centuries ago.

The camp was guarded by very young Partisan soldiers, local recruits by their looks, behavior and language. Their acting tough did not deter Mother, fluent in their local Slovene dialect, from chatting them up and talking them into letting her leave the camp to visit Veliko Mraševo, her home, for only a short few hours.

After all, she had to come back to her hungry family, hopefully with some food these young guards could not provide. And again, the pleas coming from a woman not unlike their mother were met with compassion and they allowed her to leave the camp.

She came back with bread, sausages and wine, all given to her by the Žibert family that had returned to their home after four years of enforced absence. The sausage, the wine and the grain for the bread had all been left behind on May 8, for which the Žiberts were now grateful and willing to share with the woman who left the house in a condition better than it was when they were forced to leave. They had received her hospitably, showing no hostility to a person who was part of the reason for their expulsion.

Not happy was the woman in the house next to the Žiberts, whose property had also been assigned to us.  When she heard that Mother was at the Žiberts she came to angrily confront Mother over the condition of her house which had received only minor repairs and been kept more or less in the condition it was when we took possession of it. Mother’s defense was in pointing out that all the rotting windows had been replaced and painted (by slave labor from Czechoslovakia) and that quite a bit of our furniture was left in the house. Also, the grain bins in some of the rooms, which we used as storage spaces, were left half full as was the hay loft which was empty when we arrived. “And you all have your property back but we lost everything, are starving and know not what is to become of us. And we were victims just like you”. All that, accompanied by a stream of tears calmed the woman and further helped to convince the Žiberts to be generous on Mother’s behalf.

- - - -

I returned to Veliko Mraševo and the Žibert house mid morning of a Saturday in the summer of 1988. I parked the hired car on the triangle and slowly entered the familiar courtyard of Number 38, only steps away. I was apprehensive, having no inkling of how I would be received, if at all, or simply given the boot.
  
Immediately apparent was the enlargement of the house and other improvements, the most obvious being the magnificent tractor near the barn. Such a machine, with its vast amount of horsepower, was unimaginable in our time there when its task was being performed by only two horses, our Yiorgo and Shargo. But my contemplation was interrupted by a middle aged woman, dressed in working clothes, coming out of the barn asking what I wanted.
 
I came to talk to gospod Žibert, I said as I gave my name. “He is not here, but he should be back any moment.  I am his wife” and could she help me. I explained that I was the oldest son of the family that lived here during the war and that I now lived in America but came to apologize for being the cause of their expulsion in 1941.
 
The quickly changing expression on the face of the woman let me know that my fears of not being welcome were without cause. She invited me into the house leading me to the large room fronting the street that in our day was used jointly as the living room and dining room and at night, the bedroom of Father, Mother, Paul and myself, with Mitzi using the spare bedroom. Now it was used as a comfortable living/dining room only, the beds having been moved into other rooms of the enlarged and improved house.

Mrs. Žibert immediately served apple cider and we chatted comfortably until after only a short while, her husband arrived from the nearby Cerkle where he had driven for supplies. I introduced myself again and explained that I came to apologize for being the cause of their expulsion in 1941. He greeted me warmly, thanked me for the effort to seek him out and waved off my apology with a magnanimous: “we were all victims”.
 
- - - -

Karel Žibert, now in his mid fifties had like me, been forced to leave his home when he was ten years old. As we sat around the dining room table on which a recognizably new red wine had replaced the cider, he described the early morning hours of the fateful day. They were having breakfast in the very room we were in now when canvas covered trucks began to roll past the house and further into the village toward the river. Karel’s father guessed the reason for the trucks and together with his wife, Karel and older sister Justa ran into the woods beyond the barn.  From behind trees, Karel and his family watched the villagers being rounded up by armed Gestapo civilians and black uniformed SS men and herded into the trucks.

By mid morning, the trucks began to leave. It took less than two hours to empty the village of its roughly 300 inhabitants. During this time, the victims had been allowed to collect only the most essential items of clothing and gather them into small bundles or equally small suitcases. By noon all the trucks, including the one carrying their neighbors were gone.
 
