May 4th 1945

It is not an easy trying to document another person’s life, I struggle with attempting to capture someone’s spirit. Whether it is the complexities of wartime politics bogging me down, the overwhelming evil humans are capable of inflicting, or quite simply me missing the forrest for the trees. But for whatever reason I missed the similarities between Anica and Aloitz’s stories. I missed how many times their paths crossed and then how one train ride would keep them apart for seven long years. 

In this discovery has come a natural beginning to their story. Aloitz and Anica left their respective homes less than 40 kilometres away from each other on the very same day - May 4th 1945. Their paths crossed in Ljubljana on the first day of their journey but from there their stories take different, twisted fates. It would take Anica a grueling eight days to make it out of Slovenia and Aloitz would not see the border for another three years!  

And so May 4th 1945 is where the story starts.

I have written about Anica’s  first few hours of departure in my previous blog post “The Knock”. 

The Knock

Anica (front row left) with her family before the war. 

I awake in a startle to the nearby sound of knuckles on glass. It is not a loud noise - only the shallowest of sleepers would hear it. I slide out from under my warm quilt and silently enter the kitchen of my sister’s home. Through the window Jernej stands. Sweat glistens at his temple, his breath fogs the cold glass.  I open the window, the air bites through the warmth of the room. ‘We must all leave now, get your family and go- the Partisans are close’. And with those few, frantic words he is gone, making his way invisibly through the night to warn others in danger. I stand there unmoving, the still open window and the reality of Jernej’s words cover my arms in goosebumps and tears well in my eyes.  I close the window in a fury, the tears dry before they have a chance to fall.

I take the stairs to the bedrooms two at a time. I have to wake my sister and her husband, collect our things and leave home - and we don’t have much time to do it.

I had prepared myself for this, envisioned this happening hundreds of times over the past two weeks. Waiting for it to happen - praying it never would.

I swing the door open to wake them and find them already collecting their belongings, the things they just could not bear to leave behind. They are silent, silhouettes packing by the glow of the moon. They had been waiting for the knock as well.

I quickly turn and leave towards my room,

Just two weeks earlier I kept my bag packed by the door - ready to leave at a moment’s notice. I slept fully dressed every night – two nights I even slept with my shoes on my feet.

But days and nights passed without event and the Americans were closing in on the Partisans. We heard their airplanes rumble over top every day, their Tommy guns within earshot. I believed the Americans would save us from Tito. The fear of being forced to flee lessened and I began to take items out of my rucksack and not return them.

And so tonight I find my satchel empty but for three pairs of underwear. I throw in a sweater, wool stockings, and 2 wool skirts. It is not hard to choose what to bring. I own very little. The Partisans having already burned down my family home in one of their revenge night raids, most of my belongings burning up with it.

I turn to leave my room and find Maria and Matija in the door. Their faces look too old for their ages. My own sadness was shadowed heavily by my sister’s. I had been hardened by the war, had lost so much already. But she had remained somewhat unscathed, protected by the luxury of a living husband at home.

Three of us leave the house silently and unseen through the back door - a knowing neighbour is a dangerous thing. 

We hurry to my brother’s house. Understandably, no one in his house answers our knocks on the back door. Knocks at the door in the night usually led to family members disappearing for months at a time. The fortunate ones returning emaciated, scarred. But most never came back home.

We throw pebbles and twigs at the bedroom window in vain. The house remains dark and still. Too much time has passed and we cannot wait any longer. We must move on. Perhaps they have left already. Perhaps we will see them on the road.

We take the main road out of Cerknica and as dawn breaks we join the hundreds of fleeing farmers and peasants. Many loaded down with rucksacks, the luckier families have horsecarts or mules. My satchel suddenly feels light with the absence of any food or drink. Those of us on foot travel faster but all I can see ahead and behind me is the sad line of shuffle dark blotches forming a squiggly line through the countryside. The sight of a countryside in exodus. 

Families and their loaded carts trying to make their way to the safety across the Austrian border May 1945

The Moment

One of the homes that Frank, Kozina and my grandpa hid in over the three years   

The cool metal of my Burp gun both reassures and frightens me. I don’t want to use it, but I will if I have to. I lock eyes with Frank and Kozina for a split second.  ‘Stick to the plan’ is the message we shared in that short but loaded glance. The plan for the past three years has been ‘strelil’ (shoot). This is not a good plan - it is a plan made by desperate men.

