Articlo in inglese su un campo di concentramento del regio esercito italiano

< < Back to Start of Article RAB, Croatia Metod Milac says he remembers October on this wind-swept island because the nights turned cold and disease spread more quickly.
.
He recalls the cup of thin gruel at mealtime, a soup so watered down that he could count the grains of rice. And he remembered roll call, where Italian soldiers would yell: "Tutti fuori, anche morti!" Everyone out, including the dead.
.
Six decades after the Italian military imprisoned Slovenes, Croats and Jews in a concentration camp on this island, the memories are vivid for the few remaining survivors.
.
But as they reach their final years, the survivors lament that memories are apparently not as sharp across the Italian border. There is a general amnesia about the Rab concentration camp, they say.
.
Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, recently told an Italian newspaper that the fascist government of Benito Mussolini "never killed anyone."
.
"Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile," Berlusconi was quoted as saying in La Voce di Rimini, an Italian newspaper.
.
Those comments angered the Rab survivors as well as others, mostly Slovenes, who endured Italian concentration camps at Treviso, Gonars, Padova and Renicci.
.
Berlusconi's words were condemned by many in Italy and around the world. But survivors of the Rab camp said they fit into a pattern.
.
Italy is often portrayed as having been a somewhat benign fascist power during World War II, a reluctant partner of the Nazi regime. The wartime Italian Army is remembered as hapless and inefficient compared to the ruthlessly brutal German war machine.
.
This is not what the Rab survivors remember.
.
Anton Vratusa, a former prisoner at Rab who went on to be Yugoslavia's ambassador at the United Nations, said that there were four distinct camps at Rab and a place that prisoners darkly referred to as the fifth camp, a cemetery where the hundreds who died of cold, starvation or illness were buried.
.
"The present-day generation in Italy doesn't know or knows very little about the real role of Italy during the Second World War," Vratusa said in a telephone interview.
.
The camps were a collection of more than a thousand open-air tents arrayed across a valley and surrounded by razor wire and guard towers. There was no organized medical care, limited water and very little food.
.
Vratusa and Milac, both Slovenes, said that they believed the Italians intended to kill everyone in the camp by starving them.
.
Yugoslavia at the time was carved up by the Axis powers, with Germany, Italy and Hungary each taking a chunk.
.
The prisoners were generally men suspected of resisting the Italian occupation army or women and children who lived in villages suspected of sympathizing with the resistance.
.
Established in July 1942, the camp held a total of about 10,000 people until it was disbanded in September 1943.
.
During winter months in Rab, the death toll rose sharply, mainly because prisoners were not given proper clothing and lived in tents exposed to the cold. Babies and children died first because they were more vulnerable to these brutal conditions.
.
By the time Italy capitulated in 1943, more than 1,200 prisoners had died, according to research by Bozidar Jezernik, a Slovenian historian and dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana. He estimates that the real death toll is around 2,000 when taking into account weakened people who were moved to other camps before they died.
.
More than a hundred of the victims were children under age 10, according to Jezernik, who based his estimate on Italian documents and the records of Slovenian and Croatian church officials.
.
Jews were held separately at Rab and were treated relatively better, survivors said. They had access to radio and newspapers and were better-fed. "We were prisoners; they were protected people," Vratusa said. "We used their assistance."
.
A unique partnership emerged between Jewish prisoners and Slovene and Croat partisans. After the Italians capitulated, a group of young Jewish men who were in decent physical shape joined the emaciated Slovenes to form a military unit - the Rab Brigade, they called it - to fight the German occupying army.
.
The brigade used weapons captured from their Italian prison guards and commandeered several Italian supply ships filled with uniforms, ammunition and food, including copious amount of parmesan cheese, a delicacy for the starved prisoners.
.
Stripped of their arms, the Italian guards were put on a boat and sent away. The Italian colonel in charge of the camp was captured and committed suicide.
.
By the murderous standards of the second world war, Rab was perhaps only a footnote of evil.
.
But Slovenian historians say that Italy's concentration camps deserve at least some mention in the annals of Western European history.
.
"I have checked many encyclopedias," Jezernik said, "and you won't find a single mention of Italian concentration camps."
.
Jezernik said that when he sought files from the Italian national archives in Rome in the 1990's, he was told by officials that most of the documents could not be divulged until 75 years after they were written. This would make them available around 2018.
.
David Wingeate Pike, a Paris-based historian of World War II and a former British intelligence officer in the Balkans, said one reason that Italian war crimes had not been fully investigated was because Allied forces did not have the same incentives to delve into them.
.
"In 1943, after all, Italy was on our side," Pike said. "I suppose the deal was: 'We don't want to know about your crimes but help us win this war.'" There were no trials of Italian war criminals as there were for the Germans and Japanese, Pike said.
.
Today there are perhaps other reasons to play down Italy's crimes. As Slovenia prepares to enter the European Union and Croatia aspires for membership, it is impolitic to dwell on Italy's wartime past.
.
Yet all of this geopolitical reasoning is not what interests the Rab survivors. In the twilight of their lives, they want the story to be told and remembered.
.
"Even in Slovenia they do not pay much attention to it," Milac said, "which hurts me a lot."
.
When Milac left the camp in January 1943 - he was lucky enough to be released early by the Italians - he was so weak and emaciated that he could not climb the ladder of the boat that took him back to the mainland.
.
Now a retired librarian in the United States, Milac in 2002 published "Resistance, Imprisonment and Forced Labor," a memoir of his time in the camp and other World War II experiences.
.
Today in Rab there are only a few scattered traces of the concentration camp.
.
A series of stone structures built with prison labor have been refurbished and are used as part of a mental asylum.
.
Grapes and corn grow where the prisoners' tents once stood. And a moss-covered stone tablet by the side of the road reads: "This is the concentration camp where many people lost their lives in terrible circumstances."
.
Down the road is a larger memorial with individual gravestones and a stainless steel plaque inscribed with hundreds of names.
.
The memorial was built in 1953 with prison labor from Goli Otok, the island where opponents of the Tito regime were imprisoned in Communist times.
.
The tragic irony of political prisoners building a monument to victims of Fascism is not lost on Jezernik, the Slovene professor. He said he once interviewed a man who was a prisoner of the Italians in Rab and subsequently a political prisoner at Goli Otok who helped build the monument in Rab.
.
"He was building a monument to himself," Jezernik said.
.
Petar Kurelic, a 78-year-old local resident who was born in a house overlooking the camp, said tourists were the main visitors to the memorial these days. Rab, a popular summer resort, is a 20-minute ferry ride from the Croatian mainland.
