Real estate under the above code now reaches high prices, incomparable to those during and after the war. At that time, many paid for ownership of a house with their lives or at least with exile, so that someone else could later obtain it for free or at a steep discount.
The case of Leopoldina’s house was unusual because the confiscated property was in poor condition and fully occupied. The Kamnica chronicler described it as follows: “… because the wife of the other (= Bogomir Pečar) was after the liberation liquidated somewhere unknown, they also confiscated the house, because although it was the husband’s property, it had out of precaution been registered in the wife’s name. But what use would the old house be to them, a house that required constant repairs? They therefore offered it to the daughter from the first marriage, Leopoldina /…/, who had to buy the house back for a fine sum of hundreds of thousands and take in two other parties as well.” In practice, this meant that in 1954, Leopoldina’s daughter Poldika and her husband Maks Damjan bought the house at Kamnica 23 at a state auction as the only bidders.
The photograph of the house with the garden was taken shortly after the purchase, in the summer of 1954, when Maks Damjan (second from the left, holding Leopoldina’s grandson Darko) had already begun renovating the house and arranging the surroundings. To his right stands Leopoldina’s daughter Poldika Damjan; in front of him, her grandson Maks; to the left, Leopoldina’s niece Vikica Podgorelec with her daughter Lidija. The gentleman on the right is Leopoldina’s eldest brother Hermann, who, eight years after the war, was the first close relative to visit Yugoslavia from Austria and return to his birthplace.