Shortly before noon, another column of trucks rolled into the village, the drivers and passengers being civilians with some military among them. This time they came for the livestock, mostly pigs and cattle who by now were clamoring for attention. All were, like their owners a few hours ago, loaded on to the trucks, a process taking longer since the animals did not respond to threats as their owners had in the morning.  But all was accomplished quickly and by mid afternoon these trucks were also gone.

Karel and his family waited until dark then silently made their way across the fields to a place along the river nearest the Dobrava village, pausing occasionally to listen for German or Italian guards who, even if infrequently, patrolled their respective side of the border. In the stillness of the night, their muted calls across the water were quickly answered. The villagers of Dobrava had witnessed the tragedy as it developed during the day both from the river bank and from the steep hill just behind the village and knew that some managed to escape into the woods and were now waiting for them. Immediately after contact was made, a boat emerged from under the willows and slid silently across to fetch them to the relative safety of a part of Slovenia occupied not by the dreaded Nazis, but by the much more tolerant troops of Mussolini’s Italy.

- - - -

For the next three and a half years, Karel, other escapees and the villagers of Dobrava watched the goings on in the village across the river. After having ascertained the routine of the German border patrol, headquartered near the bridge in upstream Brod, some of the former residents and other brave souls returned under the cover of darkness to retrieve whatever possible from their former homes. Staging such excursions was not a problem since the Italians had few forces in place and did not patrol their side of the border. And when within weeks, they saw the village being re-populated, Germans moving into their houses, they realized the permanency of the expulsion and loss of their homes and their land.

With glasses of wine animating our conversation, Karel and I continued to recall the dramatic events of those years, events we shared but experienced with different perspectives imposed on us by the river, the border and the collision of ideologies. The hatred that in those tragic days had no boundary was no longer present; it had been diffused and softened over the years since and given way to compassionate understanding between the two former enemies, now sitting at the same table sharing wine.
 
Karel talked about the summer afternoons with school friends in the water on his side of the river, at that point about 60 meters wide, while keeping an eye on the hostile crowd of youngsters on a little beach on the opposite side. He did not know that our parents, like theirs, halfheartedly forbade us to go near or into the river for fear of drowning or, in their case, being fired upon by the guards from across the water. A least they had learned to swim, having grown up along a river, which was not the case with us.

Karel remembered the time when an especially vituperative exchange of epithets with bathers across the water resulted in bursts of bullets fired at them from our side. He also remembered the afternoon in early fall of 1944 when a commotion on the opposite side attracted their attention. It was the drowning of my friend Franz. They watched our helpless efforts to save him and he recalled how some of the older boys got into a boat to row across and help. I do not remember how the body was finally retrieved because I had been ordered by the adults who came running to go and tell his parents. But Karel explained that his older friends had rowed across, dived into the water, found the body and dragged it ashore. After that, they quickly rowed back to their side.

Yes, he not only remembered the huge explosion in 1944, but he was there and saw it all. He and others had watched one of their older friends swim across the river at a narrower point upstream to retrieve a buried mine from the minefield as he had done before. But this time the boy pulled a trip wire hidden in the tall grass with his foot, setting off the mine which lifted the body and dropped it into the middle of the barbed wire web.  I recounted to Karel how I watched the boy die.
 
- - - -

I asked Karel if he knew of the big raid of July 7, 1943.  He not only knew of the raid, his father and some of his older friends were part of it. The Partisan raiders brought along the teenagers to help get the cattle from the village stables, lead them to the river and cross them to the other side. The raiders and all the villagers on their side of the river were fully aware that there was only minimal risk since the patrolling of the border was virtually non-existent by then. 
Karel heard about the shot that killed Mrs. Mams who had heard a noise just outside and yelled ‘who is there’. He also knew the young man who had fired the gun.
 
The group of raiders of which the elder Žibert was a part was about to enter our courtyard when the raid, much to the chagrin of Karel’s father, was terminated. I explained to him that at that very time, Mitzi, Paul and I were under the beds in this very room, sent there to hide by our parents, who had been watching the goings on through the windows.
 
