Peter Starič (1924) was a 16-year old student of secondary school, when the Axis powers occupied the Kingdom Yugoslavia. As a kid he wasn't much interested in the politics and war interpretations, he was more into music and teenage things.  He was also a keen amateur radio operator and was lucky he wasn't caught for that activity.

Malnutrition weakened almost every one. They were supposed to get 800 calories a day, but the majority got substantially less, for much of the food was stolen or distributed unjustly. Consequently, the immune system of the internees dropped significantly.

Peter was a tall boy of 187 cm, but he only weighted 41 kg when he returned back home. “They offered us an effective slimming treatment in the camp”, remarks ever witty Peter.

He was lucky to have survived, for many of his friends didn’t.

Not only the mortality rate in the camp itself, also the (lethal) consequences in decades following the internment should be taken into consideration when rethinking the harshness of the concentration camps.

© Manca Juvan

When Marjana Pahor called on the phone I was strongly impacted by the intense narration. She tried to summarize and convey the destiny of her grandfather Angel Pahor.

Most of all she was proposing a social act of remembrance: "We keep the identification number of his internment. Is there a possibility to write his name on the memorial in Gonars? The history forgot him." I didn't have the answer to Ms. Pahor's request but I was experiencing pain and suffering contained in the memory about her grandfather.

I remember our phone conversation beginning with: "My grandmother never got back the body of my grandfather." With this words a grandchild Marjana Pahor set the content and the flow of a conversation.

"He dug Teleskop with his hands. Pirnat (Niko) and Magajna (Bogomir) told it," Ms. Pahor began a string of second- or firsthand collected memories mentioning two representatives of Slovene cultural elite at the time. According to what she was told her grandfather was connected with a group of internees who dug an underground tunnel and escaped the camp. The escape was named Teleskop. "I am not asking for his name to be written down because he is my grandfather. I am talking about a person who was a friend of Srečko Kosovel, a person who supported the culture." She enforced the statement by revealing that Riko Debenjak, a Slovene painter and printmaker was her grandfather's friend. He became his son's Sergej Pahor godfather. When the family lost a father, Debenjak supported the education of Angel's sons. One became a journalist, the other a scientist and a professor of quantum physics.

© Manca Juvan

When Magda Lovec Trtnik (1932) attended school in occupied Ljubljana she wasn't allowed to tell her father was shot as a hostage and her mother killed at Urh, a location known for torture and killings of partizans and supporters of the resistance. "Tell them they died before the war," were the instructions Ms. Lovec Trtnik, a World War II orphan, received.

For years she was holding for herself events that marked her life since she was nine years old. For her as for many others the Word War II and the italian occupation of the slovene territory turned into a life sentence.

The truth is that her father, a political activist and member of resistance, was shot by italian soldiers as hostage in Ljubljana at Gramonza jama on June 11, 1942. 

Tone Trtnik, later a national hero, was one of seven hostages killed that day. Shot hostages were buried in two graves. "At the time my aunt visited the graves and lit the candles. One candle died out. She decided that my father is buried in the grave with the lit candle," Ms. Trtnik explained how this simple belief influenced the location of her father's grave. It stayed unquestioned until today. It is of immense importance and consolation to Ms. Lovec Trtnik to have a known place she can visit and pay respects to her father.

Her mother, Justina Trtnik, was an activist and member of resistance too. "One morning when she left for work - she was working at the paper factory Papirnica Vevče - italian soldiers arrested her," Ms. Lovec Trtnik remembered the September 18, 1942 events. Her mother was arrested and sent in internment on the island of Rab. "The soldiers searched for me too. My grandmother sent me on time to known people in a neighboring village," Ms. Lovec Trtnik beleives that day she escaped the internment.

Letters and postcards her mother wrote in interment where messages of encouragement, care and love. Ms. Lovec Trtnik preserved all of them. She read them many times and she shown them to her children and grandchildren. "When I read her letters and postcards I cry," she told.

Letters are full of mother's care for the daughters survival and future. She was allowed to write to her doughtier on Thursday, we learned form Ms. Lovec Trtnik. Through letters Justina Trtnik encouraged her doughter to learn at school, get healthy and never turn down anything important. In a child story stile she described the internment. She wrote about animals in internment. She wrote about lice.

