We ran into Ms. Ada Rebov in Gonars. "I came to see, where my three brothers were in internment", she said. To visit the location and memorial of a fascist concentration camp in this northeastern Italian town, not far from Venice, it took her an hour and a half long drive from Slovenia.

During the Italian occupation of Ljubljana, her three brothers, Bogomir, Anton and Marjan Javornik, were educated young men. They were arrested in a raid and later deported to a concentration camp in Gonars.
With the Italian occupation, educated and cultured individuals and intellectuals, no matter their age, became a threat to fascist expansionist policies and its cultural and ethnic assimilation. 
Written communication from and to the concentration camp was allowed, as were allowed parcels with food sent to internees. "That's what I was taking care of", Ms. Ada Rebov explained her role as a girl during war time.

She was searching through streets of Ljubljana, at the time an annexed city within a barbed wire fence and under severe control of Italian military. An act of repression turned the actual capital of Slovenia in a camp with controlled and limited exits.
"We barely succeeded. We were allowed to send five kilos. One parcel, each month, to each of them", Ms. Ada Rebov remembered from the period of her brother's internment.
Once in internment, men, women and children suffered hunger, illnesses and poor hygiene. For many of them, parcels - if delivered - granted survival. For some, the sudden intake of received food was fatal.


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