Another home that hid the men.

More voices and boots storm into our home. Frank flashes six fingers and uses the other four to maintain grip on his machine gun. There are six Partisans downstairs - how many more were outside surrounding the house, trapping us up here on the second floor? We stand motionless, paralyzed by fear atop the stairs. We are trapped up here with no way out, ‘strelil’ is really our only hope.  

The harsh clamor of intruders resonate through our home. The cacophony of sound overwhelms the three of us whose secret existence have led to silent, ghoulish lives, where we hide during the days and become active only at night under the shroud of darkness. The different dialects from all over Yugoslavia drift up the stairs to our perch - one of the voices sound familiar, like Jancar, a boy Frank and I grew up with but I can’t be sure of it.

Their sounds travel around the main floor and up the stairs to where I stand praying for our lives to be spared. I had deserted the Communist Army and would be sent to death by firing squad if caught. Frank and Kozina hold secrets of Tito and his Partisans - they survived a massacre of tens of thousands of innocent men at Kocevski Rog. They had come back from the grave to threaten the vice-tight grip Communists kept on the truth.  They want us dead and we will do anything to survive.

A boot stomps down on the first step. The polished black leather boot is just visible around the supine stairs. The soldier begins to ascend the stairs. This is it. My heart stops. My breath held. My finger on the trigger. Time moves slow and thick. The sweet smell of his Lucky Strike cigarette reaches my nostrils and adrenaline replaces paralyzing fear - my heart beats fast and hard surging  blood through my veins. The closer you come to Death the more Alive you feel. He stops, resting his boot on that first step as he turns slowly and sits down with his back towards us. Kozina inhales sharply, and I wait for the Partisan’s head to turn in response to the sound - it doesn’t. He doesn’t turn around, but if he does he will be looking down the barrels of three guns aimed at him.

An eternity passes. The soldier enjoys his smoke as we stand, a mere ten feet away, without breathing, waiting to kill or be killed.

The stairs groan with the shift of the soldiers weight as he stands - the barrel of my gun follows the middle of his back with my finger poised on the trigger. Anger rolls over me as he grinds his Lucky Strike out on the floor of our home with his big, black boot before he turns and walks away. His footsteps recede into the kitchen.

We exhale.

From the kitchen, gruff and crude tones mix with Mother’s fragile voice.  I can’t hear what they are saying to Mother, or what she is saying in response. Her words have saved us from capture before, I only pray her words will spare us yet again. A pang of guilt pierces through the fear reminding me how dangerous our existence is to our loved ones.

The floorboards creak as footsteps quicken towards the stairs. I inhale sharply and aim to shoot whoever walks up these stairs.

The Sweater

I look around - I am just one of hundreds of prisoners held by a bunch of criminals. Herded together and sorted like animals. I am pushed into a cluster of fifty-three other terrified ‘prisoners’ and before I can even look for a familiar face in the group, I am somehow in formation and marching.

We march all day through frigid November rivers and streams. We march in single file and in eerie silence. At night our captors push us into a barn to spend the night, we have no blankets, food or water. The locals must know and they bring us the bits of food they can scrounge and save in these times of rations and robbery.  

I look down at myself for the first time in days; My skirt is torn and filthy, my nylons are caked with mud and blood from my raw ankles and heels. I think of what the rest of me must look like; my starved frame drowning in the sweater I have been wearing for the past two months, dirt smeared face and lice infested hair. Broken down from three days of marching with little food and even less hope. Were they marching us to death or marching us to our deaths? Those seemed to be our only options. 

Through a knot in the barn boards I look to the lights of Ljubljana that pierce the darkness of the night - the tears roll down my cheeks silently and land in tiny splashes on my lap. The lights of the city seem to mock me, reminding me of my dark reality. I close my eyes tight and feel the warmth of my tears. 

I must have fallen asleep because I am awoken by a young man, a fellow ‘prisoner’, shaking me with a strong but bony hand. At first, I don’t recognize him - he has lost so much weight but as my eyes adjust in the darkness, I make out a familiar face. He is from Begunje, the village I was doing my apprenticeship in before I was arrested. He was a well known, educated, recently married, young man who in normal times worked as an engineer. These were not normal times, so instead he is crouched in a barn; filthy, emaciated and terrified. We stare at each other, still without saying a word. Nearby a prisoner’s cough startles us and he gives a panicked glance around looking for guards. He turns, facing me again and as our eyes lock, he begins to talk. 

