Literary evening with the writer Nataša Konc Lorenzutti on Friday, January 19 at 8 p.m., in the hall of the Municipality of Nova Gorica, the central theme of the conversation is Nataša Konc Lorenzutti’s new documentary novel entitled Senca bez mnjako, which was published by Slovenska matica in 2023 .
The editor of Slovenske matica, literary historian dr. Ignatius Fridl Jarc. Excerpts are read by Lucija Lorenzutti and Luka Seražin.
The novel is about the fate of Slovenian children who were stolen from their parents by the Nazis in two operations in Celje in August 1942 and taken to the territory of the Third Reich, many of their fathers were killed, and most of their mothers died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp. About thirty children, mostly infants, underwent “racial selection” and were transferred from the children’s camps of the Office for the Strengthening of Germany to the Sončna Poljana home in Kohren-Sahlis near Leipzig, which was operated by Himmler’s network of secret organization Lebensborn. There they could be taken in by future German foster parents who were at least apparently loyal to the regime, but did not know that they were taking stolen children.
The documentary novel about the children of war who became victims of peace is based on the shocking testimonies of the still living Lebensborn children and their descendants, as well as the author’s meetings and conversations with them. They intertwine with her story of searching for traces of missing children, set in a time when war is raging on the edge of Europe and human destinies are being traded again. Faced with novelistic, but at the same time realistically documented memories of real people, who in this “film in prose” turn into more or less tragic literary heroes, just like the author of the novel, even the sensitive reader can form his own attitude towards family, identity, nation and his past, i.e. to common human concepts that are of fundamental importance for each of us.