In April 1943 her mother was released from italian fascist internment. 

Once back home Ms. Lovec Trtnik remembers her mother being weak. But nothing was in a way for Justina trtnik to go back to work. "It's from work that she once came home and announced the capitulation of Italy," Mr. Lovec Trtnik remembered.

The capitulation of Italy was just a short period that turned to be a period of exchange of occupiers, soldiers and troops in Ljubljana and its suburbs. Soon German soldiers took over the territory. With Germans their local allies the so called White Guard and Slovene Home Guard - domobranci got power. They arrested Justina Trtnik at the end of November 1943, seven month after her release from the internment. "She never came back," Ms. Lovec Trnik said. Her mother is one of non-identified victims at Urh.

Ms. Lovec Trtnik assisted to the exhumations of the mass grave at Urh. She was a 13-years old war orphan and she was standing and staring at corpses in an attempt to recognize her mother's outfit. 

The exhumations stopped before all the victims were unburied. Justina Trtnik was never found and she doesn't have a grave. "It is difficult to explain the importance of a memorial place where you can visit your dear ones," Ms. Lovec Trtnik told.

She shown us all the material heritage she is preserving from her childhood: letters, few photos, articles cut from newspapers … Among them was a little orange notebook. She opened it on a page where she wrote dates of her father's birth, arrest and death and of her mother's arrest. It was heart braking to step in shoes of a ten or thirteen years old girl who is writing down in her notebook dates of loss of her parents and not dates of falling in love with a boy from the same class.

© Manca Juvan

Ivanka Zamida, a survivor of three italian fascist camps, greeted us at her home in Kočevje - the largest city in the area that was exposed to extreme fascist ethnic cleansing and designated, as a region reach in timber, to be populated by Italians from South of Italy. Ms. Zamida welcomed me even if her health was deteriorating. She was open to tell what she remembers. Deeper in the memories we went more upset and agitated she got. Nonetheless she didn't stop. She was committed to make herself available until all what she find important was told.

She was born in a poor peasant family of six children in 1929 in the village of Papeži. Her account began with an incursion of Italian soldiers. "It was an ordinary day. They came and surrounded the village. Soldiers were robing the houses. They took everything. There was not much. They took the chickens, put the pigs on a truck. They killed what they couldn't take. Our heifer didn't want to move. They shoot it and drag it down. They tied the men and locked them in the school building."

The next vivid memory Ms. Zamida recalled located us in Western Croatia, in horse stables in a coastal town of Bakar. At the time she didn't know she arrived in a concentration camp for civilians, first of the three she was in internment. 

Ms. Zamida didn't know her internment didn't start on Rab but in Bakar. How could she? During the time of war she knew her home was burned down, the live stock taken away or killed and that they were forced to leave the village. The internment in the concentration camp was unprecedented to her and to the memory of her family. She was familiar with the war and the loss of soldiers. Many men from her area were enrolled and fought the WW1. The concept of internment of civilians was new.

Later, during the post WW2 period in Yugoslavia she could't gain much insight in her internment - fascist concentration camps were not a topic of significant importance. Similar was at the level of european historic research of WW2 and social awareness.

Until today Bakar concentration camp for civilians remains poorly researched. The area of the camp and it's cemetery are part of an industrial area. 

"Father was visiting us during our stay on Rab. Three sister and me were so foolish to put bread aside for him. If he didn't come to collect it, we sent it through our cousin. He never delivered the bread to our father. He ate it himself."

In the concentration camp Kampor on the island of Rab children until age of 14 were forced to the sea. "I was so sad. I couldn't socialize. I sat on my mess bowl touching the sea with my feet. I couldn't do much. I was so sad." And they were suffering hunger.

As children they searched kitchen rotting leftovers hoping to find something to calm the persistent hunger. "Out of desperation I was once among this kids. Suddenly an officer hit me on the head with a stick having a metal square and a hook on the top. I was wounded. I've got a bruise and a swelling on my head."

There were other reasons than officer's violence that prevented her from searching food scraps: "Didn't take us long to learn that kids eating rotting food were soon gone." 