- - - -

The Žibert family attempted to return after we left on May 8, 1945, but there was some shooting. They came back for good later and yes, they all remembered my mother when she came to beg for food.
 
I asked if I could see the church and Mrs. Žibert, who had joined us after changing into her Sunday best said she would get the key from a neighbor and take me there. There were still no bells in the steeple, but the outside of the building was in excellent repair, the last coat of paint had not yet lost its luster and the once bare surrounding grounds had been planted with attractive shrubbery. But the biggest surprise was the interior of the church which in our time served as an empty space under a roof, used mainly for storing common farming equipment: the threshing machine and its mate; the wood-powered steam engine with its huge flywheel; the copper boiler of the still and its companion the condensing vessel and a few wagons and plows. Now the space was filled with hardwood benches and the floor sparkled with attractive tile. Even more to the point was the Eternal Light burning over the decked altar signifying the presence of the Host in the Tabernacle. It was obvious this was a functioning Catholic church in a Communist state.

Mrs. Žibert explained how the people of Veliko Mraševo and those of the smaller communities nearby struggled since their return in 1945 to collect funds to complete the church, which they had started to construct in the early 1930’s. It had been consecrated to St. Peter and Paul on June 29, 1934 and Mass was held on Sundays by a priest from the Cerkle parish. Before the war, worshipers sat on chairs, the money for the benches not yet raised.  And after the villagers came back in 1945, they struggled with collections and finances and except for the lack of bells, were now pleased with their church, the spiritual and communal center they had wanted for so many years. A reminder of the effort of my ancestors in Masern, centuries ago.

After the church, Mrs. Žibert led me through the main part of the village with houses on either side of the road leading to the river.  Some had gone to ruin or had become vacant lots, their original owners not having returned from the Nazi labor camps after the war. Occasionally she stopped to introduce me to someone on the street or near their house. However, she always prefaced the introduction by saying that I had come to express my regret for being the cause of their expulsion and that we also were victims of Nazi ideology. No hostility was shown and most expressed their appreciation for my gesture. Some asked me to step inside to have a glass of wine. Unfortunately I had to decline their generous hospitality due to my limited time.  “But please visit us when you come again”.

We walked to the river, a short distance from the last house. The bunker, the fence and the gate had been dismantled soon after the villagers returned. The little beach was smaller than I remembered but a short pier, with a rowboat tied to it, was new. A similar addition at the other side, now seemingly less far away made for easy crossing, this being the widest part where the water is deep and gentle, holding the reflections of clouds and willows and poplars lining its banks. Here the water flows slowly and peacefully, giving little resistance to a boat being rowed across. A little further downstream the river disappears gradually around a bend into a narrower stretch where it picks up speed and is more of a challenge to those crossing there.
 
Mrs. Žibert patiently watched me linger on the sloping beach while my mind wandered through images of the past, the most vivid being the drowning of my school friend Franz who with flailing arms propelled himself into ever deeper water. I remembered how, unable to help we watched until he disappeared and the water became smooth again.

- - - -

On the way back, I asked Mrs. Žibert if she knew what happened to the carpentry tools Father had left behind in the workshop he set up in the house of their neighbor, the house of the woman who had so vehemently expressed her anger at Mother on that day of May 1945. Oh, they all are now in possession of the wine barrel maker at the other end of the village. Would I like to go and see them. She phoned and yes he is home and would gladly talk to me.

This time we walked in the opposite direction, away from the river, on the road leading out of the village. Slowly at first but more quickly past the house of Johann Krisch since it brought up images I was not willing to dwell on at the moment.

Past the house of Karl Mausser who after some years had finally discovered for himself the well-known village secret why his wine became progressively more watery every spring and summer. His wife and two teen-aged daughters all had developed a liking and dutifully replaced every liter of wine taken from the barrels with water from the pump.

Past the house of the smith, the smithy silent after mid 1944 when he, like most of the able men in the village, was called up. His youngish widow was assigned a placid but able Slovene forced laborer and there were rumors.

