Michael Moore did not know

At least six people died last Tuesday as heavy rain caused floods in northwestern Slovenia. While expressing my regret for the loss of human lives, I also want to point out the destruction of a piece of the European Heritage, washed away by the raging water.

[Photo: www.delo.si]

The Franja partisan hospital (Wikipedia article in Slovenian only) was located in a canyon near the small town of Cerkno and it was active from 1943 until May, 1945. Named after dr. Franja Bojc Bidovec, one of the doctors who served there, it was obviously not a top-notch facility ...but nonetheless better than the fictional contemporary Slovenian typical hospital mocked by Michael Moore's Sicko, while making fun of the US health system (just one position above the Slovenian one in the WHO ranking).

I visited the place several years ago, when I was a kid, and have been told a lot of stories about the partisan resistance movement by my grandfather (whose family comes from the town nearby) and his friends. I remember it was the first time I felt emotionally connected to what was written in history books, and all of a sudden I was struck by the image of the wounded, carried on stretchers upstream the narrow canyon of the Pasica stream. I think that it is an example of what Francesco Morace recently described as "knowledge embodied in its own place". I felt so puny, unimportant, with my childish fear of the dentist and figuring that same fear made one thousand times stronger, magnified by the desperate run in the woods to get there and the menacing, incumbing rock walls all around the place.

The wooden huts, with square windows and neat lace curtains made such a sharp contrast with the rudimentary x-rays machinery and the painfully brilliant steel tools in the operating room. It really changed the way I looked at contemporary history and especially World War II and, despite the fact that no relative of mine had actually been cured there during the war, knowing that it exists no more makes me feel a sharp pang of melancholy.