.
When he was a teenager, he said, Italian soldiers were alternatively kind and cruel, sometimes offering food to Rab residents, other times beating them or worse.
.
But today, Kurelic said the wounds have healed and German and Italian tourists are welcome on the island.
.
"Things change," he said. "The Germans and Italians used to be our enemies and we killed each other. Today we are friends," Kurelic added. "The memories are there, but the hatred is gone."
.
International Herald Tribune RAB, Croatia Metod Milac says he remembers October on this wind-swept island because the nights turned cold and disease spread more quickly.
.
He recalls the cup of thin gruel at mealtime, a soup so watered down that he could count the grains of rice. And he remembered roll call, where Italian soldiers would yell: "Tutti fuori, anche morti!" Everyone out, including the dead.
.
Six decades after the Italian military imprisoned Slovenes, Croats and Jews in a concentration camp on this island, the memories are vivid for the few remaining survivors.
.
But as they reach their final years, the survivors lament that memories are apparently not as sharp across the Italian border. There is a general amnesia about the Rab concentration camp, they say.
.
Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, recently told an Italian newspaper that the fascist government of Benito Mussolini "never killed anyone."
.
"Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile," Berlusconi was quoted as saying in La Voce di Rimini, an Italian newspaper.
.
Those comments angered the Rab survivors as well as others, mostly Slovenes, who endured Italian concentration camps at Treviso, Gonars, Padova and Renicci.
.
Berlusconi's words were condemned by many in Italy and around the world. But survivors of the Rab camp said they fit into a pattern.
.
Italy is often portrayed as having been a somewhat benign fascist power during World War II, a reluctant partner of the Nazi regime. The wartime Italian Army is remembered as hapless and inefficient compared to the ruthlessly brutal German war machine.
.
This is not what the Rab survivors remember.
.
Anton Vratusa, a former prisoner at Rab who went on to be Yugoslavia's ambassador at the United Nations, said that there were four distinct camps at Rab and a place that prisoners darkly referred to as the fifth camp, a cemetery where the hundreds who died of cold, starvation or illness were buried.
.
"The present-day generation in Italy doesn't know or knows very little about the real role of Italy during the Second World War," Vratusa said in a telephone interview.
.
The camps were a collection of more than a thousand open-air tents arrayed across a valley and surrounded by razor wire and guard towers. There was no organized medical care, limited water and very little food.
.
Vratusa and Milac, both Slovenes, said that they believed the Italians intended to kill everyone in the camp by starving them.
.
Yugoslavia at the time was carved up by the Axis powers, with Germany, Italy and Hungary each taking a chunk.
.
The prisoners were generally men suspected of resisting the Italian occupation army or women and children who lived in villages suspected of sympathizing with the resistance.
.
Established in July 1942, the camp held a total of about 10,000 people until it was disbanded in September 1943.
.
During winter months in Rab, the death toll rose sharply, mainly because prisoners were not given proper clothing and lived in tents exposed to the cold. Babies and children died first because they were more vulnerable to these brutal conditions.
.
By the time Italy capitulated in 1943, more than 1,200 prisoners had died, according to research by Bozidar Jezernik, a Slovenian historian and dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana. He estimates that the real death toll is around 2,000 when taking into account weakened people who were moved to other camps before they died.
.
More than a hundred of the victims were children under age 10, according to Jezernik, who based his estimate on Italian documents and the records of Slovenian and Croatian church officials.
.
Jews were held separately at Rab and were treated relatively better, survivors said. They had access to radio and newspapers and were better-fed. "We were prisoners; they were protected people," Vratusa said. "We used their assistance."
.
A unique partnership emerged between Jewish prisoners and Slovene and Croat partisans. After the Italians capitulated, a group of young Jewish men who were in decent physical shape joined the emaciated Slovenes to form a military unit - the Rab Brigade, they called it - to fight the German occupying army.
.
The brigade used weapons captured from their Italian prison guards and commandeered several Italian supply ships filled with uniforms, ammunition and food, including copious amount of parmesan cheese, a delicacy for the starved prisoners.
.
Stripped of their arms, the Italian guards were put on a boat and sent away. The Italian colonel in charge of the camp was captured and committed suicide.
.
By the murderous standards of the second world war, Rab was perhaps only a footnote of evil.
.
But Slovenian historians say that Italy's concentration camps deserve at least some mention in the annals of Western European history.
.
"I have checked many encyclopedias," Jezernik said, "and you won't find a single mention of Italian concentration camps."
.
Jezernik said that when he sought files from the Italian national archives in Rome in the 1990's, he was told by officials that most of the documents could not be divulged until 75 years after they were written. This would make them available around 2018.
.
David Wingeate Pike, a Paris-based historian of World War II and a former British intelligence officer in the Balkans, said one reason that Italian war crimes had not been fully investigated was because Allied forces did not have the same incentives to delve into them.
.
"In 1943, after all, Italy was on our side," Pike said. "I suppose the deal was: 'We don't want to know about your crimes but help us win this war.'" There were no trials of Italian war criminals as there were for the Germans and Japanese, Pike said.
.
Today there are perhaps other reasons to play down Italy's crimes. As Slovenia prepares to enter the European Union and Croatia aspires for membership, it is impolitic to dwell on Italy's wartime past.
.
Yet all of this geopolitical reasoning is not what interests the Rab survivors. In the twilight of their lives, they want the story to be told and remembered.
.
"Even in Slovenia they do not pay much attention to it," Milac said, "which hurts me a lot."
.
When Milac left the camp in January 1943 - he was lucky enough to be released early by the Italians - he was so weak and emaciated that he could not climb the ladder of the boat that took him back to the mainland.
.
Now a retired librarian in the United States, Milac in 2002 published "Resistance, Imprisonment and Forced Labor," a memoir of his time in the camp and other World War II experiences.
.
Today in Rab there are only a few scattered traces of the concentration camp.
.
A series of stone structures built with prison labor have been refurbished and are used as part of a mental asylum.
.
Grapes and corn grow where the prisoners' tents once stood. And a moss-covered stone tablet by the side of the road reads: "This is the concentration camp where many people lost their lives in terrible circumstances."
.
Down the road is a larger memorial with individual gravestones and a stainless steel plaque inscribed with hundreds of names.
.
The memorial was built in 1953 with prison labor from Goli Otok, the island where opponents of the Tito regime were imprisoned in Communist times.
.
