By: Paul Zakelj
Šentjošt, Slovenia
The mountain village of St. Jošt above Vrhnika, now Šentjošt above Horjul in Slovenia, is located approximately 14 miles west of Ljubljana, 60 miles south of Vetrinj (Klagenfurt-Viktring), Austria and prior to the Second World War, about 9 to 12 miles east of the international Rapallo Border that separated the Kingdom of Yugoslavia from the Kingdom of Italy.
Šentjošt was little known before the Second World War even though it was the center of both the municipality and the parish. The inhabitants were mostly engaged in agriculture. Routes from Šentjošt led in all directions: toward Horjul and Polhov Gradec, toward Podlipa and Vrhnika, toward Rovte and Zaplana, toward Gorenja vas and Škofja Loka. Along these routes, the people of Šentjošt were connected with the wider world and were always up to date with events in both the nearby and distant surroundings.
Being near the Italian/Yugoslav border, Šentjošt was also near a defensive fortification. Built between 1937 and 1941, was the Rupnikova linija (Rupnik’s Line) which ran between the village of Šentjošt and the Italian border. It was positioned as the front-line defensive shield to repel a potential Italian invasion. The main fortifications of the Rupnik Line sat just west and southwest of Šentjošt.
April 1941 brings changes
The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was invaded on April 6, 1941 (Palm Sunday), by Axis powers led by Nazi Germany, alongside Italy and Hungary.
The forces manning the defensive Rupnik Line, quickly fell apart and failed. The commanders of military units were receiving frequently contradictory orders every few hours.
On Holy Wednesday, April 9, 1941, the confusion among the troops reached its peak. Patrols rushed back and forth, and the men became increasingly bewildered. The Italian artillery, which fired without interruption, contributed greatly to the mood among the soldiers, a mood such as one sometimes sees at the end of a war. In the evening, an order came from somewhere to withdraw the troops from the defensive line positions. Company after company departed.
The defensive line that had inspired so much hope was left empty and dead. (ref. 1)
The brief conflict lasted less than two weeks and concluded with the unconditional surrender of the Royal Yugoslav Army on April 17, 1941.
The invasion erased the international border with Italy. The invading Italian Fascist and German Nazi forces established a new internal demarcation line/occupational border between German-occupied territory, and the Italian Province of Ljubljana. It ran just north of Šentjošt coinciding with the border between the districts of Ljubljana and Škofja Loka.
September 1943, Italy Surrenders
Italy surrendered to the Allied powers on September 8, 1943, ending its role as an Axis power in World War II and resulting in the German occupation of Slovenia previously occupied by Italy. Italian support of the Vaška Straža, Village Guard was no more. The Village Guard was first established in Šentjošt in July, 1942 with permission from the Italian occupiers for self-defense of the local citizenry from communist aggression. It was sometimes referred to by its Italian initials, MVAC, Milizia voluntaria anticomunista, (Anti-Communist Volunteer Militia). (ref. 2)
Domobranci or Home Guard was formed in Ljubljana in September 1943 after the surrender of the Italians to the Allies. Its formation was supported by the German occupying force as an anti-communist force (ref. 3 &4). This was a very complicated historical event whose ramifications are still being felt today and cannot be adequately addressed in this article.
Spring 1945, The Withdrawal
Soon after the Italian surrender in 1943, Slovenian anti-communists found themselves in a paradoxical and precarious reality. German forces were battling Communist led Partizans in Slovenia while simultaneously supporting Slovenian Home Guard anti-communist forces.
By the spring of 1945, however, the German forces were being defeated by the Allies throughout Europe, including in Slovenia. With German support collapsing, Slovenian anti-communists faced an increasingly precarious and complex military and political quandary (ref. 4). Because the Communist Partizan forces were supported by the Allies (Britain, United States and Soviet Union), it became apparent to anti-communist forces, Slovenian and otherwise, that they needed to withdraw from Yugoslavia to avoid being captured and slaughtered.
The democratic-minded Slovenians had always considered themselves as allies of the Western Powers of Britian and the United States. (ref. 4) The Domobranci withdrawal was intended to last only a matter of weeks, until they could regroup, be resupplied by the Allies and retake Slovenia from the Communist Partizans.
Already on 3 May 1945, in the region around Šentjošt, the Communist Partizan army occupied Cerknica, Rakek, and Planina. One day later, they occupied Logatec and began attacking Vrhnika. The Home Guard units from Rovte and Vrhnika, along with civilians who were fleeing with them, passed through Šentjošt on Saturday, 5 May. (ref. 5)
On Sunday afternoon, 6 May, the Šentjošt Home Guard members and others who had decided to leave were also ready to depart. However, due to a change of plans, only the civilians left while the Home Guard soldiers took up positions around the village and spent the night there. On the sunny morning of 7 May, camouflaged with the fresh green foliage of young beech branches, they began withdrawing from their overnight positions. They departed toward Suhi Dol, where those who had left the previous afternoon were waiting for them.
