European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

I arrived there and was in the 'personnel department'.

My job was to question those who joined the Partisans and became noncommissioned officers.

I had to ask them where they had been, I had to thoroughly interrogate them and find out what kind of past they had.

So that’s how it came to be that I was in the 1st regiment up until November 1945.

Short visit at mothers home

When I arrived I went and found my mother. Then this man had to bring us across because the bridge was down.

It had been burned. He brought us across and my mother and I, me with my stolen bicycle and she with hers,

headed up through the Zadrecka valley. It’s about eight kilometers uphill.

Then the Partisans stopped me

and claimed that I was a German soldier dressed as a Partisan, who wants to stay in a liberated Yugosalvia.

I said listen, listen …

But they pulled out a revolver and aimed at me. My mother began to cry. They would have shot me if it hadn’t been for her.

They claimed that I had killed a Partisan, dressed in the Partisan uniform and thrown away the German one. It wasn’t true.

I joined the Partisans in 1943, I had all my documents, and I could prove it. In the end we made it home.

It was the morning or maybe afternoon of May 16th when I arrived here at Kropa.

That’s just how things were at Kropa after the war; people were gone.

I went back to Celje too; with the bicycle. Our brigade had already left.

Mesic had said to me that he had heard we would be moving out of Celje.

I said that if they move before I return, for them to leave a message at this woman’s house.

There was an old woman, perhaps she was in her 60s or 70s.