Father's Day

Through a women’s group that Chantelle belongs to here, she met a Slovenian woman named Tea (who coincidentally is moving to Minneapolis…small world) whose grandfather was a member of the Partisan resistance in World War II.  For my Father’s Day gift, Chantelle arranged for me to have dinner with Tea and her grandfather while she and her mother babysat the kiddos.

Don and Cindy were also invited (Happy Father’s Day, guys), and with Tea acting as translator, the three of us listened to two hours’ worth of stories about the Partisans, his career as a police officer and role in twenty-eight security details for Tito, and about his efforts since his retirement to ensure that Partisan history is preserved and celebrated. 

He’s a set-in-his-ways, not-afraid-to-express-his-opinion, sparkle-in-his-eye gentleman.  He only drinks wine from his hometown region and grilled our 18-year-old waiter on why they don’t serve that wine at the restaurant.  After, he joked to Tea that he “would think twice about hiring a young man with a pierce as a waiter.”  He poked fun at himself for living in the same apartment since the end of World War II, for having an 18-year-old car with only 60,000 kilometers on it (he doesn’t even own a tollway sticker because he never drives on the highway), and for having only been on an airplane once, which was plenty (he laughed heartily when I suggested he come to Minneapolis to visit Tea after she moves there… “Ne, ne, NE!!”).

He’s also passionate about the Partisans, their efforts to resist the Nazis, and the lives they sacrificed to do it.  He brought photos, pins, commemorative coins, books, pamphlets, and plenty of stories to dinner.  In 1943, when he was sixteen, he joined the Partisans, and was part of the brigade that finally liberated Ljubljana in May 1945.  He talked about it as a time that is tough to imagine if you didn’t experience it:  his future wife watched the Germans shoot her father when he wouldn’t tell them where her brother was hiding (her brother was one of the very early members of the Partisans); later, her brother was captured and executed as their local priest stood by and refused to intervene.  The scene he remembers the most vividly is spending three days digging graves in the middle of winter to bury 150 Partisans who were massacred in the middle of the night after their whereabouts were compromised by a Nazi collaborator.  For his 80^th birthday, he rented a bus and took all of his children and grandchildren to the site of this massacre and told them, “These men and women gave their lives and were never able to have families…I want you to see this because I was fortunate to have survived and to have all of you as my family.”

Awesome.  This will be a tough Father’s Day gift to top.