Past the house of the middle aged spinster sisters who frequently entertained a man or two late into the night. The men would announce their leaving early in the morning by joyously playing an accordion.
 
Past other houses, some of them still empty but which, like those in the opposite direction toward the river, each had their own history that remained unknown to us in the three and a half years we lived there.

- - - -

The barrel maker was waiting for us in his shop near the house. He showed me the many tools his father had taken from the workshop Father had set up in the large room of the house next to the Žiberts in 1942. He did this before the owners of that house returned. His father had also been confronted by the same angry woman for leaving the workshop bare.  She considered the tools to be rightly hers.

He proudly showed off the different size Yankee brand planing tools Father had brought back from Brooklyn in 1914, just after the beginning of WW I, seventy-four years ago. All were oiled to limit rusting and kept in excellent shape, but he had difficulty getting replacement cutting blades. He said he was fortunate to have them since these precision tools allowed him to make superior barrels. As I fondly fingered a small one, he offered to let me have it as a memento, a touching gesture I was obliged to decline. The plane was useful to his trade and small compensation for the misery brought upon his family by our intrusion in 1941.
 
A little later, as we sat over a glass of wine in his living/dining room, I told the barrel maker that I had been in this house, in this very room in December of 1941, shortly after we arrived in Veliko Mraševo when I and several other youngsters were exploring the empty houses in the village.  In the middle of the table in this very room had been a large bowl of porridge, untouched by the spoons surrounding it, obviously left there by residents forced to leave in a great hurry.  He was born after the war, but clearly remembered the tales of his father, describing the arrival of the trucks that were to take them away; how the family ran into the woods and under cover of the following night escaped across the river.  They, like the Žibert family spent the following years on the other side of the Krka, in Kostanjevica, a small town some fifteen km upstream. His father was with the Partisans and participated, with Karel Žibert’s father in the big raid on the villages along the Krka in the summer 1943.

Warmly we said good bye and he again offered to let me have the small plane. “And if you ever change your mind, just let me know”, he said as were leaving to return to the Žiberts.

- - - -

Since that summer of 1988, I visited Veliko Mraševo several times, each time enlarging the store of memories of the three and a half years in that village; eventful times that appeared more dramatic and tragic with each passing decade. Why were we there to begin with, how did we get there and why. But it was only years later when I realized the full magnitude of that first visit. That return and others to that village and that country caused the beginning of a personal catharsis, which challenged me to take seriously the notion that there is more than one side to a story. This particularly so when I realized that our Gottscheer history was being written by those who helped to end it, a veiled and distorted view shaped by the bias of a still lingering ideology. Therefore, the expressions “history belongs to those who tell it” and “truth and history are poor bedfellows”, both coined by Napoleon Bonaparte, became for me an urge to tell it my way.

Karel Žibert survived the battle for his homeland, his inheritance, his possessions and his hearth, but lost the war to cancer. He died in 2002 at the age of 69. In him, I lost the once bitter enemy I jeered at across the river, who then became a compassionate victor, sharing his meager supplies with my pleading mother and ultimately a treasured friend after so magnanimously accepting my apology.

- - - -

The generosity of the Žiberts greatly helped the otherwise inadequate subsistence provided by our captors at the Brežice camp. But Mother was now confronted with requests from others to share, especially from families with small children who were starving. Father was against it but she shared some of the bread anyway saying that she would go out again to get more. Others tried to do what she had done but they did not speak Slovene and the guards were not sympathetic to pleas in German, the language of the defeated occupier, in spite of tears.
 
In the afternoon of May 23, word had it that we should get prepared and ready to leave the camp the following morning. This seemed to become likely since the food ration was a bit more generous that evening and bottles were provided for water. But where to, maybe back to Masern? No one knew and even Mother could not get an answer from the young guards behind the wire fence. Perhaps they also did not know.  But they did tell her to fill the bottles.

The rumbling of the trucks began to wake us at dawn the following morning. This was followed by the shouting of the guards ordering us to line up outside immediately. This took little time since we were all sleeping in our clothing, not changed since the 8th of May.
 