From south of Šentjošt, heavy gunfire could be heard throughout the day and night of Monday May 7. When the gunfire finally fell silent, an oppressive silence descended. Those who had remained at home hardly dared to leave their houses. Everyone waited to see what would happen. The parish priest and the sacristan had left, so the parish was completely quiet. The municipal office was also closed, since the mayor, secretary, and servant were gone. Even nature itself seemed strangely silent and peaceful.
The Skrivači Organize
The tense silence was also keenly felt by the six men who, on May 7, unknown to most of the withdrawing military forces and civilians, remained covertly near Šentjošt as a clandestine rear sentinel, skrivači.
Shortly before May 6, Janko Žakelj, the youngest brother of Jakob and Jože, told Viktor Tominec that a small group of Home Guards would remain in their home area if a withdrawal to Carinthia took place. He invited Tominec to join this group. Tominec agreed, partly because he and Janko got along well. When he later saw that Janko was not among the group, he was somewhat disappointed.
The initiative for this plan came from Jakob Žakelj. In Šentjošt, he had been one of the main representatives of the Slovene Legion, from which the Village Guards (Vaška straža) and later the Home Guard developed.
Even when the others were leaving, Jakob Žakelj tried to conceal the fact that he or anyone else intended to remain in the home area. He visited a local official (terenski aktivist) and warned him to carefully consider what he would do during those few weeks when Jakob would be gone. To convince people that he had also gone to Carinthia, Jakob, on May 7, accompanied the Home Guards part of the way toward Škofja Loka. He then disappeared from their company only to return to Šentjošt and rendezvous with the others.
Members of the clandestine cell were: Stanko Guzelj, radio operator Florijan Duh, the only member not from the Šentjošt region, Albert Malovrh, Viktor Tominec, and brothers Jože and Jakob Žakelj.
The group had no offensive or defensive intentions. The six did not intend, nor was it even possible, to provide protection for the village and its surroundings. Their objective was only to observe what was happening and maintain contact with those who had gone to Carinthia. They had a radio transmitter, which broke down during the first days. Had it not, they certainly would have been soon discovered. They had no contacts with Vrhnika or Ljubljana, nor did they know whether anyone with a similar purpose had remained there. The group was entirely a Šentjošt matter and not a link in some broader organization.
At first, the six men were divided into three pairs with each pair hiding separately. Occasionally, they would meet to discuss matters. They had a special signal, a bird-like whistle, by which they signaled one another.
Throughout the entire time, they maintained strict secrecy. Nevertheless, unexpected events occasionally occurred.
Tominec was once seen by a young girl grazing sheep in a forest clearing. Unlike her usual cheerful habit of singing while tending the sheep, that day she sat silently and frightened beneath a spruce tree. She later told Malovrh’s mother that she had seen a Partizan.
On another occasion, Tominec was sitting in a spruce tree observing the surroundings when a man from a neighboring village appeared beneath him. Before Tominec could climb down, the man went directly to the Žakelj home and told Žakelj’s mother that he had seen her son. She offered him žganje, distilled spirits likely slivovec, and persuaded him that he must have been mistaken, since everyone had gone to Carinthia.
A more serious situation arose when Jakob and his mother were talking one morning a short distance from the house at the edge of the forest. Unexpectedly they heard shouting and saw someone running past their home with an entire platoon of soldiers chasing him. Jakob threw himself to the ground and rolled into the bushes, while his mother calmly walked toward the house.
But it was a ruse as the soldiers were only pretending to be chasing someone. They surrounded mother Žakelj and said: “We have just captured one of yours. Where are the others?”
Mother Žakelj remained calm: “You have captured none of ours, because they are all in Carinthia!”
They placed her against a wall, fired submachine gun bursts around her, and continued demanding she reveal the whereabouts of her sons.
She was steadfast and repeated that they all went to Carinthia.
Six Plus One
In May of 1945, Pavel Žakelj, the brother of Jakob and Jože, withdrew to Carinthia with his Home Guard Unit, fleeing Tito’s advancing communist forces. They retreated to Vetrinj, in British-controlled Austria, believing they would find protection.
They did not.
On Sunday, May 27, Pavel’s brother Vinko, a newly ordained priest, celebrated his first Mass (Nova Maša) in the church in Vetrinj. Pavel attended Vinko’s first Mass along with his brothers France, Stanko and Janko, his sister Ani, pregnant with her first child, and her husband Franc Grdadolnik. Only Pavel and Vinko would ever attend Mass again.
Within days, in a brazen act of treachery, British forces began repatriating the anti-communist Slovenian Home Guard back to Slovenia, where they were handed over to Tito’s communists. What followed were forced marches, imprisonment, torture, and execution in mass killings across Slovenia.
