Family history

The History

Our story begins in 1907, when Franci, Nives’ grandfather, was born into the family of the mayor of Žaga as the second son of nine children. Žaga, situated in the valley of the emerald Soča river, in those days still belonged to the Habsburg Empire (Austria-Hungary). The mayor’s name was Andrej Domevšček, his wife Eliza Žagar. But as is still customary in Slovenian villages today, the family’s house in Gorenja Žaga, the upper part of Žaga, also had a name, namely Pr’ Fišerju. The father was mayor, so the family was relatively wealthy with about five cows and a lot of agricultural land, but that was only relative in this poor mountain region: during the winters the mayor travelled as a peddler in trinkets through Austria for months at a time.

In the lower part of Žaga lived the village forester, Ferdo Kutin. In 1915, just before the outbreak of the First World War, he and his wife Jožefa Žagar (Mama Anca) had their daughter Pepa, the first of eight children. Both of Nives’ great-grandmothers are inextricably linked to the village of Žaga by their surname Žagar (meaning sawyer), which owes its name to a former sawmill on the Učja River. The Učja is the tributary of the Šoca, which flows through Žaga from the Italian Rezia valley. In World War I, the Soča valley formed an important front, the Isonzo front, where there was long and hard fighting. To escape this violence, the population of the village of Žaga was evacuated to Savona near Genoa.

Grandpa Franci often told that as a little boy, tanned by the Italian sun, he got chewing gums from the American soldiers in Savona and that he regularly visited the little girl Pepa. When the inhabitants of Žaga moved back to their village after the war – the Soča valley had become part of Italy ­- they found themselves in a world where war and cholera had wreaked havoc. The remains of the war are still visible today in the mountain ranges on both sides of the valley in the form of trenches, bunkers and rusty barbed wire.

Back in Žaga, Pepa in particular did not have an easy life as the eldest child of a stern father from a big family with little income. Her family had moved to a house (Pr’ Zepcu) on the Klanc, the most beautiful viewpoint of the village of Žaga with a view of the Soča valley, both in the eastern direction of Bovec and in the southern direction of Srpenica. Pepa attended the Italian elementary school, but besides that she had to help her mother with the care of the little siblings and with the work on the land and in the house. She had to accompany her father before dawn into the Učja valley to a piece of forest owned by the family, on the border with present-day Italy. Pepa and her father would gather firewood for days on end, saw it while kneeling down, and then carry it home on their sled. The family did not have much, some eggs, corn for polenta, cabbage. By selling the eggs, they could occasionally buy coffee, tobacco or a piece of sausage, of which each family member received a slice, slightly thicker the older the child.

Grandpa Franci was trained as a carpenter. But when the crisis really hit and many Slovenians sought refuge abroad, Franci too decided to leave Slovenia in 1929 (“following the bread with his belly”). Having missed the boat to Argentina, he decided to follow his elder brother and sister to the coal mines in Heerlerheide, South Limburg. Pepa also had to earn money for the family and left at the age of 18 to Perugia in central Italy, to work for an army doctor’s family as a domestic help, nanny and cook. During the time she worked for this wealthy family, she sent all of her earned money back home. As a result, in the six years she spent in Perugia, she was only able to return home twice for a visit.

Franci, because of his hardworking nature and skill with languages, had meanwhile become a foreman, coaching new immigrant workers in the Orange-Nassau III mine. During one of his visits home in Žaga he met Pepa (again), the little girl he had visited regularly as a small child in Savona. They fell in love and kept in touch by letter and finally decided to get married on 12 August 1939 in their native region, just on the eve of the outbreak of World War II.

After their wedding Franci was allowed to travel back to the Netherlands because of his working appointment. But Pepa was stopped at the border and could only travel to her new home months later, at the umpteenth attempt, alone and with a suitcase full of linen, a note indicating the place of destination and a heap of courage, without knowledge of the German or Dutch language.

In the Netherlands they thrived well: Franci worked 33 years underground in the mines, Pepa ran her own little farm with a vegetable garden, pigs, rabbits and chickens, made wine from apples and grapes as in Slovenia and took care of the two children Anita and Theo. In those days Heerlerheide and Žaga were worlds apart: for years there was only contact through letters and the first live meeting with relatives back home was only after 14 years at the fence of the Italian-Yugoslavian border. In the meantime, the Soča valley belonged to the republic of Yugoslavia, as a result of Tito’s unification of six federal states at the end of World War II.

During the years under Yugoslavia, contacts between Heerlerheide and the home front became more frequent again. In the meantime, an active Slovenian community had arisen in South Limburg that honoured Slovenian traditions with festive meetings featuring Slovenian food, drink, song and dance.

In the following years Pepa and Franci visited their fatherland several times with their children as part of the transports organized by the Slovenian association. The love for the fatherland was instilled in Anita and Theo at an early age. As a matter of course this love was passed on by Anita to her husband Piet (from Limburg origin) and their children Ivo and Nives. For years they were all active in the Slovenian dance association in Limburg. Family visits to Žaga were a regular part of the summer holidays. During the holidays they invariably brought lots of home-distilled schnapps from Žaga and in turn smuggled coffee and washing powder to Žaga. In the meantime the relative prosperity, achieved under Tito’s regime, started to decrease and people’s savind completely devaluated in a matter of months. In June 1991, this eventually resulted in a new civil war in the Balkans, with Slovenia being the first to declare the sovereign state. In the course of a century, the Soča Valley had assumed its fourth nationality: from Austria-Hungary, through Italy and Yugoslavia, to Slovenia.