Italian Fascist camps in the memories of Slovenian men and women

The project deals with the memory of the camp experience of Slovenian men and women as a consequence of the Italian occupation of the Slovenian-inhabited territory in the first half of the 20th century. The idea for the project stems from the belief that Italian Fascism and especially the chapter on deportations in Fascist Italian camps are given too little attention in current (professional and everyday) European discussions on totalitarian regimes of the 20th century.

The aim of the project is to collect oral and other autobiographic and archival sources in order to shed light on the subject that is still largely unexplored in Slovenian historiography and has only recently begun to receive attention of Italian historiographers, and also remains obscure to many international scholars. By collecting life stories of male and female internees in Italian camps who are presently reaching a very old age, we will save from oblivion the experiences and traumas that during World War II marked the lives of a significant part of Slovenian civilian population.

At the same time we will endeavour to collect documentary materials scattered throughout Slovenian and Italian archives that testify to the beginning, functioning and ideology of the Italian camp system, which, in addition to the Slovenes, was also directed against the Croatian population. The research on the aforementioned subject will yield an original Slovenian contribution to studies of World War II in Europe, as well draw attention to the dynamics of memory and amnesia in post-war society, both in the context of the Socialist Yugoslav state and Italian Western Democracy. Last but not least the research intends to strengthen the theoretically and methodologically innovative streams of Slovenian historiography by using approaches from “new cultural history” and “new oral history.”