Rejoined by our men from the barracks across the dividing fence, we were ordered again to climb on to canvas covered trucks; destination unknown. This, in a few minutes, turned out to be the railroad station; the very one we arrived at under such different circumstances in December 1941. Waiting for us on a siding was a long line of boxcars, some with gaping doors, others shut tight. At the front end was a connected locomotive, intermittently coughing steam.  It was apparent that the train had arrived from the south carrying passengers behind the shut doors and had stopped to pick up others like us.

- - - -

“We are going home …”, was heard hopefully but without much conviction from many; their arrival three and a half years ago and the irony of our present situation being painfully on their minds.

It was difficult to get into the cars, so high up from the coarsely graveled tracks but the threatening submachine guns were an encouragement to help each other. The Partisans monitored the space inside the cars and when packed to mostly standing room only, drove those still outside up and down the train to find room in other cars, the tears shed by the separated being ignored, the order enforced by the barrel of a gun.

Finally the doors rolled shut, the multi-hooked bolt engaged to the fully closed position. The first jerk of the engine caused those standing to pile up against each other, some tripping over those who found room to sit on the boards of the floor. The expected direction of the train, noticed by the location of the locomotive, was confirmed; at least we were not moving East.
 
The train rolled slowly and even slower over sections that were being repaired, stopping often.  Those who managed to peer through the cracks of louvers high up on the wall of the car reported on our progress as we passed known markers along the way. The late May sun began to add to the heat from the packed mass of sweating humanity; the air further fouled by the stench from the open bucket in one corner of the car for the relief of its occupants. The water in the bottles was reluctantly shared.

After some hours the train stopped. The door rolled open, the inrush of fresh air lessened the stench and brilliant sunlight blinded our eyes. The open door also revealed a Partisan, his sub-machine gun aiming at the opening to prevent its human contents from spilling out. This was not likely; all occupants by now fully aware that their lives had value only to themselves.

As the eyes slowly adjusted to the new light, they revealed, beyond the pointed barrel, a stunning sea of yellow flowers in a large field gently sloping downward toward the Sava. Mother asked if she could run down to the river to refill the now empty water bottles, a request firmly rejected by a wave of the gun.
 
The pastoral moment was very short. One of now two Partisans climbed into the car and with drawn pistol began to search pockets for jewelry, remove watches and strip fingers of rings. And after he noticed some women fiddling under their skirts, he grinningly examined their crevices for hidden treasure. This ended only when his companion began to yell that the train was to about to move again. Mother pleaded with the Partisans to leave the door partly open. Apparently satisfied with their loot, they obliged by using another of the hooks on the swinging latch, leaving an opening of about six inches. Mother’s success brought relief, but did not relieve the hostility from some in the car who felt she was, because of her ability to talk to the tormentors, somehow connected with them.  This, in spite of the fact, that she too was subjected to the same torment.

- - - -

Again, as two weeks ago, we were approaching Zidani Most. Through the opening in the door we observed the road traveled, the track crossings crossed, the places camped at. The road was no longer congested, but the curbs were still bulging with the spoils of war. The once pervasive smell of decaying bodies was no longer noticed; the air inside the cattle car too dense with its own fumes to permit others to enter. The place where Frantze was shot point blank was on the opposite side behind the shut door and could not be seen. But across the river came into view the camp at Radeče where Father re-entered our lives and just beyond that the place where he tried to exit his and just a little further on, the steel bridge where he sought to end mine.
 
The outburst “maybe we are going home” was not unreasonable given the fact that we were on the same tracks, traveling in the direction we had come from three and a half years ago. “we soon will see” heightened the hopeful suspense; with all now knowing that our destiny was in the way the switches were set in Zidani Most, our approaching fork in the road.

That we were not going home became clear when the train, instead of crossing the Savinja bridge and continuing along the Sava toward Ljubljana and from there to Kočevje, continued to hug the steep hill on the right and head north. Many cried while others were consoling. Father seemed relieved knowing we were rolling toward Austria, the place we had made for to begin with, away from the Communists we had so foolishly tried to outrun.
 
