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My first home is now completely gone.
I was just looking for some photographs of the baracks where i grew up.There used to be some pictures of the munition depots , the shooting wall and some of the nature around it. All gone. It is now a nature preserve, with a big, artificial lake where the barley and rye fields used to be.. Nobody wants to remember the camp where refuges from the east arrived weekly. Some received visas to emigarte to Israel or the United States and Canada almost immediately. Others stayed for years and years.
The Canadian Forces which administered the camp , came around once a month to collect the rent and listen to the residemts' concerns. The ammunition bunkers were guarded by Yugoslavians who had to leave their country because they were Nazi sympathizers during the war.
We kids were strictly forbidden to even get close to the fence that surrounded the munitions depot. We hung out there by the gate anyway. The guys were nice and gave us some of their food. We were always starving.
I have many good memories of living there. We ran wild, played cowboys and Indians, collected frogs from the ditches and picked up spent rifle shells to sell for the brass they contained.
I lived there until I was 14 years old and my parents were finally eligible to build a house in the village. I never lived down the "girl from the camp" name, even when I got a scholarship to the most prestigious prep school in the city.
Now everybody who was alive during that time is dead, including my little brother. And of course, the whole world will never let me forget.

Spinliesel 9 Sep 17
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My grandparents left Gotschee before WW1 (an area that became Yugoslavia at a point). I have a cousin that lived in a camp probably like yours after WW2

we are the only family he has left. He didnt know of us until we found him doing a geneology search

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