The tragic irony of political prisoners building a monument to victims of Fascism is not lost on Jezernik, the Slovene professor. He said he once interviewed a man who was a prisoner of the Italians in Rab and subsequently a political prisoner at Goli Otok who helped build the monument in Rab.
.
"He was building a monument to himself," Jezernik said.
.
Petar Kurelic, a 78-year-old local resident who was born in a house overlooking the camp, said tourists were the main visitors to the memorial these days. Rab, a popular summer resort, is a 20-minute ferry ride from the Croatian mainland.
.
When he was a teenager, he said, Italian soldiers were alternatively kind and cruel, sometimes offering food to Rab residents, other times beating them or worse.
.
But today, Kurelic said the wounds have healed and German and Italian tourists are welcome on the island.
.
"Things change," he said. "The Germans and Italians used to be our enemies and we killed each other. Today we are friends," Kurelic added. "The memories are there, but the hatred is gone."
.
International Herald Tribune RAB, Croatia Metod Milac says he remembers October on this wind-swept island because the nights turned cold and disease spread more quickly.
.
He recalls the cup of thin gruel at mealtime, a soup so watered down that he could count the grains of rice. And he remembered roll call, where Italian soldiers would yell: "Tutti fuori, anche morti!" Everyone out, including the dead.
.
Six decades after the Italian military imprisoned Slovenes, Croats and Jews in a concentration camp on this island, the memories are vivid for the few remaining survivors.
.
But as they reach their final years, the survivors lament that memories are apparently not as sharp across the Italian border. There is a general amnesia about the Rab concentration camp, they say.
.
Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, recently told an Italian newspaper that the fascist government of Benito Mussolini "never killed anyone."
.
"Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile," Berlusconi was quoted as saying in La Voce di Rimini, an Italian newspaper.
.
Those comments angered the Rab survivors as well as others, mostly Slovenes, who endured Italian concentration camps at Treviso, Gonars, Padova and Renicci.
.
Berlusconi's words were condemned by many in Italy and around the world. But survivors of the Rab camp said they fit into a pattern.
.
Italy is often portrayed as having been a somewhat benign fascist power during World War II, a reluctant partner of the Nazi regime. The wartime Italian Army is remembered as hapless and inefficient compared to the ruthlessly brutal German war machine.
.
This is not what the Rab survivors remember.
.
Anton Vratusa, a former prisoner at Rab who went on to be Yugoslavia's ambassador at the United Nations, said that there were four distinct camps at Rab and a place that prisoners darkly referred to as the fifth camp, a cemetery where the hundreds who died of cold, starvation or illness were buried.
.
"The present-day generation in Italy doesn't know or knows very little about the real role of Italy during the Second World War," Vratusa said in a telephone interview.
.
The camps were a collection of more than a thousand open-air tents arrayed across a valley and surrounded by razor wire and guard towers. There was no organized medical care, limited water and very little food.
.
Vratusa and Milac, both Slovenes, said that they believed the Italians intended to kill everyone in the camp by starving them.
.
Yugoslavia at the time was carved up by the Axis powers, with Germany, Italy and Hungary each taking a chunk.
.
The prisoners were generally men suspected of resisting the Italian occupation army or women and children who lived in villages suspected of sympathizing with the resistance.

RAB, Croatia Metod Milac says he remembers October on this wind-swept island because the nights turned cold and disease spread more quickly.
.
He recalls the cup of thin gruel at mealtime, a soup so watered down that he could count the grains of rice. And he remembered roll call, where Italian soldiers would yell: "Tutti fuori, anche morti!" Everyone out, including the dead.
.
Six decades after the Italian military imprisoned Slovenes, Croats and Jews in a concentration camp on this island, the memories are vivid for the few remaining survivors.
.
But as they reach their final years, the survivors lament that memories are apparently not as sharp across the Italian border. There is a general amnesia about the Rab concentration camp, they say.
.
Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, recently told an Italian newspaper that the fascist government of Benito Mussolini "never killed anyone."
.
"Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile," Berlusconi was quoted as saying in La Voce di Rimini, an Italian newspaper.
.
Those comments angered the Rab survivors as well as others, mostly Slovenes, who endured Italian concentration camps at Treviso, Gonars, Padova and Renicci.
.
Berlusconi's words were condemned by many in Italy and around the world. But survivors of the Rab camp said they fit into a pattern.
.
Italy is often portrayed as having been a somewhat benign fascist power during World War II, a reluctant partner of the Nazi regime. The wartime Italian Army is remembered as hapless and inefficient compared to the ruthlessly brutal German war machine.
.
This is not what the Rab survivors remember.
.
Anton Vratusa, a former prisoner at Rab who went on to be Yugoslavia's ambassador at the United Nations, said that there were four distinct camps at Rab and a place that prisoners darkly referred to as the fifth camp, a cemetery where the hundreds who died of cold, starvation or illness were buried.
.
"The present-day generation in Italy doesn't know or knows very little about the real role of Italy during the Second World War," Vratusa said in a telephone interview.
.
The camps were a collection of more than a thousand open-air tents arrayed across a valley and surrounded by razor wire and guard towers. There was no organized medical care, limited water and very little food.
.
Vratusa and Milac, both Slovenes, said that they believed the Italians intended to kill everyone in the camp by starving them.
.
Yugoslavia at the time was carved up by the Axis powers, with Germany, Italy and Hungary each taking a chunk.
.
The prisoners were generally men suspected of resisting the Italian occupation army or women and children who lived in villages suspected of sympathizing with the resistance.
.
Established in July 1942, the camp held a total of about 10,000 people until it was disbanded in September 1943.
.
During winter months in Rab, the death toll rose sharply, mainly because prisoners were not given proper clothing and lived in tents exposed to the cold. Babies and children died first because they were more vulnerable to these brutal conditions.
.
By the time Italy capitulated in 1943, more than 1,200 prisoners had died, according to research by Bozidar Jezernik, a Slovenian historian and dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana. He estimates that the real death toll is around 2,000 when taking into account weakened people who were moved to other camps before they died.
.
More than a hundred of the victims were children under age 10, according to Jezernik, who based his estimate on Italian documents and the records of Slovenian and Croatian church officials.
.
Jews were held separately at Rab and were treated relatively better, survivors said. They had access to radio and newspapers and were better-fed. "We were prisoners; they were protected people," Vratusa said. "We used their assistance."
.
A unique partnership emerged between Jewish prisoners and Slovene and Croat partisans. After the Italians capitulated, a group of young Jewish men who were in decent physical shape joined the emaciated Slovenes to form a military unit - the Rab Brigade, they called it - to fight the German occupying army.
.