Beyond Zidani Most, the river becomes virtually buried in a fissure barely leaving room for the track and the road both in parts buried in tunnels. This was in a way fortunate for us since at times the roof of our car was shaded from the now high noon sun adding, at least in spots, no further heat to the already unbearable atmosphere surrounding those languishing inside.

The train slowed to a crawl just before Rimske Toplice or Roman Baths, named so for the Roman settlement there nearly 2000 years ago. This was the place where the SS troops, together with their allies, put up one of their final if hopeless stands, the reason for the blockage that slowed us down so fatefully two weeks ago. The tracks were still being repaired by exhausted looking workers, guarded by machine-gun bearing Partisans.

After that, our train made more rapid progress toward Celje, being slowed only occasionally by repair work on the rails all being done by guarded crews. But eventually we pulled on to a siding at the Celje station, a major east-west-south rail intersection, with the eastern direction leading toward Hungary, along the way there branching off to the left toward Maribor in the north and beyond that to the Austrian border.

- - - -

We stayed on the siding in Celje for quite a while, our door never opened beyond the six-inch crack before we moved on. The reason for the delay in Celje had to do with an exchange of passengers on our train, prisoners really, who were behind the doors of the boxcars we noticed shut when we boarded the train in Brežice. These were taken from the train and replaced with others. We did not know that only a few kilometers east of Celje, in Teharje, was a major prison camp, a Partisan interrogation and holding camp, where suspected collaborators and war criminals were culled out from the great mass of ethnic Germans to be expelled from the new Yugoslavia. Those in the boxcars were taken to Teharje and kept there under brutal conditions. The emptied cars, in turn, were reloaded with those that had been there and cleared for expulsion.
 
But we knew none of this when we started to move again. We also did not know that Teharje had been a major Concentration Camp of the SS. Nor did we know where we were going, the train slowing down frequently in parts where track repair was underway. There was no sense of direction since no one in our car had ever been this way and the station markers, already changed from German to Slovene were of no help and had no meaning.
 
There was no sense of direction until we were in what appeared to be the outskirts of a place larger than any since Celje. Then someone yelled - Maribor -, which electrified those awake and roused the others who had surrendered their misery of heat, thirst and hunger to the relief of a semiconscious stupor or sleep. All knew that Maribor was Marburg the German equivalent of the second largest city in Slovenia, in the north of the country. All also knew that the city was near Austria and realized that we were on the way there, a journey into exile that began sixteen days ago.

But relief in the minds of many was still tempered by doubt that we were finally going to get there. And if so, what then and what was waiting for us in Austria, was it not occupied by the Russians, Communists worse than the Partisans, “animals used to killing and raping”, as we had so often been told?  Were the Russians going to kill us, now that it appeared that the Partisans were going to let us live? Were they going to separate out the young and able, send them to Russia or Siberia and kill the rest, the scenario that drove Father to madness on the steel bridge twelve days ago?

Or perhaps, Austria was occupied by the English or the Americans. If so, our suffering was to end after we crossed the border. And especially so ‘if the Americans are there, they would help us to contact aunts Johanna and Paula in Brooklyn who would surely take care of us’ !

- - - -

The train slowed but did not stop.  It rolled slowly through the partly bombed out station, then through thinning suburbs and after that through open fields again.  Then it stopped.

The bolt was lifted, the door rolled open and a Partisan, standing off to the side yelled; “raus”.
  
The train had stopped at the edge of a broad downward sloping field and then after a flat part, upward toward the road a few hundred feet from the tracks. On the other side of the road was a long, 20 foot high stone embankment, keeping in place the hill into which the road had been constructed.

On the stones of the embankment was written in huge white capital letters, plain to all spilling from the boxcar to see:

“Wir Danken Unserem Führer”
 
Plain for all to contemplate, in silence, the four words of now bitter irony, words we had been made to utter so often in mass rallies during the summer of 1941 and the years after that without really knowing why.
 
