Authors:
Oto Luthar, Urška Strle, Marta Verginella
Year:
2023
The internment of Slovenian men and women in Italian Fascist camps—one of the most violent and hence the most traumatic chapters of the twentieth-century Slovenian history—has until recently remained a little known and severely under-researched topic. Even though those deported to Italian internment camps at Gonars in the Province of Udine and as far as the small island of Ustica in the southern Tyrrhenian Sea represent “no more than” one-tenth of all the casualties of the Second World War on Slovenian soil, they too deserve to be the subject of in-depth and comprehensive historical research. Not least also because historical studies conducted so far have rarely relied on accounts provided by the returnees.
Centering on the above-mentioned accounts, the authors of this study believe that their research, and especially its rich collection of testimonies, will give the readers an intimate insight into the deportees’ ordeals. It will help to understand why and when they were arrested by Fascist authorities, why and how they were interrogated and condemned as well as why some were sent to prison and others to internment camps—including that on the island of Rab, where the unbearable internment regime was particularly deadly in the female section of the camp.
The fate of women and children on Rab, who suffered from the deprivation of food and water as well as from atrocious hygiene conditions at the hands of indifferent guards, will prove particularly revealing for all those less versed in these chapters of the Second World War in Europe. Besides, the developments that took place in this camp will provide the unknowing reader with a better understanding of the problem concerning Italy’s denial of its war crimes. It is through this denial that the memory is being erased of the Fascist Italy’s (c)overt racism toward the Slovenian and Croatian inhabitants of the occupied territory.
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Authors
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Publishing House:
Založba ZRC
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Publisher
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ISBN
978-961-05-0692-8
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Year
2023
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Series
Language(s)
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Specifications
hardback 14,5 × 21,5 cm 380 pages
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