Pavel, his brothers France, Stanko, Janko, pregnant sister, Ani, her husband Franc Grdadolnik were all repatriated into the hands of the communists.
Unlike his siblings and most others, Pavel escaped and survived. He experienced everything that happened along the route from Vetrinj (Carinthia), through Jesenice and Škofja Loka, to Šentvid, the last stop before the mass graves at Kočevski Rog. Strangely, and fortunately, he remained in Šentvid longer than the others and an opportunity arose for him to make his escape from Šentvid. (ref. 6)
Back in Šentjošt, the clandestine cell hiding in the forest was not particularly afraid of the presence of communist soldiers. The soldiers would come and go but never attempted to enter the forest so they were not overly concerned about being detected.
Everything changed one morning in the second half of June, when Pavel Žakelj surprised them with his appearance in the forest. They had barely exchanged greetings when he chastised them: “How can you be so careless? The Partizans will come and slaughter everyone, just as they have done to so many others.”
A Brother’s Recollection
Adolf Malovrh (1929-2020), the younger brother of one of the skrivači, Albert Malovrh, wrote in his memoirs that his family, along with two others, were responsible for providing food to the clandestine cell. They resupplied the men usually once per week. (ref. 7)
Adolf, 16 years old at the time, recalls that one evening he was carrying food to the group at a preordained site. Upon seeing the group, he quickly realized that their number had increased by one. When he studied the newcomer more carefully, he saw that he was emaciated and with an overgrown beard. Adolf writes that he recognized him by his smile (or expression), he was Pavel from the house of Krvinat (Žakelj). {“Spoznal sem ga po smehu, bil je Krvinetov Pavle”.}
Adolf also recollects that with the arrival of the KNOJ troops in Šentjošt, the cell felt threatened. KNOJ, {Korpus narodne obrambe Jugoslavije} were the Corps for the National Defense of Yugoslavia a communist force of the former VOS {Varnostno obveščevalna služba}, the communist Partizan assassination squad. At times, it seemed as though the KNOJ troops knew about them. They therefore decided to withdraw to Žirovski Vrh where they hid in the bunkers of Rupnikova linija, (Rupnik Line) the defensive fortification between Italy and Yugoslavia that was overrun by the Italians in April 1941. When the KNOJ troops left Šentjošt, the pressure eased somewhat, and sometime around the middle of September the skrivači returned to the vicinity of their homes.
Autumn came and the leaves on the trees above the modest shelters of the skrivači began to turn yellow and fall. The numerous inconveniences that had plagued them since the beginning of their clandestine operation were compounded by cold and rainy weather. They decided to leave for Italy.
Florijan Duh, the radio operator of the group, communicated his recollection of those events, (ref. 8). Duh recounted that when they decided to leave for the Italian border, a priest came to them one evening and administered the sacrament for the dying. “When he arrived, he placed a small cross on the rock and lit two candles. He gave each one a blessing and then left without speaking to them. Words cannot express what I felt at that moment.”
They departed from their hometown on the evening of September 27, 1945, at six o’clock.
“We walked for three days and three nights in constant danger of being caught and probably killed, as happened to so many others…
When we were already near Gorizia in the dark on the last day, we stopped for a moment and looked. In front of us, a city full of light and activity, behind us, Slovenia in darkness, no light, no sound! I asked myself: ‘What do you want, life or death?’ I loved Slovenia, but I decided on life. I looked at the others and said: ‘Forward!’ “
On the afternoon of October 1, not without trial and tribulation, they crossed into Gorizia, Italy.
In memory of all Slovenians resting in hidden or unmarked graves throughout Slovenia, may they rest in God’s peace.
Photographs
Photographs 1 and 2, taken somewhere in the forest around Šentjošt during Autumn of 1945, are group photographs of the seven skrivači, in two groups of 6. The seventh is taking the photograph. Judging by the background trees, photographs 1 and 2 appear to have been taken during the same photo session. Note that the overall quality of the photographs differs because they were obtained from different sources.
It is interesting, that given the situation they were in, they had a camera and used it for “group selfies”. Cameras were not as prevalent as they are today. What was the conversation like, deciding who would snap the picture? The subjects are well positioned within the photographs. Who composed the pictures? Perhaps one of them was a trained photographer?
Skrivači in Photograph 1 from left to right, front row: Florijan Duh, Viktor Tominec, Pavel Žakelj; back row: Albert Malovrh, Jakob Žakelj and Stanko Guzelj. Manning the camera: Jože Žakelj.
Skrivači in Photograph 2 from left to right, front row: Stanko Guzelj, Florijan Duh, Jože Žakelj; back row: Viktor Tominec, Jakob Žakelj and Pavel Žakelj. Manning the camera: Albert Malovrh.
