By Walter Volovsek
Third in a series
I returned to my homeland a few more times and witnessed changes. Marshall Tito died in 1981, actually during our first visit. My grandmother passed away on the last day of 1985, still paying rent on her house. It had been privatized again; bought from the government by someone on speculation. In the summer of 1991 Slovenia declared independence, and after an 11-day war with the Slovenian forces the Yugoslav Army withdrew, to refocus their offensive against Croatia, and a bit later, Bosnia. My 1991 visit was particularly memorable as there were roadblocks and burnt-out tanks on the roadways, and the big tourist attractions saw no tourists, so we had them all to ourselves.
The biggest change, however, was obvious during my last visit, in 2006. The government had been active in openly acknowledging the brutality of Tito’s Revolution and national monuments were erected in those places where people deemed opponents to it had been interned and eventually liquidated.
The war in Slovenia did not end — as elsewhere in Europe — on May 8, 1945. A new war replaced it, this time on her own people. According to the Yalta Convention all political refugees were to be repatriated by the Allies to their country of origin. Refugees that had escaped to southern Austria were forcefully repatriated by the British, who were in charge. Packed on trains, they were taken back across the border to processing centres at Teharje and Kocevje. These became concentration camps that facilitated the destruction of some 50,000 lives in nearby forests and abandoned mines.
The returnees were of many political convictions. There were the Royalists who supported the King, now residing in England; the supporters of the former Nazi regime in Croatia; Slovenes who dared to long for an independent country; Slovenes who had organized themselves as the Domobranci (Home Guard), who initially fought both the Germans and the partisans to protect their farms against depredation, and were later effectively supported by the Catholic Church and the Germans as a bulwark against communism; and there were German sympathisers who fondly remembered the progress Slovenia had made under the Austrian rule and who had no use for the monarchy. All were seen as enemies of communism. Added to that lot were those that did not flee: successful businessmen, farmers that opposed the collectivization of their lands, and intellectuals that questioned the loss of personal liberty.
In May 1945 my grandfather Anton Zupancic was arrested and imprisoned at Teharje. Our house became state property and my grandmother, mother, and I were allotted one small bedroom to live in. The local partisan band took over the house for their headquarters. The four German soldiers they had illegally caught were tortured in our basement, prior to being shot in the woods as I described earlier. Some furniture as well as all of my grandfather’s woodworking machinery was hauled away.
Similar treatment was received by Alois Cater, whose house was across the highway. He was a merchant. He and his wife Olga were both imprisoned, leaving ten-year old Dragec Cater to fend for himself without the benefit of his home, from which he had been locked out. Eventually his mother returned, but he never saw his father again. The main perpetrators were immediate neighbours who had turned into political commissars with unlimited power.
For the decades that followed the two women lived in the hope their husbands would return from some forced-labour camp. The truth came out when a sexton confessed on his deathbed that he had been forced to bury several men, including Cater and Zupancic, who had been shot outside the local cemetery wall on the evening of Aug. 2, 1945. The date is significant: two hours later they would have been free men under Tito’s amnesty for political prisoners.
I have a book published in 1995, in which retired judge Milko Mikola documents and categorizes the extra-judicial proceedings followed by the communists after the war. Cater and Zupancic are used as examples where the motivation for the murders was nothing more than envy by people in power for the former success of their neighbours, and the opportunity to enrich themselves in the process.
With the passing years guilt bore down heavily on the victors. Our immediate neighbour, August, ended his life by shooting himself. Cater’s neighbour, Jože, sought out Dragec to ask his forgiveness, and intervened to shield my grandmother from eviction from what was formerly her home. Seeking atonement, he died of throat cancer on Jan. 8, 1987, a year after my grandmother.
Grandmother’s house was demolished after her death by the owner who had bought it when she was still alive and subsequently attempted to evict her. The lot is now occupied by a mansion. The grave in the forest and the adjacent trees have disappeared, making room for a new subdivision at the base of the hill.
