Trafika Europe 5 - Slovenian Interlude

manure pile. After old Pečnik went to Eisenkappel to report the incident, the police came back at night, poured gasoline on the rest of the Hojniks and set them on fire. Nonsense, Grandmother counters, old Hojnik wasn’t sick, his son Johan was in bed with pneumonia when the police looted their house. Old Hojnik was beside himself because the police not only wanted to arrest his sick son, but also to take away his daughter-in-law Angela and his grandchildren, Mitzi and Johan. The police had filled two ox-drawn carts with stolen goods and blankets and ordered old Hojnik to come with them, but with his crutches he could barely walk in the snow. He sat down on the side of the road and said he wouldn’t let them take him away from his farm. So then, the police officers beat him to death with his crutches. Bits of his brain stuck to the surrounding trees, that’s what eighteen-year-old Mitzi told her in Ravensbruck, where she’d been sent after the arrest, Grandmother says. Mitzi and her brother Johan, who had to pull a fully loaded cart, were forced to watch as their parents and grandparents were murdered. Mitzi Hojnik, by the way, was killed on the very day Ravensbrück was evacuated. An SS man was shooting wildly about because he was drunk and Mitzi happened to step out of the line at that very moment. On evacuation day, you understand, just like that, by chance, Grandmother says, her voice rising. She was denied a homecoming. In any case, Grandmother continues after a pause, little Klari, who the police left behind with her younger siblings, all of them alone on the farm, she refused to leave the house for three

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