European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

Decision to take part in the Resistance

and from the northern border of the city and southwards were the Italians …

The Hungarians had entered into the Rome-Berlin Axis and occupied Prekmurje.

Well, of course I knew what lay ahead of us.

I knew that Italian fascism just like German Nazism had it in their programs to basically liquidate the Slovenes.

For a while I knew nothing of any Liberation Front (LF), or maybe I only sensed that something was going on.

One day in early autumn I went up to the Ljubljana Castle and looked towards the German border of Ljubljana.

I saw huge amounts of smoke billowing up above the village of Rasica.

That village was situated on the German side. I don’t know how the news came in to Ljubljana.

But everyone around me already knew that Rasica was burning. That the Germans were burning it.

That they had rounded up and taken all the male population away.

That moment I said to myself I can’t just do nothing.

I didn’t want to overestimate my own powers, after all I was young and I wasn’t expecting that I’d be able to do much.

But considering what I’d read by Tolstoy, I knew that basically every historical action

is the result of the actions of many perhaps completely insignificant people,

who together can achieve something historically significant.

So I decided that I can’t let myself just stand aside.

I said I wanted to get ‘in’, that I also wanted to do whatever they knew about. The very next day I was called to my first meeting.