- - - -

The Partisan motioned with his gun to cross over to the road and move on it to the right. The spring grass on the field in front of us was trampled flat telling us that we were not the first to do so. But Mother kept asking “where to” until one of the Partisans grumbled “meja” which she translated as border to others who passed it on. This field apparently was a major drop off point for people being expelled, the trampled grass and the intentional display of mockery on the embankment attesting to that. The now emptied train reversed direction, most likely to pick up another load of humanity marked for exile while being held captive somewhere.

It was now apparent that we were only a walking distance away from the Spielfeld bridge, the bridge crossing the Mur, the river border between Yugoslavia and Austria. This was now only a fraction of the entire distance of sixteen kilometers from Maribor, most of which we had traveled on the train. As we trotted along in the late afternoon sun, it soon became obvious why they had not taken us the few extra miles. The tracks alongside the road had not yet been repaired; twisted rails and deep cavities in the rail bed attesting to bombardments in a recent past. This rail, a major link used by the occupier not too long ago and decades before that, had been a major north/south connection. It was now idle, its repair postponed in favor of more urgent priorities.

On our road there was no traffic other than the stream of hurrying refugees now on their final stretch. For the five of us, it soon became a very slow walk; Father not yet fully recovered having tired very quickly and was now struggling on his crutches. Mitzi, Paul and I would impatiently walk ahead then sit on the grass and watch others hurry by until our parents caught up with us.
 
- - - -

It was now late in the afternoon with nightfall soon to come, yet the border was still nowhere in sight. At some point there was a cluster of people on the road in front of us which dissolved to pass on as we got nearer. But from within this cluster emerged the thirteen year old Irma Jaklitsch, my one time Masern play-mate, my first girlfriend. In one of her arms she held the remaining half of a huge loaf of bread, while the other hand held a knife with which she had been cutting off slices for those passing by.
 
We had not eaten since the day before and the liberal slice Irma cut from the loaf for each of us was gratefully acknowledged. It is not far to the border Irma said, and if you hurry, you will get there before nightfall. So we walked on and away since others had arrived and were now crowding around the girl with the shrinking loaf. What caused this teenager to perform this act of generosity, where the bread had come from and the whereabouts of her parents remains a mystery. But I suspect that nearby, out of sight, her father was behind this; he having been the major driving force in Masern to convince the villagers to switch love of God and homeland to love of the Führer and agreement to resettle. As the Nazi trained village leader, he had performed his task to perfection getting all except a few families, undesirables for sure, to leave their homes for the Reich. But now prudently hiding, realizing that those he once controlled and so skillfully deceived might react violently to his sight.
 
It is also possible that Franz Jaklitsch, the former Sturmführer of Masern, now seeing that his former fanaticism had led the entire village into disaster, merely wanted to share his loaf of bread with those he had so willfully misled. If such a humbling acceptance of the total failure of Nazi ideology was indeed in the mind of this man, he certainly was the exception among so many others who have not done so to this day.

- - - -

We walked on, slowly, now the only stragglers on the road; the others of this drama having passed us by. Dusk was rapidly extinguishing the last glow of the sun that had set a while ago as we approached and entered a totally darkened village. No longer able to continue, partly because of the dark and partly because Father had reached the limit of exhaustion, we turned right into the courtyard of a farm house abutting the street. In the back we made for the stable, fortunately empty of its usual inhabitants and fortunately also filled with welcoming straw.
 
Mother woke us at dawn and with Father having recovered some of his energy we walked through the empty street at a reasonably rapid pace. We knew that we had not far to go but knew not what was waiting for us at the border and beyond that.
 
The border was the river, the crossing point a bridge to the unknown. On this side, the sleepy and sullen Partisan border guards, emerging from a newly erected shack, casually motioned us on to the bridge as they had motioned to others in days past. But on this day of May 25, 1945, we were the first to arrive and the first to cross, a distinction not up-most in the minds of this small group of five.
 
The first rays of the sun, markers to a new day and to a new future, were not yet visible when we got to the other side. There, the Austrian border guards, in different uniforms and caps no longer displaying the five-pointed red star, mumbled a courteous “guten Morgen” as they too, waved us on. 


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