The brigade used weapons captured from their Italian prison guards and commandeered several Italian supply ships filled with uniforms, ammunition and food, including copious amount of parmesan cheese, a delicacy for the starved prisoners.
.
Stripped of their arms, the Italian guards were put on a boat and sent away. The Italian colonel in charge of the camp was captured and committed suicide.
.
By the murderous standards of the second world war, Rab was perhaps only a footnote of evil.
.
But Slovenian historians say that Italy's concentration camps deserve at least some mention in the annals of Western European history.
.
"I have checked many encyclopedias," Jezernik said, "and you won't find a single mention of Italian concentration camps."
.
Jezernik said that when he sought files from the Italian national archives in Rome in the 1990's, he was told by officials that most of the documents could not be divulged until 75 years after they were written. This would make them available around 2018.
.
David Wingeate Pike, a Paris-based historian of World War II and a former British intelligence officer in the Balkans, said one reason that Italian war crimes had not been fully investigated was because Allied forces did not have the same incentives to delve into them.
.
"In 1943, after all, Italy was on our side," Pike said. "I suppose the deal was: 'We don't want to know about your crimes but help us win this war.'" There were no trials of Italian war criminals as there were for the Germans and Japanese, Pike said.
.
Today there are perhaps other reasons to play down Italy's crimes. As Slovenia prepares to enter the European Union and Croatia aspires for membership, it is impolitic to dwell on Italy's wartime past.
.
Yet all of this geopolitical reasoning is not what interests the Rab survivors. In the twilight of their lives, they want the story to be told and remembered.
.
"Even in Slovenia they do not pay much attention to it," Milac said, "which hurts me a lot."
.
When Milac left the camp in January 1943 - he was lucky enough to be released early by the Italians - he was so weak and emaciated that he could not climb the ladder of the boat that took him back to the mainland.
.
Now a retired librarian in the United States, Milac in 2002 published "Resistance, Imprisonment and Forced Labor," a memoir of his time in the camp and other World War II experiences.
.
Today in Rab there are only a few scattered traces of the concentration camp.
.
A series of stone structures built with prison labor have been refurbished and are used as part of a mental asylum.
.
Grapes and corn grow where the prisoners' tents once stood. And a moss-covered stone tablet by the side of the road reads: "This is the concentration camp where many people lost their lives in terrible circumstances."
.
Down the road is a larger memorial with individual gravestones and a stainless steel plaque inscribed with hundreds of names.
.
The memorial was built in 1953 with prison labor from Goli Otok, the island where opponents of the Tito regime were imprisoned in Communist times.
.
The tragic irony of political prisoners building a monument to victims of Fascism is not lost on Jezernik, the Slovene professor. He said he once interviewed a man who was a prisoner of the Italians in Rab and subsequently a political prisoner at Goli Otok who helped build the monument in Rab.
.
"He was building a monument to himself," Jezernik said.
.
Petar Kurelic, a 78-year-old local resident who was born in a house overlooking the camp, said tourists were the main visitors to the memorial these days. Rab, a popular summer resort, is a 20-minute ferry ride from the Croatian mainland.
.
When he was a teenager, he said, Italian soldiers were alternatively kind and cruel, sometimes offering food to Rab residents, other times beating them or worse.
.
But today, Kurelic said the wounds have healed and German and Italian tourists are welcome on the island.
.
"Things change," he said. "The Germans and Italians used to be our enemies and we killed each other. Today we are friends," Kurelic added. "The memories are there, but the hatred is gone."
.
International Herald Tribune

< < Back to Start of Article RAB, Croatia Metod Milac says he remembers October on this wind-swept island because the nights turned cold and disease spread more quickly.
.
He recalls the cup of thin gruel at mealtime, a soup so watered down that he could count the grains of rice. And he remembered roll call, where Italian soldiers would yell: "Tutti fuori, anche morti!" Everyone out, including the dead.
.
Six decades after the Italian military imprisoned Slovenes, Croats and Jews in a concentration camp on this island, the memories are vivid for the few remaining survivors.
.
But as they reach their final years, the survivors lament that memories are apparently not as sharp across the Italian border. There is a general amnesia about the Rab concentration camp, they say.
.
Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, recently told an Italian newspaper that the fascist government of Benito Mussolini "never killed anyone."
.
"Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile," Berlusconi was quoted as saying in La Voce di Rimini, an Italian newspaper.
.
Those comments angered the Rab survivors as well as others, mostly Slovenes, who endured Italian concentration camps at Treviso, Gonars, Padova and Renicci.
.
Berlusconi's words were condemned by many in Italy and around the world. But survivors of the Rab camp said they fit into a pattern.
.
Italy is often portrayed as having been a somewhat benign fascist power during World War II, a reluctant partner of the Nazi regime. The wartime Italian Army is remembered as hapless and inefficient compared to the ruthlessly brutal German war machine.
.
This is not what the Rab survivors remember.
.
Anton Vratusa, a former prisoner at Rab who went on to be Yugoslavia's ambassador at the United Nations, said that there were four distinct camps at Rab and a place that prisoners darkly referred to as the fifth camp, a cemetery where the hundreds who died of cold, starvation or illness were buried.
.
"The present-day generation in Italy doesn't know or knows very little about the real role of Italy during the Second World War," Vratusa said in a telephone interview.
.
The camps were a collection of more than a thousand open-air tents arrayed across a valley and surrounded by razor wire and guard towers. There was no organized medical care, limited water and very little food.
.
Vratusa and Milac, both Slovenes, said that they believed the Italians intended to kill everyone in the camp by starving them.
.
Yugoslavia at the time was carved up by the Axis powers, with Germany, Italy and Hungary each taking a chunk.
.
The prisoners were generally men suspected of resisting the Italian occupation army or women and children who lived in villages suspected of sympathizing with the resistance.
.
Established in July 1942, the camp held a total of about 10,000 people until it was disbanded in September 1943.
.
During winter months in Rab, the death toll rose sharply, mainly because prisoners were not given proper clothing and lived in tents exposed to the cold. Babies and children died first because they were more vulnerable to these brutal conditions.
.
By the time Italy capitulated in 1943, more than 1,200 prisoners had died, according to research by Bozidar Jezernik, a Slovenian historian and dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana. He estimates that the real death toll is around 2,000 when taking into account weakened people who were moved to other camps before they died.
.
More than a hundred of the victims were children under age 10, according to Jezernik, who based his estimate on Italian documents and the records of Slovenian and Croatian church officials.
.