Remembering a short documentary made on concentration camp of Rab Ms. Zamida got upset. "My son Dušan brought me the documentary. I can not watch it," she made it know that remembering requires a substantial amount of control to cope with strong emotions that could overwhelm her at any moment. At that moment I was questioning myself if awakening survivor's past memories of dehumanization, suffering, pain, mistreatment, violence, loss, death and illness is appropriate. As a researcher and an interviewer I needed to stay with my grief. The gift of empathy at moments seemed to be a curse.

"My uncle died there, my aunt, … I lost at least ten relatives on Rab and at home, where they were killed," Ms. Zamida summarized her family loss in war.

She was moved from Rab to a concentration camp in an italian town of Gonars, to a barrack number 21. She remembers arriving during a cold snowy winter.

Among many memories she recalled a priest who was holding a mass. "I didn't attend. I stop attending mass since I saw the priest blessing the dead and the alive who were than shot. I don't judge the existence or the non-existence of god. If there is God, he would act at the time when we were suffering so much," Ms. Zamida placed herself among many who, while exposed to atrocities, looked forward for an action of an interventionist God. As for many, so for Ms. Zamida, God died during WW2. 

To whom could possibly turn a 14 years old girl who is kept captured in an unknown land, suffering extreme deprivation and fighting flies, malnutrition and dysentery.

In September 1943 she and her sisters left the concentration camp at Gonars among the first. They were disoriented and walked the Italian territory left to the mercy of its inhabitants. "One of the woman told us to left behind our handicapped sister. Can you believe this? " She recalled they walked from Gonars to Udine and back to Palmanova where they caught a train to Slovenia. The train was taking them for an approximately hundred kilometers ride back home to the occupied territory where Slovene Partisans, an anti-nazi resistance movement, were fighting Nazi Germans.

Her cousins didn't left with first groups of internees. They were captured by Nazi Germans and transported to the Dachau concentration camp. "They died in Dachau. If they would left with us, they would be alive," she remarked. 

Ms. Zamida and her three sisters reached their village to find out that nothing was left behind. Begging for food marked their recovery from internment until they find a job as maids. Her father returned from the internment too.

Our interview was over and Ms. Zamida's son Dušan joined us. He was tensed and overwhelmed by the event too. While talking in the living room there was more light and less heaviness. Looking at Ms. Zamida I noticed her face mussels relaxed. Her right hand stopped shaking.

A road Padua-Vicenza lead us to Chiesanuova. We were searching for a military facility, indicated as a former fascist concentration camp area for Yugoslav civilians, mostly Slovenes. Driving we passed by apartment buildings, houses, bars, shops and stores, a church … when suddenly, a wide area opened up and an orange brick building caught our attention.

We were supposedly standing at the entrance of the caserma Romagnoli, a shut down Italian military area. It is surrounded by high walls and rusty barbed wire. Gates are locked with chains.

In an absence of a sign, we were guessing if we found a location that during Word War II was a fascist concentration camp, established at the end of July 1942.

The first internees - they were 1.429 - were Slovene men from the Province of Ljubljana - an occupied and annexed territory. The camp was in operation for twelve months. Later it received internees from Croatian islands of Zlarin and Rab, and from an Italian island Ustica. During the twelve months of its operation 70 men died.

Facts we share are gathered from history books. There is no memorial preserving the historic memory at the site.

Walking the street we greeted people taking care of their garden. Their spacious home is facing the wall of the caserma. I didn't hesitate to ask if they know, what was behind the walls during the war. A lively conversation developed followed by an invitation to enter the house. Our host, remembering his roots and the history of the house, brought a book. He opened it on the page with a large areal picture of Padua, taken during the war. He pointed with a finger his family house and the military area in Chiesanuova. "This area was heavily bombed during the World War II. Do you see the explosion craters? Our house wasn't hit. We were lucky."

I repeated the question if, as a family living in the neighborhood of the military area for more than hundred years, he knows if the facility functioned as a concentration camp? Instead of answering he suggested to contact Ugo Usardi, an old man who is knowledgeable about that period of local history.

