Remembering Fascist Camps is a collaborative book, exhibition, radio and film documentary project about Italian Fascist concentration camps.
Background
Witnessing the shock of an Italian comic artist Davide Toffolo, when learning about a concentration camp for civilians being less than an hour drive away from his home, was a moment we realized the importance of preserving memory of Italian fascist concentration camps. Braking through the historic amnesia was moving and powerful. Learning about war crimes Slovene, Croatian and other groups of civilians were subjected to during Italian occupation of Yugoslavia in years 1941-1943 was shocking and painful.While on one hand Italy as a state never apologized for their past rulers' deeds, we soon discovered Slovenian youth has no acknowledgement of the fascist occupation either. Check encyclopedias and you won't find a single mention of Italian concentration camps which served as an instrument of political and racial persecution.
That's why listening to individuals who experienced deprivation, hunger, illness, repression and witnessed death of children and adults - facts and testimonies omitted from Slovene and Italian study books - brought us to a commitment to create a platform where voices on internment will be heard by a wider audience.
To do so we started collecting testimonials. In the twilight of their lives, survivors and their relatives want the story to be told and remembered. The body of work we are creating contributes to recent Slovene oral history records given mostly by civilian survivors. We are part of the emergence of the "new" WW2 history, developing an area of research that is still at its beginnings.
Bearing in mind that many survivors left silently, and we will therefore never hear about their experience, others preserved the memory of an internment within a family. By doing so they enabled us to record as authentic and honest memory in their absence.
We want to continue in this line, believing that a release of decades old historic memory being a wind, we may find ourselves sitting in an eye of a hurricane. Coming out of it cleansed and enriched.
Saša Petejan, Manca Juvan and Urška Strle
We want to continue in this line, believing that a release of decades old historic memory being a wind, we may find ourselves sitting in an eye of a hurricane. Coming out of it cleansed and enriched.
Saša Petejan, Manca Juvan and Urška Strle
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