Grave of the victims of the fire in the village of Podbeže

»Tone Ivančič-Kusov, Smrekar, Orana, 40-year-old farmer from Brkinov, later a partisan teacher and propagandist.

[…]

Tone Ivančič-Kusov (see above). The text was written at the cemetery in Hrušica in May 1944, when the Germans burned the village of Podbeže, locked people in a barn and shot their legs off with machine-gun fire so that they would burn alive.

The manuscript is kept by the author's sister. If 17.

Victims of Podbeže

There were sixteen of them.

They are no longer here.

To everything that happened only a painful memory remains.

The grave is covered only the dead do not sleep

and every night they return

home, running.

To the place where they spilled blood where the living burned among flames and blood

they have become silent forever.

What do you say, German mother how do you look at this crime this murder of innocent victims committed by your son?«

(Slovenian Poetry of Resistance 1941–1945, Second Book, Partisan, Selected and Edited by Boris Paternu, assisted by Irena Novak-Popov, Novo mesto: Tiskarna Novo mesto Dolenjska založba, In Ljubljana: Znanstveni inštitut Filozofske fakultete 1995, pp. 33, 37)