Recollections of the mess bowl

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 © Manca Juvan


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.

In search of witnesses

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 © Manca Juvan

The collaborating at Remembering Fascist Camps came as second to my academic research project within Scientific Research Center Of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. This blog and the upcoming exhibition in September 2013 at the Museum of Contemporary History of Slovenia were a natural development of a "dream trio" joined forces.
Today it is clear to me that I perceive both projects as a call of duty with regard to my ancestors. 
I grew up with nono Pepi’s (1915-1993) funny and bitter anecdotes about his interwar period on the island of Sardinia. In 1943 he was "mobilized" along with other young men to be isolated from the war events and used as unpaid labor force in such distant places. While Franci (1927-1991), grandpa on my father’s side, kept telling me the touching story of how his father was shot dead as a hostage "by Italians". His broken, blood covered corpse was left to his wife and three children to be buried. Consequently, the oldest of them freaked out for good. Soon afterwards, only 15-year-old Franci grabbed his father’s rifle and went to the woods to fight the occupiers …
 
The idea for the academic research project had been raised from the poor recognition of Italian war crimes in the international context.
Italian occupiers are mostly considered as indulgent and benevolent, and their concentration camps as mild and favorably inclined. 
Initially, as a research team, we thought finding internees seven decades after the tragic events, who would still be sufficiently lucid and open to share their dreadful stories, would be uneasy. Out of over 40.000 deported and interned Slovenians only several dozen former internees are believed to be alive nowadays. 

Luckily we found a handful of intellectuals, eloquent witnesses, who provided precious, detailed and well structured testimonies. 
Some people refused to cooperate.  Their major argument revealed as persistent internment memories: bursts of fear, subjection, confinement, homesickness, shame, dehumanization, recollections of loss, illness, starvation and death. Occasionally, the internment revives in nightmares. Silence, however, is also very telling.
Later, to reach as much witnesses as possible, we published a call for collaboration in various newspapers. Many survivors – to our great surprise – responded positively. These narrators are mostly outspoken persons who never publicly revealed their experiences. They represent the major group of internees, coming predominantly from rural areas, areas of extreme ethnic cleansing and internment policies led by Mussolini's Italy. 
They were excited to be given the voice. 
Their experience turned out to be of immense importance. Many testimonies revealed also items from private archives, like photographs, letters, drawings, pictures and other objects used in the camps. Unexpectedly, such objects give an added documentary value to the research.

 Finally, it is appropriate to acknowledge that the majority of testimonies expressed gratitude for the research we conduct. We take the occasion to thank all and each of them for bravery and willingness to participate through their experiences to the collective memory of Europe. 


Finding a camp location at Visco

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We walked all around a vast closed area in search of a sign or a memorial saying we are at the former Italian fascist concentration camp site. Instead, in Visco, a small community in Northern Italy, we found walls, fences, barbed wire, gates and bushes keeping us out from what during WW2 was a concentration camp and later a military area.
As much as we tried, we didn't find a memorial place to pay our respects to the victims of this concentration camp, operating between February and September 1943. 
During eight months between 4500 to 6000 prisoners, mostly civilians from Slovenia and Croatia, were kept in internment there.

The concentration camp was a detention center mostly for people belonging to ethnic groups living in territories occupied by Italian army during WW2. Under the rule of fascism civilian inhabitants were displaced from areas today belonging to Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Montenegro.

At that point, we find it important to remember that as a result of the mistreatment of civilians interned during WW2, the Fourth Geneva Convention was established in 1949, in order to provide for the protection of civilians during times of war. We believe that in times of enormous human development and achievement, we need to remember the basic values of humanity and human responsibility. We should own the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which restricts the use of internment. Article 9 states that "No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile." Enforcing the Declaration of Human Rights, we pay our respects to victims of Italian fascist camps.

Location: Visco, Province of Udine, Italy

Historic context

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This map shows only the western portion of the former Kingdom of Yugoslavia - currently known as Republic of Slovenia - and its divisions between the Axis Powers. 

 Gray stripes: Fascist Italy occupied territory, known as The Province of Ljubljana; Brown: Nazi Germany occupied territory; Green: Hungary occupied territory; Black: Area already annexed by Italy with the Treaty of Rapallo




On April 6, 1941 when the Axis Powers invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Slavic union was largely occupied by Nazi Germany and the Kingdom of Italy, while smaller territories were occupied by Hungary and the Independent State of Croatia. In the process of annexing this territories to their parent land, the various occupiers imposed racial laws, conducted ethnic cleansing, and forced cultural assimilation.

Our research is limited to Slovene territories under Italian rule from 1941 to 1943, which was then renamed as the Province of Ljubljana. An estimated twenty-five thousand people, or 7.5 percent of the total population, were deported during the duration of this occupation. Villages were destroyed, houses were burnt, and people were interned in concentration camps, such as Rab, Gonars, Monigo (Treviso), Renicci d'Anghiari, Chiesanuova and elsewhere.

Our human concern compels us to document what has happened to our ancestors.

By the atrocious standards of the Second World War, the Italian concentration camps may be perceived as only a footnote of evil. We do not attempt to measure that evil. We intend to memorialize Italian war crimes that have not been fully investigated until now. There were no trials of Italian war criminals, such as there were for the Germans and Japanese. 

We are recording testimonials of survivors to document these atrocities. By doing so, we are creating a missing context of Italy's concentration camps in the annals of Western European history. 

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