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.