Dozens and dozens of prisons and concentration camps are those that the fascist regime imported, so to speak, into the countries it invaded. Prisons and camps in fact, we find them in today’s Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Greece and of course Yugoslavia. Hundreds and hundreds of people were persecuted and often killed by the fascist regime. A regime that repeated in the invaded territories, what was done in Italy in the persecution of opponents with the aggravating circumstance of building fascist concentration camps, A black page often forgotten. Taking the Yugoslav case as an example, we talked about it with Alessandra Kersevan, historian and author of research on the subject. Kersevan, what happened after Italy invaded Yugoslavia?

KERSEVAN ANSWER: Let us say that after the aggression of 1941, the eastern border of Italy had moved far to the east, practically reaching beyond Ljubljana. So we have the beginning of the liberation struggle and already in the autumn of 1941 the military war tribunal is functioning in Ljubljana and the first death sentences are handed down. And in the winter of 1941-42 we have very extensive and very drastic repressive measures. Particularly in February 1942, in one night, the Sardinian Grenadier Regiment surrounds the city of Ljubljana with a fence of about 35 kilometres in order to carry out raids. All adult men in Ljubljana are arrested and subjected to controls. And they were first locked up in what could have been the Ljubljana jails, which were evidently not sufficient, and then the barracks that had belonged to the Yugoslav army were also used, which had evidently remained unused until then because the Yugoslav army had surrendered already in April 1941.So you have these prisons, let’s say improvised, but soon even these turn out to be insufficient and thus the situation of these prisoners who remain even for weeks in the barracks, practically lying or sitting on the floor eating very little with very little possibility of any form of hygiene etc. The conditions became very serious and so the command of the Second Army, the Intendancy, decided to transfer these prisoners to concentration camps. The first concentration camps were barracks in the Soča Valley area and then, since the territory in which these barracks were located in the Soča Valley was partisan fighting territory, they decided to transfer these prisoners to a camp within the old Italian borders. This term that was used in military documents, were those, practically, that had been before the First World War. And so they identified the Gonars camp, which is a town about 20 kilometres south of Udine, on the Friulian plain, and we have to imagine it with all the trappings of a concentration camp. That is, wooden barracks surrounded by a high fence with turrets with machine-gun nests, floodlights for night lighting, and then in March 1942, General Roatta, General Robotti and the others who commanded the army in this area, decided to transform it from a camp for prisoners of war into a camp for internees. And so in March of ‘42 they started arriving by train, from Ljubljana it then passed through Aurisina and stopped in a village near Gonars, Bagnaria Arsa, which is about 5 kilometres from Gonars, they arrived on foot, chained and then tied up with slaves, they arrived in a long procession getting off the train and arrived in the Gonars camp. In June of ‘42 there were already 4,200 people in the camp. In a camp that had a capacity of 2,500, so there was already overcrowding. which would become even more crowded because by the end of September ‘42 there were 6,500 people. During the summer of 1942, the raids that had taken place in various towns in Slovenia and the Ljubljana province, turned into actual raids of the territory with very serious measures such as the burning of villages and the displacement of the entire population. In the meantime, many other concentration camps were established besides Gonars. In the summer of ‘42 there were the camps in the Italian territory of Monigo di Treviso, Chiesanuova di Padova, or in Tuscany at Renicci di Anghiari in the province of Arezzo, then Cairo Montenotte in the province of Savona and then Fraschette di Alatri in the province of Frosinone and then many other camps in Umbria, Colfiorito Pietrafitta, Tavernelle, and these were mainly for Montenegrin internees. While the others I mentioned were mainly Slovenians and Croatians. Then many other camps, these are the main ones, those that each had thousands and thousands of internees. But then there was a whole geography, let’s say spread over the Italian territory of many other small concentration camps run, perhaps not by the Ministry of War but by the Ministry of the Interior, located I don’t know in disused factories, spinning mills or even old schools. And with a few dozen, a few hundred internees. So let’s say by 1942 and there is a whole panorama in all Italian regions of small or large concentration camps for civilian and Yugoslav internees. If in the first phase of these round-ups mainly adult men aged 14/15 years and over were arrested and interned, then with the round-ups in the summer of 1942 other categories of people were also arrested and interned: women, old people and children. So in the Gonars camp, for example, the one I mentioned, the first one used, thousands of women with children and old people arrived in the winter of 1942-43. In addition to the camps I mentioned, many camps were opened, in conditions, if you can say even worse, on the occupied Dalmatian islands after 1941. Particularly in Rab, Rab as the Croatian name for the island near Rijeka, up to 10,000 people were interned, in this case, mainly women, old women and children, and then other places in the Dalmatian islands, in the territory of, let’s say, the eastern Adriatic. Melada, then the island of Antivari and then a whole panorama of concentration camps and therefore internment also on the other side, let’s say the Adriatic, of the Italian peninsula. All of these were under the command of the Italian army or the Ministry of the Interior, say the fascist regime, and thousands of people died in these camps in a year or so. In the Gonars camp, for example, 500 people died in a year and a half of operation, and the causes were basically hunger and poor living conditions. In the island of Rab, at least 1,500 people died, and similar numbers in many other places, which I mentioned earlier.