Photograph 3 is of Pavel Žakelj, also taken during Autumn of 1945, after his escape from Šentvid but before his first post-war crossing into Italy. The backside of the photograph includes a handwritten notation that is somewhat difficult to decipher but likely is: “Lahko se smeješ, pokazati jo smeš samo zanesljivim!” Roughly translates to: “You may smile, but only show this to those you trust!”
Epilogue I
Janko Maček’s (1931-2023) article (ref. 8) provides some additional information about the activities of the skrivači after they crossed into Italy.
When Florijan Duh (1925-2015) saw Gorizia during their journey, he felt that he might be leaving his homeland, to which he was attached and loved, but where he was threatened with death, so he decided to live abroad. He remained in the refugee camp until he was given the opportunity to emigrate to Canada where he established a family home.
Viktor Tominec (1919-2017) soon left Italy for Austria, then emigrated to the USA and started a family in Cleveland.
Jože Žakelj (1909-1980) left the refugee camp in Italy for Argentina. In 1956, his wife and three sons followed him from Slovenia and joined him in Buenos Aires.
The other four skrivači, Albert Malovrh, Stanko Guzelj, Pavel and Jakob Žakelj surreptitiously returned to their hometown multiple times during 1946 and 1947.
On one such occasion, Stanko Guzelj (1920-1990) returned with his fiancée Albina to the refugee camp, married, and then soon left for Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Albert Malovrh (1924-1999) also went to Argentina, married, and raised a family.
The last to leave Italy were brothers Jakob (1904-1974) and Pavel Žakelj (1914-1993). Jakob first, and then Pavel, settled in Cleveland.
Jakob’s wife and five children followed a few years later.
In Cleveland, Pavel met and married, Marija Oblak, also a Slovenian refugee.
Epilogue II
Marija and Pavel Žakelj are my parents, Lord willing, come November 28, we will be celebrating her 100th birthday.
Jožo, Jakob, Vinko, Stanko, Janko and France Žakelj are my uncles, Ani (Žakelj) Grdadolnik is my aunt. Half of them, Ani (1912-1945), Stanko (1919-1945), Janko (1921-1945) and France (1906-1945) as well as Ani’s unborn child and her husband, Franc Grdadolnik (1901-1945) did not survive their post-war experiences.
The goal of my writings is to revive the stories of the victims and survivors and to ensure that their memories are not forgotten. By telling their stories, we keep their experiences alive in our consciousness and pass them on to future generations. Without accessible records of their lives, struggles, and sacrifices, the memory of our Slovenian heritage and the hardships endured by our ancestors will gradually fade, and with it, our understanding of where we came from and how we came to be where we are today.
List of References
1. Kako so Nemci preseljevali, (Eng.: How the Germans Displaced People) by Jakob Žakelj, Zbornik Svobodne Slovenije , BUENO S AIRES , ARGENTINA, 1965. Article: https://www.dlib.si/details/URN:NBN:SI:DOC-35AREF8T maintained by Digitalna knjižnica Slovenije (dLib.si), The Digital Library of Slovenia
2. Prva Vaška Straža V Sloveniji – Šentjošt 1941-43; by Marta Kavčič-Kersič, self-published Šentjošt, 199
3. DOMOBRANCI ZDRAVO – BOG DAJ Protikomunistične enote no Slovenskem 1942-1945; by Aleš Nose, Ljubljana: Modrijan, 2008
4. The Slovenian Exodus of 1945 by Jože Rant, Buenos Aires, 2007. The English version, translated by Jerry Zupan: https://theslovenianexodus.com/slovenians-and-slovenia/
5. Zadnja straža (Eng.: The Last Vigil or The Rear Guard) by Janko Maček, Zaveza, Številka 6, September 1992. Includes Viktor Tominec’s memoirs: https://www.zaveza.si/zaveza/zadnja-straza/
6. Voices From the Past: Record of A Survivor, by Paul Zakelj; Slovenian American Times, (Slovenski Ameriški Časi), April, 2026. https://www.slovenianamericantimes.com/voices-from-the-past/
7. Adolf Malovrh’s memoirs document: https://zakladnicaspominov-scnr.si/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Pisno-pricevanje_Adolf-Malovrh-1.pdf. It is maintained by Študijski center za narodno spravo (SCNR), Study Center for National Reconciliation at http://www.scnr.si/, in the section for Zakladnica spominov; Treasury of memories; https://zakladnicaspominov-scnr.si/zakladnica-spominov/
8. Dnevnik zapoznelih beguncev, (Eng.: Diary of Refugees Who Lagged Behind) by Janko Maček, Zaveza, Številka 57, May 2005. Article: https://www.zaveza.si/zaveza/dnevnik-zapoznelih-beguncev/