Jews were held separately at Rab and were treated relatively better, survivors said. They had access to radio and newspapers and were better-fed. "We were prisoners; they were protected people," Vratusa said. "We used their assistance."
.
A unique partnership emerged between Jewish prisoners and Slovene and Croat partisans. After the Italians capitulated, a group of young Jewish men who were in decent physical shape joined the emaciated Slovenes to form a military unit - the Rab Brigade, they called it - to fight the German occupying army.
.
The brigade used weapons captured from their Italian prison guards and commandeered several Italian supply ships filled with uniforms, ammunition and food, including copious amount of parmesan cheese, a delicacy for the starved prisoners.
.
Stripped of their arms, the Italian guards were put on a boat and sent away. The Italian colonel in charge of the camp was captured and committed suicide.
.
By the murderous standards of the second world war, Rab was perhaps only a footnote of evil.
.
But Slovenian historians say that Italy's concentration camps deserve at least some mention in the annals of Western European history.
.
"I have checked many encyclopedias," Jezernik said, "and you won't find a single mention of Italian concentration camps."
.
Jezernik said that when he sought files from the Italian national archives in Rome in the 1990's, he was told by officials that most of the documents could not be divulged until 75 years after they were written. This would make them available around 2018.
.
David Wingeate Pike, a Paris-based historian of World War II and a former British intelligence officer in the Balkans, said one reason that Italian war crimes had not been fully investigated was because Allied forces did not have the same incentives to delve into them.
.
"In 1943, after all, Italy was on our side," Pike said. "I suppose the deal was: 'We don't want to know about your crimes but help us win this war.'" There were no trials of Italian war criminals as there were for the Germans and Japanese, Pike said.
.
Today there are perhaps other reasons to play down Italy's crimes. As Slovenia prepares to enter the European Union and Croatia aspires for membership, it is impolitic to dwell on Italy's wartime past.
.
Yet all of this geopolitical reasoning is not what interests the Rab survivors. In the twilight of their lives, they want the story to be told and remembered.
.
"Even in Slovenia they do not pay much attention to it," Milac said, "which hurts me a lot."
.
When Milac left the camp in January 1943 - he was lucky enough to be released early by the Italians - he was so weak and emaciated that he could not climb the ladder of the boat that took him back to the mainland.
.
Now a retired librarian in the United States, Milac in 2002 published "Resistance, Imprisonment and Forced Labor," a memoir of his time in the camp and other World War II experiences.
.
Today in Rab there are only a few scattered traces of the concentration camp.
.
A series of stone structures built with prison labor have been refurbished and are used as part of a mental asylum.
.
Grapes and corn grow where the prisoners' tents once stood. And a moss-covered stone tablet by the side of the road reads: "This is the concentration camp where many people lost their lives in terrible circumstances."
.
Down the road is a larger memorial with individual gravestones and a stainless steel plaque inscribed with hundreds of names.
.
The memorial was built in 1953 with prison labor from Goli Otok, the island where opponents of the Tito regime were imprisoned in Communist times.
.
The tragic irony of political prisoners building a monument to victims of Fascism is not lost on Jezernik, the Slovene professor. He said he once interviewed a man who was a prisoner of the Italians in Rab and subsequently a political prisoner at Goli Otok who helped build the monument in Rab.
.
"He was building a monument to himself," Jezernik said.
.
Petar Kurelic, a 78-year-old local resident who was born in a house overlooking the camp, said tourists were the main visitors to the memorial these days. Rab, a popular summer resort, is a 20-minute ferry ride from the Croatian mainland.
.
When he was a teenager, he said, Italian soldiers were alternatively kind and cruel, sometimes offering food to Rab residents, other times beating them or worse.
.
But today, Kurelic said the wounds have healed and German and Italian tourists are welcome on the island.
.
"Things change," he said. "The Germans and Italians used to be our enemies and we killed each other. Today we are friends," Kurelic added. "The memories are there, but the hatred is gone."
.
International Herald Tribune RAB, Croatia Metod Milac says he remembers October on this wind-swept island because the nights turned cold and disease spread more quickly.
.
He recalls the cup of thin gruel at mealtime, a soup so watered down that he could count the grains of rice. And he remembered roll call, where Italian soldiers would yell: "Tutti fuori, anche morti!" Everyone out, including the dead.
.
Six decades after the Italian military imprisoned Slovenes, Croats and Jews in a concentration camp on this island, the memories are vivid for the few remaining survivors.
.
But as they reach their final years, the survivors lament that memories are apparently not as sharp across the Italian border. There is a general amnesia about the Rab concentration camp, they say.
.
Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, recently told an Italian newspaper that the fascist government of Benito Mussolini "never killed anyone."
.
"Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile," Berlusconi was quoted as saying in La Voce di Rimini, an Italian newspaper.
.
Those comments angered the Rab survivors as well as others, mostly Slovenes, who endured Italian concentration camps at Treviso, Gonars, Padova and Renicci.
.
Berlusconi's words were condemned by many in Italy and around the world. But survivors of the Rab camp said they fit into a pattern.
.
Italy is often portrayed as having been a somewhat benign fascist power during World War II, a reluctant partner of the Nazi regime. The wartime Italian Army is remembered as hapless and inefficient compared to the ruthlessly brutal German war machine.
.
This is not what the Rab survivors remember.
.
Anton Vratusa, a former prisoner at Rab who went on to be Yugoslavia's ambassador at the United Nations, said that there were four distinct camps at Rab and a place that prisoners darkly referred to as the fifth camp, a cemetery where the hundreds who died of cold, starvation or illness were buried.
.
"The present-day generation in Italy doesn't know or knows very little about the real role of Italy during the Second World War," Vratusa said in a telephone interview.
.
The camps were a collection of more than a thousand open-air tents arrayed across a valley and surrounded by razor wire and guard towers. There was no organized medical care, limited water and very little food.
.
Vratusa and Milac, both Slovenes, said that they believed the Italians intended to kill everyone in the camp by starving them.
.
Yugoslavia at the time was carved up by the Axis powers, with Germany, Italy and Hungary each taking a chunk.
.
The prisoners were generally men suspected of resisting the Italian occupation army or women and children who lived in villages suspected of sympathizing with the resistance.
.
Established in July 1942, the camp held a total of about 10,000 people until it was disbanded in September 1943.
.
During winter months in Rab, the death toll rose sharply, mainly because prisoners were not given proper clothing and lived in tents exposed to the cold. Babies and children died first because they were more vulnerable to these brutal conditions.
.