 

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: Is it known how many people fascism persecuted and killed in Yugoslavia, is there an estimate between people put in prison and people deported and killed?

RESPONSE KERSEVAN: Yes, so as far as concentration camps are concerned, between 120 and 150 thousand people were interned. This difference, let’s say, is due to different methods, probably of calculation. 150,000 is the figure given by the then Yugoslavia and of course also took into account the studies of Yugoslav historians. it is a difference that is not particularly significant in my opinion because in any case 120,000 is already a very large number, taking into account that this whole affair ended on 8 September ‘43. If fascism had not fallen, there had not been the armistice and the Italian policy of aggression against other countries had continued until the end of the war, the numbers would have been even higher. Of these 120,000 or more people, between 7 and 11,000 died. The difficulty in calculating the numbers is also due to the fact that these internees were continuously moved from one camp to another. And many also died in the transfers and then also in the first phase of internment. The camp and district military commands etc. also kept track of the numbers of both deportees and those who died. And at a certain point, however, all these calculations in the most heated phase, let’s say in the last months, the count was not made in such a precise manner. So you don’t have completely certain data, but the numbers are more or less like this, thousands of people. And the cause in all these cases is death from starvation and diseases resulting from starvation. So deaths due to extremely difficult living conditions.

 

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: But was the system the same as the Nazi system? That is, they were first put in prison, then deported to these camps and made to work, to die of work, or were they different?  

KERSEVAN ANSWER: In the Italian concentrationary system, which was mainly managed by the army as far as large numbers were concerned, there was no provision for the use of internees I don’t know in factory work…. In Friuli there was a work camp, for example, to which mostly Slovenian peasants were sent in the area of Fossalon di Grado, so let’s say in the southern part of the region. About 300 to 500 people were interned, who basically worked in the fields. Then I don’t know, in Umbria, for example, internees were used for the construction of a railway at Tavernelle, then also in a small mine. But in general the internees in the camps were left to do nothing. In fact, many also remember that one of the problems, it may seem unbelievable, but it was also the boredom of the days that passed in the same way without being able to often, especially those who were educated people who had jobs, let’s say even intellectual jobs, but also for those who were used to manual work, inactivity in some way was a problem. Then combined with poor diet and disease, parasites, etc., it became, in short, a situation… And then of course the prisons in Italy were also used. For example, I remember once being in Foligno to give a conference and there they told me that the prisons in Foligno had been overcrowded during that period of 1942-1943, due to the arrival, even in that case, of, for example, Slovenian women. Because also many women were naturally interned, not only women who had been arrested in the villages rounded up to liberate the population, but also women who had been engaged in the liberation struggle. And then also, for example, on the islands. The islands that had been the islands of confinement during fascism were also interned there. So a widespread reality that was somehow first forgotten, then silenced, now it is talked about a little more.

 

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: Why were they taken from Yugoslavia to Italian prisons or Italian concentration camps?

KERSEVAN ANSWER: Because the Italian army had initially interned them even in the occupied territories. But given the strength of the Yugoslav liberation struggle, it became very difficult to control these camps. Even, for example, during the train transport from the Ljubljana area to the Gonars or Renicci camp, in the part of the territory inhabited by Slovenes, the partisans often managed to stop the train and free some of the internees. So let’s say the Italian army had big problems controlling the territory. In fact, the large raids, the round-ups that were carried out, were aimed at ridding the territory of the population. Because the purpose of these concentration camps in the programmes of the Italian army at least, apart from those that were recognised as dangerous, as far as the mass of the population that was deported was concerned, was not so much to keep them in the concentration camps, but to then sort them out in various parts of Italy. That is to say, the aim was to free the territory from the population, so that there would be no support from the population for the partisans and these deported populations would then have to be sorted out in various regions of Italy to be in the future, if Italy had won together with Germany evidently, assimilated into the Italian population and thus solve the problem of the existence of non-Italian populations in the annexed territories. And so there was a grand plan that naturally could not be realised in its entirety, both because there was however this important partisan struggle that opposed these plans and then because in short Italy in ‘43 was already in full crisis. The Italian army was struggling to control all these territories, so it could not have proceeded with further mass deportations as it had done in 1942. Although the deportations even continued, this is an interesting thing to add, that the deportations did not end with 25 July 1943, i.e. with the fall of Mussolini. But they continued under the Badoglio government, still between 25 July and 8 September. And there were deportations from the area, even from Venezia Giulia, that is from the territory annexed to Italy after the First World War in the part inhabited by Slovenes, by the special inspectorate of public security in Trieste, of about two thousand people in the period between 25 July and 8 September. And these were deported mainly to the concentration camps in Cairo Montenotte in the province of Savona the males and in Fraschette di Alatri in the province of Frosinone, especially the women and children.

 

QUESTION BERTOLUCCI: They were obviously only fascist camps not Nazi camps

KERSEVAN ANSWER: They were under Italian command, decided by the Italian army, by the fascist regime. In fact, the existence of these camps ended more or less after the 8th of September, that is, after the Italian armistice. But if I may say, over the years I have gone to many regions of Italy to give lectures on this subject and I can say that I still find it astonishing because in the collective consciousness of Italians, there is still, let’s say, no place for this reality of these crimes committed by Fascism and the Italian army during the Second World War.