Croatian Jews-Pago Island 1941

[Andy H]

Whilst reading an article called 'Rescuing Croatia's Jews' by Benjamin Wood in Octobers WW2 magazine, it mentions evidence of atrocities carried out on the island of Pago.

The Italians took over two camps on the island in September'41. The soldiers discovered the bodies of 407men, 293 women and 91 children, many of them stabbed and hacked to death.

Can anyone throw any light on these camps etc?

Andy H

[Locke]

Check this link Andy: http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... c&start=15

BTW, Pago is Italian name for the island and Croatian name is Pag.

Regards,
Polona

[Andy H]

Thank you Locke for the link.

Reading through that thread and the links within, they describe Pago or Pag island C.Camps in a singular sense, yet the article I read stated there were 2 such C.Camps on the island.

Could this just be a an error of grouping both C.Camps into a singular entity for admin/statistical reasons, or was there only one C.Camp on the island?

Andy H

[michael mills]

Who had run the camp or camps before Italian forces took them over?

The Croatian Government? Local people?

Were the vicitms positively identified?

I have read that a lot of Croatian Jews fled to the Adriatic Islands occupied by Italian forces precisely because they would be safe there.

[Andy H]

The camps on Pago were run by the Ustase.

Following reports of the Pago atrocities, many Jews far and wide headed for the Italian controlled area's as word spread that they were intervening against Ustase units involved in the killing/movement of Jews.

The Italians at one stage had some 3500 Jews housed safely on the island of Arbe. When Italy surrendered in '43, all bar 204 (mostly sick & elderly) joined the Partisans. Some 275 would die fighting, whilst those 204 were sent to Auschwitz

Andy H

[Locke]

Some links to your post, Andy
http://www.croatiaemb.org/in%20the%20sp ... bition.htm
http://www.balkanpeace.org/hed/archive/ ... 6077.shtml

About 13000 prisoners passed through camp Kampor on the island of Rab (Arbe), and more than 4000 died. Majority of prisoners were Slovenes.

Best,
Polona

[DrG]

I've read in an article that in a book (Amleto Ballarini, Mihael Sobolevski, "Le vittime di nazionalità italiana a Fiume e dintorni (1939-1947) / Zrtve talijanske nacionalnosti u Rijeci i okolici (1939.-1947.)", Società di Studi Fiumani, Roma / Hvratski Iinstitut za Povijest, Zagreb, 2002, ISBN 887125239X) the total of people died in Arbe/Rab was 1,276. But since the central topic of that book is not Arbe but the Italian victims of Fiume, I would like to know more details. The book is written both in Italian and Croat and is a publication sponsored by the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali.

[Locke]

My source is website vojska.net

Kampor - Rab Island - Italian - Formed in early 1942, closed with capitulation of Italy in September 1943. Interned larger number of Jews, Croats and Slovenians. Through camp some 13,000 prisoners has passed. According to official Italian records 1267 persons has died, 1079 marked graves. According to Commission for determining crimes for Croatian littoral, number of killed is 4641.

http://www.vojska.net/ww2/camps/death/default.asp
And yes, official Italian numbers as stated above are 1267 people.
I don't know.. does anybody have any sources about the numbers stated by this Comission?

Best,
Polona

[Andy H]

About 13000 prisoners passed through camp Kampor on the island of Rab (Arbe), and more than 4000 died. Majority of prisoners were Slovenes.

This is post Italian surrender I presume

Andy H

[Locke]

About 13000 prisoners passed through camp Kampor on the island of Rab (Arbe), and more than 4000 died. Majority of prisoners were Slovenes.

This is post Italian surrender I presume

Andy H

No, when Italy surrendered the camp was closed. But the number of deaths might be about 1,200 - I found that number on most websites.

Regards,
Polona

[Allen Milcic]

Thank you Locke for the link.

Reading through that thread and the links within, they describe Pago or Pag island C.Camps in a singular sense, yet the article I read stated there were 2 such C.Camps on the island.

Could this just be a an error of grouping both C.Camps into a singular entity for admin/statistical reasons, or was there only one C.Camp on the island?

Andy H

Hi Andy:

The Slano Camp was located on the island of Pag (Pago in Italian), one of the handful of Adriatic islands that were did not become part of Italy in 1941 but was part of the Croatian puppet state NDH. The camp was founded and run by the Ustase, and had separate male and female sub-camps - this is where the reference to '2' camps on Pag probably comes from. The name 'Slano' means "salty", as the camp was located in the area of a former sea-salt factory.

Regarding the camp on the island of Rab (Arbe in Italian), this camp was founded by the Italian government on one of the Adriatic islands that came under Italian control in 1941 and remained so until September of 1943. The camp did not continue its existence under the NDH government that gained control of the island after the surrender of Fascist Italy. The following is an article pertaining to that camp, published originally in the International Herald Tribune:

Survivors of war camp lament Italy's amnesia
Thomas Fuller/IHT
International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, October 29, 2003

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

Best regards,
Allen/

[michael mills]

I wonder if the International Herald Tribune is not mixing a number of different things up.

The Jews on Rab Islands must have been refugees from the Croatian mainland who were under Italian protection, whereas the Slovenes must have been prisoners.

Is it likely that the Jewish refugees and the Slovene prisoners would have been held at the same camp? That seems doubtful to me.

The article refers to German occupation of Rab after the German surrender. Was it German nor Croat occupation?

The account of the formation of partisan bands after the Italian surrender in September 1943 contains a number of anomalies. The motivation for the Jewish refugees on Rab taking to the hills and becoming partisans is obvious; once the Italians had left and the island was occupied bu either the Germans or the Croats, their lives were in danger.

But the concept of Jews joining the former Slovene prisoners is puzzling. The Jews had been friendly to the Italians, and had been protected by them, whereas the Sovenes had been the enemies of the Italians, and had been badly treated by them. It seems to me that they would have made very unlikely allies.

No doubt the Slovene prisoners were glad to see their Italian guards leave after the Italian surrender, and helped them on their way. But I cannot believe that the Jewish refugees wanted them to leave, since the Italian army was their sole protection.

[DrG]

Michael, your points are very interesting.
About the presence of both Jews and partizans (and sometimes their families: in Dec. 1942 there were 5,349 men, 176 women and 4 children) in the same camp it's not an anomaly: it was rather common in Italian concentration camps to keep both protettivi (literally: "those that are protected" or "defended", usually families of collaborationists and Jews) and repressivi ("those that are reprimed" or "punished") inmates. In Arbe, on 27 June 1943, there were 2,232 inmates: 2,163 repressivi and 69 protettivi (2,174 catholics, 9 orthodox, 46 Jews, 3 Muslim). Shortly before 25 July 1943 2,661 Jews (all protettivi, coming from other camps that didn't provide the same safeness from the Croat authorities) were in Arbe, and on 16 Aug. 1943 they were freed: those who wanted were allowed to leave the camp and move to Italy.

[Allen Milcic]

The article refers to German occupation of Rab after the German surrender.

I presume you meant "after the Italian surrender"?

Was it German nor Croat occupation?

Rab was one of the territories that Italy had annexed in 1941 (fall of the Yugoslav Kingdom) that was then absorbed into the NDH with Italy's September 1943 surrender (along with a number of other Adriatic islands and Dalmatia).

Allen/

[michael mills]

Many thanks to DrG and Allen Milcic for their answers to my queries.