By the time Italy capitulated in 1943, more than 1,200 prisoners had died, according to research by Bozidar Jezernik, a Slovenian historian and dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana. He estimates that the real death toll is around 2,000 when taking into account weakened people who were moved to other camps before they died.
.
More than a hundred of the victims were children under age 10, according to Jezernik, who based his estimate on Italian documents and the records of Slovenian and Croatian church officials.
.
Jews were held separately at Rab and were treated relatively better, survivors said. They had access to radio and newspapers and were better-fed. "We were prisoners; they were protected people," Vratusa said. "We used their assistance."
.
A unique partnership emerged between Jewish prisoners and Slovene and Croat partisans. After the Italians capitulated, a group of young Jewish men who were in decent physical shape joined the emaciated Slovenes to form a military unit - the Rab Brigade, they called it - to fight the German occupying army.
.
The brigade used weapons captured from their Italian prison guards and commandeered several Italian supply ships filled with uniforms, ammunition and food, including copious amount of parmesan cheese, a delicacy for the starved prisoners.
.
Stripped of their arms, the Italian guards were put on a boat and sent away. The Italian colonel in charge of the camp was captured and committed suicide.
.
By the murderous standards of the second world war, Rab was perhaps only a footnote of evil.
.
But Slovenian historians say that Italy's concentration camps deserve at least some mention in the annals of Western European history.
.
"I have checked many encyclopedias," Jezernik said, "and you won't find a single mention of Italian concentration camps."
.
Jezernik said that when he sought files from the Italian national archives in Rome in the 1990's, he was told by officials that most of the documents could not be divulged until 75 years after they were written. This would make them available around 2018.
.
David Wingeate Pike, a Paris-based historian of World War II and a former British intelligence officer in the Balkans, said one reason that Italian war crimes had not been fully investigated was because Allied forces did not have the same incentives to delve into them.
.
"In 1943, after all, Italy was on our side," Pike said. "I suppose the deal was: 'We don't want to know about your crimes but help us win this war.'" There were no trials of Italian war criminals as there were for the Germans and Japanese, Pike said.
.
Today there are perhaps other reasons to play down Italy's crimes. As Slovenia prepares to enter the European Union and Croatia aspires for membership, it is impolitic to dwell on Italy's wartime past.
.
Yet all of this geopolitical reasoning is not what interests the Rab survivors. In the twilight of their lives, they want the story to be told and remembered.
.
"Even in Slovenia they do not pay much attention to it," Milac said, "which hurts me a lot."
.
When Milac left the camp in January 1943 - he was lucky enough to be released early by the Italians - he was so weak and emaciated that he could not climb the ladder of the boat that took him back to the mainland.
.
Now a retired librarian in the United States, Milac in 2002 published "Resistance, Imprisonment and Forced Labor," a memoir of his time in the camp and other World War II experiences.
.
Today in Rab there are only a few scattered traces of the concentration camp.
.
A series of stone structures built with prison labor have been refurbished and are used as part of a mental asylum.
.
Grapes and corn grow where the prisoners' tents once stood. And a moss-covered stone tablet by the side of the road reads: "This is the concentration camp where many people lost their lives in terrible circumstances."
.
Down the road is a larger memorial with individual gravestones and a stainless steel plaque inscribed with hundreds of names.
.
The memorial was built in 1953 with prison labor from Goli Otok, the island where opponents of the Tito regime were imprisoned in Communist times.
.
The tragic irony of political prisoners building a monument to victims of Fascism is not lost on Jezernik, the Slovene professor. He said he once interviewed a man who was a prisoner of the Italians in Rab and subsequently a political prisoner at Goli Otok who helped build the monument in Rab.
.
"He was building a monument to himself," Jezernik said.
.
Petar Kurelic, a 78-year-old local resident who was born in a house overlooking the camp, said tourists were the main visitors to the memorial these days. Rab, a popular summer resort, is a 20-minute ferry ride from the Croatian mainland.
.
When he was a teenager, he said, Italian soldiers were alternatively kind and cruel, sometimes offering food to Rab residents, other times beating them or worse.
.
But today, Kurelic said the wounds have healed and German and Italian tourists are welcome on the island.
.
"Things change," he said. "The Germans and Italians used to be our enemies and we killed each other. Today we are friends," Kurelic added. "The memories are there, but the hatred is gone."
.
International Herald Tribune RAB, Croatia Metod Milac says he remembers October on this wind-swept island because the nights turned cold and disease spread more quickly.
.
He recalls the cup of thin gruel at mealtime, a soup so watered down that he could count the grains of rice. And he remembered roll call, where Italian soldiers would yell: "Tutti fuori, anche morti!" Everyone out, including the dead.
.
Six decades after the Italian military imprisoned Slovenes, Croats and Jews in a concentration camp on this island, the memories are vivid for the few remaining survivors.
.
But as they reach their final years, the survivors lament that memories are apparently not as sharp across the Italian border. There is a general amnesia about the Rab concentration camp, they say.
.
Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, recently told an Italian newspaper that the fascist government of Benito Mussolini "never killed anyone."
.
"Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile," Berlusconi was quoted as saying in La Voce di Rimini, an Italian newspaper.
.
Those comments angered the Rab survivors as well as others, mostly Slovenes, who endured Italian concentration camps at Treviso, Gonars, Padova and Renicci.
.
Berlusconi's words were condemned by many in Italy and around the world. But survivors of the Rab camp said they fit into a pattern.
.
Italy is often portrayed as having been a somewhat benign fascist power during World War II, a reluctant partner of the Nazi regime. The wartime Italian Army is remembered as hapless and inefficient compared to the ruthlessly brutal German war machine.
.
This is not what the Rab survivors remember.
.
Anton Vratusa, a former prisoner at Rab who went on to be Yugoslavia's ambassador at the United Nations, said that there were four distinct camps at Rab and a place that prisoners darkly referred to as the fifth camp, a cemetery where the hundreds who died of cold, starvation or illness were buried.
.
"The present-day generation in Italy doesn't know or knows very little about the real role of Italy during the Second World War," Vratusa said in a telephone interview.
.
The camps were a collection of more than a thousand open-air tents arrayed across a valley and surrounded by razor wire and guard towers. There was no organized medical care, limited water and very little food.
.
Vratusa and Milac, both Slovenes, said that they believed the Italians intended to kill everyone in the camp by starving them.
.
Yugoslavia at the time was carved up by the Axis powers, with Germany, Italy and Hungary each taking a chunk.
.
The prisoners were generally men suspected of resisting the Italian occupation army or women and children who lived in villages suspected of sympathizing with the resistance.
.
