when my dad was very young , the home and vineyard inwhich my father and his family lived , was taken over by the army in Yugoslavia…my father was Catholic; he , my grandmother, and aunt were put into a concentration camps by Tito. My grandfather had to serve in 3 different armies. To this day, my father is afraid to return, fearing he would be killed.I wish to take him there…his family never regained ownership of the land. After the war, when he escaped the camps, in a wine barrel his mother put him in, on a wagon, he never returned to his home.
I never knew this story until last year, as my father suddenly had a vision and remembered himself running along the grape terraces of his childhood home,as he was in my yard pruning my fruit trees. My father is 70 years old.
I always had dreams as a little girl of living in a vineyard …now I know why..it was always a part of me.
Just this past February, I had the wonderful experience to take my mom back to her childhood home in Czechoslovakia..she had not seen her home in 62 years, from the day her Catholic family was removed from her home by the German army, and placed into German concentration camps. I will never forget that day when she walked through her childhood home once again.
What brought me the greatest surprise was that she did not recognise her home, as we came closer, I told her it must have been that one…the one that so closely matched my new house plans! It left me standing there speechless.