He is certain he will be killed very soon; as soon as they identify him as one of the intelligentsia he is sure to be sent to death either by a bullet in his head or much worse. But he is also certain I am destined for a different fate, something tells him that I am going to make it out of this hell alive.  His words shake me to the core. For the first time in weeks I allow the the idea of survival into my thoughts. He is speaking quickly now, taking off his thick, wool, sweater, apologizing for what he is about to ask me. 

The sweater, he explains had been knit for him by his beautiful wife and he wants her to have the sweater so she will know of his fate and at least a part of him could return home to her, to their lives together. He pauses and looks away from the sweater and with unblinking eyes he asks me if I can deliver this last message of love and loyalty from him in this time of hatred and betrayal.

I take the sweater from him and hold it close, my mind is too shaken to think of any words to say and my mouth is too dry from thirst to say them. Silence lingers between the two of us, our eyes doing most of the talking and as I sit here holding his sweater,  and slowly nod my head. He half smiles, turns, and leaves.  

I sit and stare at this sweater, wondering if he is right. Am I going to make it out alive? I put the sweater on, I am happy to have the extra warmth, but the extra weight of responsibility exhausts me even more. I fall into a dark, dreamless sleep. 

I awake to a barking of orders as soldier’s boot swings into my ribs, forcing me to get up. My body aches, my stomach growls with hunger and thirst, my head spins with fear...and now my ribs are throbbing. 

Another day of marching. 

My Grandma and one other fellow prisoner survived a harrowing escape and made it out with their lives. My Grandma walked to Begunje and returned the young man's sweater to his widowed wife. Her husband was bludgeoned to death along with all other 51 prisoners. 

A Book is Born.

For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated by my grandparents; the language they spoke when alone in the kitchen or on the phone to their friends enthralled me.  When I was younger I thought they were speaking Chinese- my young mind associated anything exotic and foreign with China. In actuality they were speaking Slovene a language spoken by a mere 2.5 million people worldwide and that number is shrinking rapidly. It is a language that belongs to a strong and proud people who live in somewhat obscurity surrounded by the European big guns; Italy, Austria, Hungary and Germany. 
*Take a look at the map to the right to see what I mean!

Going to my grandparents was always an adventure. They live in Toronto on the Lakeshore in an old split house they bought for $15,000 in 1956 and is now worth the better half of a million dollars. Our visits were jam-packed with fun and food; rollerblading along the Toronto Lakeshore, feeding the ducks at High Park, skating on the frozen Grenadier Pond. We were always fed far beyond capacity, our stomachs bursting from the schnitzel, smashed potatoes (smashed-not mashed), salad made from the lettuce my grandparents grow in their backyard vegetable garden and of course the most delicious apple strudel you will ever taste outside of Eastern Europe.  

The table setting was always elegant and formal -the conversation was loose and comfortable. We all had our favourite stories about my dad and uncles and all the hell they raised as 3 boys growing up in a poor, immigrant family in 1950’s and 60’s Toronto. In among the tales of boys getting into fights, playing pond hockey, breaking bones and running away there were the stories of my Grandparents' past. Their stories were filled with humour and lightheartedness that left us grandkids laughing at the thought of our grandpa eating the peel of the first banana he ever ate at age 23. As young children we never understood that the world of their past was so ugly and evil.

Theirs was a world of refugee camps, mass killings, murderous Communists, starvation and the constant cloud of death above them- the realities of all Europeans during World War II. And yet still, their stories would have everyone laughing, never knowing they were happening in such a dark blotch of world history. How were they able to find humour, friendship and love in such desperate, inhumane circumstances? Why were they not dark and angry over the cruel injustices that consumed the best years of their lives and abruptly ended the lives of far too many of their friends, family and countrymen? 

These questions and a seemingly endless supply of others entered my thoughts in my pre-teens and just never left. Instead the questions nestled comfortably in my mind, knowing they were going to be there for the long haul, knowing that a part of me would always have a need to know more, to answer those questions. Knowing that eventually the small voice of curiosity would get louder and louder until I could no longer ignore it and I would eventually have to face it head on. 

So that is my book-the book that I have been writing in my head since I was 14 years old, the book that sits patiently in my thoughts waiting its turn to be addressed. The book that I am making my first real, wholehearted attempt to get onto paper and this is the story of the book that is to be. 

My Grandma with her 3 sons a.k.a the Village People