Living Chiesanuova we felt bitter. There is no designated place to remember, grieve and pay our respects. There is no memorial with names of men who died in the internment in Chiesanuova.

The first chapter of Cristina Sartori's book entitled Padre Placido Cortese (2010) holds a title after Majda Mazovec               ©Urška Strle

When a tiny, long-haired elderly woman curiously opened the door of her cozy flat, I was a bit surprised, for I expected a rather different figure in regard to the facts I was told about her. Dr. Majda Mazovec (1920) is a retired, yet still vivid pioneer of Slovenian cardiology, who considers humanistic foundations to be essential to her medical vocation.

During the WW2 she was a promising student of medicine at the University in Padova, Italy. While at the outskirts of Padova, in Chiesanuova, one of many Italian fascist concentration camps was located.

Majda learned about the nearby camp when she tried to get in contact with her arrested and interned cousin, who – as it turned out – was also among the internees in the Chiesanuova concentration camp.

Soon Majda became a part of undercover help network, led by a Franciscan monk Placido Cortese (1907-1944) who secretly operated as an assured anti-fascist and helped many who were being prosecuted by the fascist regime. As a priest he was appointed to Chiesanuova concentration camp to conduct a religious service for the internees. However, it was young and determined Majda, who convinced p. Cortese, “a small limping man with glasses, dressed in black monk robes”, to help the internees with extra food, money, providing them letters and information.

“I was motivated for such an activity, for I found it extremely unjust that I could study medicine while others were dying of starvation. There were also my relatives and friends among them and maybe people, who were more important to be in the world than me, a green student of medicine,” dr. Mazovec told.

Majda worked as courier and was in charge of smuggling money, letters and information on relation Ljubljana–Padova. That was a very adventurous and dangerous task, which might have proved costly at the expense of her life in case her legal activities in the excessive time of war were discovered. She was lucky enough she hadn't been caught. She never visited the concentration camp herself, neither did p. Cortese tell her about the circumstances in the camp - for safety reasons.

Prompt and witted, courageous and empathetic, "a green student of medicine" later became an important Slovenian cardiologist. It seems she has chosen the right profession, if we take into account the difficult, yet hearty actions that could have cost her a life.

Her venturous deeds unintentionally question us, what would we have done if we were in her shoes. Would we risk our lives to help others as many anonymous individuals like Majda did? Would we?

© Manca Juvan

Usually photography is about capturing this key moment, the "now" in an unfolding event. In this photographic project, it's equally if not more about confronting the past.

In a way, Remembering fascist camps project is a continuation of my previous long term project Unordinary Lives that speaks about the war and its consequences on civilian population; they both address the war trauma and bring out things that are usually unpleasant to address or to look at.

While in Afghanistan the war is ongoing and still very much part of the 'present', in Slovenia the war our project refers to is practically a reality of seven decades ago. However, the long term consequences of it, the trauma transferred through generations, is still much a thing of the present.

Photography is surely not a perfect medium - as written or oral testimonies aren't either. Consequently it has been, unjustly, a subject of much critic by modernist and post-modernist critics for its anti-analytical nature. If we expect that photographs explain us how and why things happen(ed), elucidate bad things that people do to each other, and not just to document it, we often forget that it is photography more than any other medium that brings out our visceral feelings. Maybe we can't articulate them instantly or well, but, I believe that this is a condition for one, for the viewer, to connect with what Roland Barthes called "the thereness of the world." Moreover, by joining various narrative perspectives in this project we hope to add to the stories we're telling another dimension.

Hanna Arendt in her writing about Aushwitz called photographs "instants of truth", and added that such instants, though not absolute or perfect, "are in fact all we have available to us to give some order to this chaos of horror." 

That's why looking at what photographs communicate, I belive, and not getting trapped by deconstructing them in sense of technical or aesthetic measures, is all the more necessary.

                                                                                                © Manca Juvan

As a preteen, Albina Vogrin was deported to a fascist concentration camp with her family. They first stayed in a tent on the island of Rab, and later they were transferred to barracks in Gonars. Their transfer to the concentration camp in Gonars and the subsequent move into barracks at first provided a source of happiness for them in those desperate times of cold gripping terror, weakness and starvation.