Established in July 1942, the camp held a total of about 10,000 people until it was disbanded in September 1943.
.
During winter months in Rab, the death toll rose sharply, mainly because prisoners were not given proper clothing and lived in tents exposed to the cold. Babies and children died first because they were more vulnerable to these brutal conditions.
.
By the time Italy capitulated in 1943, more than 1,200 prisoners had died, according to research by Bozidar Jezernik, a Slovenian historian and dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana. He estimates that the real death toll is around 2,000 when taking into account weakened people who were moved to other camps before they died.
.
More than a hundred of the victims were children under age 10, according to Jezernik, who based his estimate on Italian documents and the records of Slovenian and Croatian church officials.
.
Jews were held separately at Rab and were treated relatively better, survivors said. They had access to radio and newspapers and were better-fed. "We were prisoners; they were protected people," Vratusa said. "We used their assistance."
.
A unique partnership emerged between Jewish prisoners and Slovene and Croat partisans. After the Italians capitulated, a group of young Jewish men who were in decent physical shape joined the emaciated Slovenes to form a military unit - the Rab Brigade, they called it - to fight the German occupying army.
.
The brigade used weapons captured from their Italian prison guards and commandeered several Italian supply ships filled with uniforms, ammunition and food, including copious amount of parmesan cheese, a delicacy for the starved prisoners.
.
Stripped of their arms, the Italian guards were put on a boat and sent away. The Italian colonel in charge of the camp was captured and committed suicide.
.
By the murderous standards of the second world war, Rab was perhaps only a footnote of evil.
.
But Slovenian historians say that Italy's concentration camps deserve at least some mention in the annals of Western European history.
.
"I have checked many encyclopedias," Jezernik said, "and you won't find a single mention of Italian concentration camps."
.
Jezernik said that when he sought files from the Italian national archives in Rome in the 1990's, he was told by officials that most of the documents could not be divulged until 75 years after they were written. This would make them available around 2018.
.
David Wingeate Pike, a Paris-based historian of World War II and a former British intelligence officer in the Balkans, said one reason that Italian war crimes had not been fully investigated was because Allied forces did not have the same incentives to delve into them.
.
"In 1943, after all, Italy was on our side," Pike said. "I suppose the deal was: 'We don't want to know about your crimes but help us win this war.'" There were no trials of Italian war criminals as there were for the Germans and Japanese, Pike said.
.


< < Back to Start of Article RAB, Croatia Metod Milac says he remembers October on this wind-swept island because the nights turned cold and disease spread more quickly.
.
He recalls the cup of thin gruel at mealtime, a soup so watered down that he could count the grains of rice. And he remembered roll call, where Italian soldiers would yell: "Tutti fuori, anche morti!" Everyone out, including the dead.
.
Six decades after the Italian military imprisoned Slovenes, Croats and Jews in a concentration camp on this island, the memories are vivid for the few remaining survivors.
.
But as they reach their final years, the survivors lament that memories are apparently not as sharp across the Italian border. There is a general amnesia about the Rab concentration camp, they say.
.
Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, recently told an Italian newspaper that the fascist government of Benito Mussolini "never killed anyone."
.
"Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile," Berlusconi was quoted as saying in La Voce di Rimini, an Italian newspaper.
.
Those comments angered the Rab survivors as well as others, mostly Slovenes, who endured Italian concentration camps at Treviso, Gonars, Padova and Renicci.
.
Berlusconi's words were condemned by many in Italy and around the world. But survivors of the Rab camp said they fit into a pattern.
.
Italy is often portrayed as having been a somewhat benign fascist power during World War II, a reluctant partner of the Nazi regime. The wartime Italian Army is remembered as hapless and inefficient compared to the ruthlessly brutal German war machine.
.
This is not what the Rab survivors remember.
.
Anton Vratusa, a former prisoner at Rab who went on to be Yugoslavia's ambassador at the United Nations, said that there were four distinct camps at Rab and a place that prisoners darkly referred to as the fifth camp, a cemetery where the hundreds who died of cold, starvation or illness were buried.
.
"The present-day generation in Italy doesn't know or knows very little about the real role of Italy during the Second World War," Vratusa said in a telephone interview.
.
The camps were a collection of more than a thousand open-air tents arrayed across a valley and surrounded by razor wire and guard towers. There was no organized medical care, limited water and very little food.
.
Vratusa and Milac, both Slovenes, said that they believed the Italians intended to kill everyone in the camp by starving them.
.
Yugoslavia at the time was carved up by the Axis powers, with Germany, Italy and Hungary each taking a chunk.
.
The prisoners were generally men suspected of resisting the Italian occupation army or women and children who lived in villages suspected of sympathizing with the resistance.
.
Established in July 1942, the camp held a total of about 10,000 people until it was disbanded in September 1943.
.
During winter months in Rab, the death toll rose sharply, mainly because prisoners were not given proper clothing and lived in tents exposed to the cold. Babies and children died first because they were more vulnerable to these brutal conditions.
.
By the time Italy capitulated in 1943, more than 1,200 prisoners had died, according to research by Bozidar Jezernik, a Slovenian historian and dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana. He estimates that the real death toll is around 2,000 when taking into account weakened people who were moved to other camps before they died.
.
More than a hundred of the victims were children under age 10, according to Jezernik, who based his estimate on Italian documents and the records of Slovenian and Croatian church officials.
.
Jews were held separately at Rab and were treated relatively better, survivors said. They had access to radio and newspapers and were better-fed. "We were prisoners; they were protected people," Vratusa said. "We used their assistance."
.
A unique partnership emerged between Jewish prisoners and Slovene and Croat partisans. After the Italians capitulated, a group of young Jewish men who were in decent physical shape joined the emaciated Slovenes to form a military unit - the Rab Brigade, they called it - to fight the German occupying army.
.
The brigade used weapons captured from their Italian prison guards and commandeered several Italian supply ships filled with uniforms, ammunition and food, including copious amount of parmesan cheese, a delicacy for the starved prisoners.
.
Stripped of their arms, the Italian guards were put on a boat and sent away. The Italian colonel in charge of the camp was captured and committed suicide.
.
By the murderous standards of the second world war, Rab was perhaps only a footnote of evil.
.
But Slovenian historians say that Italy's concentration camps deserve at least some mention in the annals of Western European history.
.
"I have checked many encyclopedias," Jezernik said, "and you won't find a single mention of Italian concentration camps."
.
Jezernik said that when he sought files from the Italian national archives in Rome in the 1990's, he was told by officials that most of the documents could not be divulged until 75 years after they were written. This would make them available around 2018.
