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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