I arrived to find a lively and spirited 83-year old woman who was patiently awaiting my first question to help awaken those distant memories for our face-to-face interview.

Historically her words are all that is left from her internment - an internment as lived by a 12-year old girl. There are no photographs, no personal items, no institutionalized collective memory of the Italian fascist concentration camps.

We began with her forced separation from her roots.

Like other families in occupied Slovenia, Albina's eight member family was violently forced out of their home. They ran into the nearby hills, taking almost nothing of their possessions. What they saw when glancing back was a fiercely burning fire where their house and their village once stood. "Seeing our house in flames hit me badly."

Only after the war was over, when Ms. Vogrin was invited to a bonfire, did she realize how deeply she had been wounded: "Seeing the fire I collapsed and ran away. After witnessing our home on fire, I wasn't able to stand the sight of fire for decades." 

She discovered that death at a concentration camp arrives unnoticed. 

She said that the event was so shocking that later anyone could describe what happened that stormy night. 

Stanko Kotnik (1925), whom I met at the presentation of a bitter graphic novel entitled Italian Winter, turned out to be an impressive voice of heavy memories from Italian fascist camps. We recorded more than eight hours of conversation, marked with his extraordinary diction, powerful articulation, dramatic narration, and improvised dialogues. 

Following his recounts of dreadful details on depravation was challenging. When memories were too painful to be disclosed, he paused them with silence. Frequently, my eyes were filled with tears. Weeks after our interview, I was still awaking in distress.

On a plateau of Kampor field on the island of Rab, turned by Italian army into concentration camp in the late July 1942, living conditions were outrageous. There was a severe shortage of water in the seething summertime. The diet was scarce and low in nutrients: a cup of watery coffee in the morning, watery vegetable soup containing some macaroni or rice for lunch, and a piece of bread the size of a child's fist with a small cube of cheese for dinner. Parcels of food sent from home were considered a treasure. An internee was allowed to receive a maximum of five kilos of essential goods per month. There was enough food, yet the regime denied it to the internees.

At the dissolution of the camp, hundreds of rotten, mold-covered parcels were found in the concentration camp storehouse.

Mr. Kotnik described how unbearable thirst and starvation aroused barbaric behavior among the internees. Some were stealing food from others. Others were deliriously accusing others of theft or selfishness. Some were begging for a tiny piece of bread, rashly promising a cow or a piece of land for it. Yet, some were willing to share what little they had. In such agony many people were driven insane. They were hallucinating, swearing, crying, praying in despair ...

"We were living in worse conditions than monkeys in a zoo, clustered in tents on everyone's sight, without privacy for months ... We were creeping skeletons dressed in dirty ragged clothes, ... starving, stinking, ... our bodies were full of wounds, we were enduring pain ... We were completely dehumanized."

In January 1943, when exhaustion brought Mr. Kotnik close to death, he was ordered to prepare and leave the camp. On the way to the concentration camp of Visco and Gonars in Northern Italy, where he was kept untill the capitulation of Mussolini’s Italy, they stopped at the sanatorium of Reka (nowadays Croatia). "There we've had nothing to eat for the whole day. Finally they called us for dinner. All of us, miserable internees, formed a line. I was among the last. I saw they filled everyone’s mess bowl full with macaroni. ‘They're gonna run out of food before it's my turn!’ I've panicked desperately. Finally, when my bowl was filled with pasta, I've realized I might survive and see my home again. I've sat down on a staircase and began to eat. I started crying. Tears were falling into the bowl, full of macaroni, but I kept eating while trembling.”

The aluminum mess bowl, which he brought back home, holds a memory of one of the gravest periods of his life. At the same time it is a symbol of survival in extreme inhumane conditions. On the outer side the names of fascist concentration camps of Rab, Visco and Gonars with the dates of relocations, are engraved. Surrounded by a large heart shape, Reka holds a special place on the bowl. I instantly understood why.

© Manca Juvan

We came across this large field in our attempt to locate the site of a concentration camp on the island of Rab. Comparing the reality in front of us to the printed old map indicating this camp for civilians, it all seemed so incomprehensibly bigger now.

