Hi Auntie:
The place, as you know yourself, is rather behind the hills - I passed through in my 50+ years only two or three times. The last time I went to see Kocevski Rog (Kocevje is slovenized name for Gottschee) and I for sure want to do it again some time.
In Rog (it's a huge terrain, 50 km across, where you can still get totally lost in the middle of Europe) is a place where you can still see - in some places, due to wisdom of the German owner back at the start of the 1900s - the forest, the way it would be without the human drive to improve on it.
In Rog there's places, connected with the resistance, which at least for me have a nearly mythical ring - my father was in Rog from autumn 1943 on -.
And in Rog there's place (it more like places) where in May and June 1945 mass executions (14.000 Slovenians) took place. A shameful, sorrowful moment for the nation, which after 60 years still pains. There's silence and a Via Dolorosa with stations with huge wooden sculptures.
Re "gottscheerbarin", probably it would sound better "Gottscheerin" - but I would have hard time, finding anybody able to answer this question. There's a few, but more of the "extinct race" kind.
How well do I know it? What I can only assume and/or quote off my head: they never bothered much anybody (life was too hard to bother about much else but surviving) until they turned (were turned) into exponents of German nationalism. Then came calls "Heim in Reich" and Himmler's resettlements and eventually by the end of the war there were just traces left. But, to be honest, this shows more "the impression of the memory of the copy of the image of ...." than any closer knowledge and experience.
Can I do something for you back in Slovenia, Rose? Trace your background or similar?
RegZ
dj |