.
David Wingeate Pike, a Paris-based historian of World War II and a former British intelligence officer in the Balkans, said one reason that Italian war crimes had not been fully investigated was because Allied forces did not have the same incentives to delve into them.
.
"In 1943, after all, Italy was on our side," Pike said. "I suppose the deal was: 'We don't want to know about your crimes but help us win this war.'" There were no trials of Italian war criminals as there were for the Germans and Japanese, Pike said.
.
Today there are perhaps other reasons to play down Italy's crimes. As Slovenia prepares to enter the European Union and Croatia aspires for membership, it is impolitic to dwell on Italy's wartime past.
.
Yet all of this geopolitical reasoning is not what interests the Rab survivors. In the twilight of their lives, they want the story to be told and remembered.
.
"Even in Slovenia they do not pay much attention to it," Milac said, "which hurts me a lot."
.
When Milac left the camp in January 1943 - he was lucky enough to be released early by the Italians - he was so weak and emaciated that he could not climb the ladder of the boat that took him back to the mainland.
.
Now a retired librarian in the United States, Milac in 2002 published "Resistance, Imprisonment and Forced Labor," a memoir of his time in the camp and other World War II experiences.
.
Today in Rab there are only a few scattered traces of the concentration camp.
.
A series of stone structures built with prison labor have been refurbished and are used as part of a mental asylum.
.
Grapes and corn grow where the prisoners' tents once stood. And a moss-covered stone tablet by the side of the road reads: "This is the concentration camp where many people lost their lives in terrible circumstances."
.
Down the road is a larger memorial with individual gravestones and a stainless steel plaque inscribed with hundreds of names.
.
The memorial was built in 1953 with prison labor from Goli Otok, the island where opponents of the Tito regime were imprisoned in Communist times.
.
The tragic irony of political prisoners building a monument to victims of Fascism is not lost on Jezernik, the Slovene professor. He said he once interviewed a man who was a prisoner of the Italians in Rab and subsequently a political prisoner at Goli Otok who helped build the monument in Rab.
.
"He was building a monument to himself," Jezernik said.
.
Petar Kurelic, a 78-year-old local resident who was born in a house overlooking the camp, said tourists were the main visitors to the memorial these days. Rab, a popular summer resort, is a 20-minute ferry ride from the Croatian mainland.
.
When he was a teenager, he said, Italian soldiers were alternatively kind and cruel, sometimes offering food to Rab residents, other times beating them or worse.
.
But today, Kurelic said the wounds have healed and German and Italian tourists are welcome on the island.
.
"Things change," he said. "The Germans and Italians used to be our enemies and we killed each other. Today we are friends," Kurelic added. "The memories are there, but the hatred is gone."
.
International Herald Tribune RAB, Croatia Metod Milac says he remembers October on this wind-swept island because the nights turned cold and disease spread more quickly.
.
He recalls the cup of thin gruel at mealtime, a soup so watered down that he could count the grains of rice. And he remembered roll call, where Italian soldiers would yell: "Tutti fuori, anche morti!" Everyone out, including the dead.
.
Six decades after the Italian military imprisoned Slovenes, Croats and Jews in a concentration camp on this island, the memories are vivid for the few remaining survivors.
.
But as they reach their final years, the survivors lament that memories are apparently not as sharp across the Italian border. There is a general amnesia about the Rab concentration camp, they say.
.
Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister of Italy, recently told an Italian newspaper that the fascist government of Benito Mussolini "never killed anyone."
.
"Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile," Berlusconi was quoted as saying in La Voce di Rimini, an Italian newspaper.
.
Those comments angered the Rab survivors as well as others, mostly Slovenes, who endured Italian concentration camps at Treviso, Gonars, Padova and Renicci.
.
Berlusconi's words were condemned by many in Italy and around the world. But survivors of the Rab camp said they fit into a pattern.
.
Italy is often portrayed as having been a somewhat benign fascist power during World War II, a reluctant partner of the Nazi regime. The wartime Italian Army is remembered as hapless and inefficient compared to the ruthlessly brutal German war machine.
.
This is not what the Rab survivors remember.
.
Anton Vratusa, a former prisoner at Rab who went on to be Yugoslavia's ambassador at the United Nations, said that there were four distinct camps at Rab and a place that prisoners darkly referred to as the fifth camp, a cemetery where the hundreds who died of cold, starvation or illness were buried.
.
"The present-day generation in Italy doesn't know or knows very little about the real role of Italy during the Second World War," Vratusa said in a telephone interview.
.
The camps were a collection of more than a thousand open-air tents arrayed across a valley and surrounded by razor wire and guard towers. There was no organized medical care, limited water and very little food.
.
Vratusa and Milac, both Slovenes, said that they believed the Italians intended to kill everyone in the camp by starving them.
.
Yugoslavia at the time was carved up by the Axis powers, with Germany, Italy and Hungary each taking a chunk.
.
The prisoners were generally men suspected of resisting the Italian occupation army or women and children who lived in villages suspected of sympathizing with the resistance.
.
Established in July 1942, the camp held a total of about 10,000 people until it was disbanded in September 1943.
.
During winter months in Rab, the death toll rose sharply, mainly because prisoners were not given proper clothing and lived in tents exposed to the cold. Babies and children died first because they were more vulnerable to these brutal conditions.
.
By the time Italy capitulated in 1943, more than 1,200 prisoners had died, according to research by Bozidar Jezernik, a Slovenian historian and dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana. He estimates that the real death toll is around 2,000 when taking into account weakened people who were moved to other camps before they died.
.
More than a hundred of the victims were children under age 10, according to Jezernik, who based his estimate on Italian documents and the records of Slovenian and Croatian church officials.
.
Jews were held separately at Rab and were treated relatively better, survivors said. They had access to radio and newspapers and were better-fed. "We were prisoners; they were protected people," Vratusa said. "We used their assistance."
.
A unique partnership emerged between Jewish prisoners and Slovene and Croat partisans. After the Italians capitulated, a group of young Jewish men who were in decent physical shape joined the emaciated Slovenes to form a military unit - the Rab Brigade, they called it - to fight the German occupying army.
.
The brigade used weapons captured from their Italian prison guards and commandeered several Italian supply ships filled with uniforms, ammunition and food, including copious amount of parmesan cheese, a delicacy for the starved prisoners.
.
Stripped of their arms, the Italian guards were put on a boat and sent away. The Italian colonel in charge of the camp was captured and committed suicide.
.
By the murderous standards of the second world