Then, an unexpected storm approached. Suddenly, I found myself trudging through the marshy grass field, my feet with every further step becoming wetter and wetter. Within moments, while my step was already sinking, I traveled back in time, to the year 1942.

On this island where water was otherwise scarce, a sudden autumn storm then flooded the camp. The section where mainly women, children and elders were stationed was hurt the most. It only took moments, according to the survivors' testimonies, for hundreds of tents to be soaked and blown away, and the interned shouting in panic: The sea's rising, we'll sink!

Flood water was rising so fast that it went up to people's waists, and its force was such that it carried away the children. But, none of them had any other place to go. Children were found next morning on the barbed wire and in the nearby spring. Dead. Drowned.

Soaked myself in only moments from this otherwise normal April weather storm, standing on this very field now barely flooded, I could almost feel the screams and panic which that night storm brought.

© Manca Juvan

A memorial to victims of Mussolini's fascism in Gonars was erected during the cold war period in year 1973. At the local cemetery a shrine was created by a Yugoslav sculptor Miodrag Živković. The 453 remains of Slovene and Croatian citizens who died in internment were then moved to two crypts at the shrine. 

At the time of our unannounced visit municipality workers opened the collective burial place without hesitation, even when in order to do so, they had to drive to Gonars town to get the keys. The keeper spoke reverently about the past. He was eager to tell us about schoolchildren visiting the shrine and a historian Alessandra Kersevan leading educational tours on location. With affection he remembered the presence of Barbara Miklič Türk, a wife of a former Slovene president, a state representative at one of recent yearly commemorations.
Visiting the shrine was a deeply moving experience. Coming out of the silent humid crypts one faces the sculpture representing a flower: stainless steel petals surrounding a round, blood red mosaic. A keeper suggested to me to step in the middle of the mosaic. His invitation: "Say something", met my discomfort and curiosity. I don't remember what I've uttered, but something unexpected happened. 

The waves of sound bounced back amplified. I felt them within my body, in my guts. I gazed in awe at the keeper whose smiling eyes revealed familiarity with the visceral experience I went through seconds ago. 

I walked away changed. 
This experience reinforced the importance of visiting the locations of internment, a commitment we've made when starting the project Remembering Fascist Camps. Our aim's been to be first person witnesses, documentarians of locations that once were Italian fascist concentration camps for Slovene civilians. 

Summarizing our 2000 kilometers drive in Italy and Croatia, with less than clear maps and directions marking locations of internment, it was because of local people's help, our persistence and intuition that we've found all five locations in Italy: Visco, Gonars, Monigo Chiesanuova and Renicci, and one location in Croatia.  

It was a place where we could pay our respects to the victims, that we were in search for. 

 While in Gonars (Italy) and the island of Rab (Croatia) memorials are easy to find, on other locations the traces of once existing fascist concentration camps are scarce. However, it's the testimonies of survivors, which you will be able to learn about through this blog, that will reveal otherwise untold fascist interment experiences and memories. You are kindly invited to follow us.

© Manca Juvan

Because a nurse, Martina Košak was immediately appointed to an improvised nursery in a building at the time known as the outhouse of Hotel Kontinental. "She was in charge of children. They were laying on the floor. She said it was horrendous. As a woman and as a nurse she should be helping people, being children or adults, but she had nothing to help with," said Mr. Herman Janež, an internee himself, who became a custodian of the spoon.

"There was no water, no paper to put under those children who all had terrible diarrhea.  Warms grew under their bodies. There were no clothes. She told me the experience was so horrible for her that as a woman and as a nurse she couldn't withstand it," Mr. Herman Janež conveyed.

After the war Ms. Košak made a research whether any babies born on Rab have survived. She found four Slovene women, one of them was Marija Mohar who died in 2011. Mr. Janež, who was also researching the issue, found nine men. According to a list of internees on Rab created by Mr. Janež, at least 163 children under the age of fifteen died during the internment. 

Researchers and historians estimate that the annual mortality rate in the Rab camp was higher than the overage mortality rate in the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald. 

Concentration camp on Rab was operating from July 1942 to September 1943.