November 3, 2024
Three Grimms’ Fairy Tales: When I was in third grade I discovered fairy tales in the library and quickly read all the books. Little did I know at the time that much of the source material comes from Slovenia, my ancestral country. Today in the space of walking 400 meters, I found the source material for three fairy tales. The first is the story written in this shrine, below, which was constructed in 1500. The legend says that there is a rock in the forest which, for all who sit on it, will make one grow into a giant (many of the giant stories come from Slovenia). The second source of probably Little Red Riding Hood is this sign in the wood (below) which warns people to leash their dogs (and children) so that wolves won’t eat them. The third tale, which is much “Grimmer” than the first two, are five mass graves right next to the fable of the giants. Communists murdered 300+ people after WWII had ended in 1945 by burning them alive in the church and forced the farm owner to bury the bodies. As yet no one has come to pick them up. And of course, in Slovenia, no one has ever been prosecuted for these crimes.
February 13, 2024
Supporters of human rights believe that Slovenia missed its chance to move towards democracy by not holding a truth commission over WWII atrocities while some perpetrators were still alive. In this article, the Maribor reporter discusses a former communist Yugoslav Army member “Jure” who participated in the mass killings in Kocevski Rog at the direction of UDBA political commissioner Milka Planinc. Jure talks about the atrocities that Planinc ordered and how she enjoyed having the victims tortured before they were murdered. The acts Jure described remind me of some of the most horrific crimes and testimony I took as an investigator at the ICTY in Bosnia in the 1990’s. Planinc died in 2010 and was never prosecuted. She was even allowed to hold high public office.
Slovenia could easily have held a truth commission after independence and had Jure testify before it. With a truth commission, no one is punished for testifying, and no one is prosecuted for their crimes. Such testimony would have brought out the truth and would have forced Slovenia to face its history. Because UDBA destroyed its own records in 1989, most of its former members have avoided scrutiny and prosecution. Most of us recall how the Stasi, the secret police of East Germany, were publicly revealed and their internal documents published. This public uncovering helped to bring real democracy to the former eastern part of Germany. Slovenia’s leaders have deliberately and unfortunately chosen to continue to hide these secrets, resulting in the Slovenia’s current two-tier system of justice.
https://e-maribor.si/milka-planinc-najhujsa-zenska-na…/…
October 3, 2023
Sterntal communist concentration camp for civilians of German ethnicity: For those of you who have visited one or more former Nazi concentration camps, you expect to see some of the buildings inmates were housed in, information about the victims and how they were treated, and information on how the perpetrators were tried for their crimes.
However, if you are looking for one of the concentration camps in the former Yugoslavia, formerly run by the Yugoslav Partisans/communists, your first challenge will be FINDING the camp, because it is gone. This is because the perpetrators were never blamed, never prosecuted, and the victims have disappeared.
The Sterntal concentration camp in today’s Kidricevo, Slovenia, was run by the Yugoslav Partisans from May-October 1945. About 12,000 Yugoslav civilians, mostly those of German ethnicity, were rounded up and brought here. Approximately 5,000 of them were murdered by the Partisans, including hundreds of children.
It took me two hours to find the location today. I had to drive off-road for a while. This is what the center of the camp looks like today:
From wikipedia: ” In May 1945, under the direction of Aleksandar Ranković, the Yugoslav secret police (OZNA) established a concentration camp at the site to collect ethnic Germans from across Slovenia, especially from Lower Styria and Gottschee. Ethnic Hungarians from Prekmurje were also sent to the camp.[2] Overcrowding and poor hygiene at the camp caused many of the inmates to die from amoebiasis and typhoid fever.[3] The inmates were also physically and mentally tortured, and many were shot. Tortures included forcing the prisoners to lie on the ground while their captors rode motorcycles over them.[4] The deaths included large numbers of the elderly and young children; some accounts state that no children under the age of two survived.[5] The camp, which was designed to accommodate 2,000 people, contained between 8,000[6] and 12,000[2] prisoners. Up to 5,000 people died at the camp.[7] The Sterntal Concentration Camp was closed down in October 1945 through the efforts of the Red Cross, and most of the survivors were sent to Austria.”
October 2, 2023
Begunje na Goremskum is a beautiful town, not far from Lake Bled. My paternal grandmother’s family comes from here. I probably have many relatives in the cemetery. It is the home of the famous musical family Avsenik, and they also have a restaurant here. Beautiful mountains are in the backdrop, and I am jealous of all the chestnut trees that grow here. But it is also the home of a former communist penal and “re-education” institute where anti-communist, non-criminal women were imprisoned after WWII in 1949. After two years in this prison, my grandmother had no desire to visit her family home town again and left for the USA.
October 1, 2023
This memorial is situated in the same field where the camp was. Thousands of Home Guards and other non-communists were forcibly sent by the British in Austria into cattle car trains from Austria back to Tito’s Yugoslavia, where they were executed. Most went through Teharje before getting killed elsewhere.