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And one day, a Thursday, when my mother and father were in the town, they came. In uniforms, in boots, weapons fixed, with pistols and military caps on their heads. They stormed into the house, shouted incom- prehensible things in abrupt sentences (when I was a child I didn't understand German) and there was immediately indescribable chaos in the house. My aunts cried, the maids cried too – there was great confusion, the "Nemci" shouted and I was gripped by a total panic because my parents weren't there. I hid until they returned home. Then, stony-faced, my mother began to dress us four children (my youngest brother Franci was two-and-a-half years old, my sister Veronika seven, my brother Andrej five and I was six). A few sacks were gathered and some clothing and such was thrown into them. Then, we – my parents, my aunts and us children (my grandfather was no longer alive and my grandmother was visiting an aunt, her third daughter) – had to leave house and home [1]. "Nemci" to the left and right and us in the middle, that is how we were taken away, we had to walk through the village and then another two kilometers by foot until we reached the road. The red bus, which had been waiting on the road, brought us to a place with many long, low-rise wooden barracks within a barbed wire fence. [2] In one such barracks, we met our maternal grandmother, an ancient, fragile little woman (she was 83 at the time), she was lying in this barracks on straw (like we had strewn for the cows at home) and next to her, my uncle's youngest child (a six-week-old baby, Maks). When she saw my mother, she kept repeating "Nemci nas nekam vlečejo." ("The Germans are taking us somewhere.") Yes, and around the barracks were these "Nemci", in uniforms with caps on their heads, with boots, weapons, pistols and unsmiling faces, looking so angry, like I had always imagined the villains in the fairytales to look. One of them took a photo of my mother with us and when he was gone, she said scornfully, "And in my moment of deepest humiliation, he has the impudence to photograph me as well".
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