In 1953, the Kampor memorial cemetery was dedicated to the victims of the Kampor camp on the Adriatic Island of Rab, located in the Kvarner Gulf. Between 1942 and 1943, the Italian occupying forces held up to 15,000 people at the camp; about 2,000 perished.
History
In early 1941, German troops and their allies occupied Yugoslavia. The occupiers divided the county among themselves, and the Adriatic coast was occupied by fascist Italy. The Italian authorities established several camps on the Island of Rab, just off the northern Croatian coast of the Adriatic Sea, from the summer of 1942 on. The prisoners held at the camps were mostly Slovenes and Croats suspected of being partisans - frequently entire families were imprisoned. The conditions at the camps were insufficient in all respects: the prisoners had to sleep in tents, food and drinking water were severely rationed. Presumably about 2,000 people died of illnesses and hunger during the one year in which the camp near Kampor was in operation. There were about 3,500 Jews among the prisoners, who were accommodated in a separate part of the camp. The Italian occupation authorities withstood German demands to hand over the Jewish prisoners - who would have been annihilated by the National Socialists - instead keeping them on the Island of Rab until the camp was dismantled. The camp was shut down in September 1943, following Mussolini's flight and the armistice between Italy and the Allies. The Jewish and Slovenian prisoners joined partisan groups and left the island heading for the mainland. About 200 elderly, ill and weak prisoners stayed behind. In late autumn 1943 they came under German occupation. In March 1944, the Gestapo arrested the Jews who had remained on the Island of Rab and deported them to the Auschwitz extermination camp.
Victims
Between the summer of 1942 and autumn 1943, about 15,000 people were held on Rab. In autumn 1942, there were about 10,000 prisoners at the Kampor camp. There is some uncertainty concerning the number of victims: according to some sources, 2,000 people died of the catastrophic conditions at the camp. Despite the high death toll, the camp on the Island of Rab was not a death camp. Though the conditions at the camp were terrible, many of the inmates - especially Jews - were saved from deportation by their imprisonment, since the Italians would not turn them in to the Germans.
After the First World War Croatia was part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In 1929 the Kingdom became Yugoslavia, a dictatorship established by King Alexander I (1888–1934) with the overall support of Serbian officers. The Croatian nationalist Ante Pavelić (1889–1959) left the country and fought the monarchist dictatorship with his terrorist underground movement »Ustasha« from a base in fascist Italy. In April 1941, Yugoslavia was occupied by German troops and their Italian, Hungarian and Bulgarian allies and the state was split into a number of annexed and occupied territories serving as puppet states of the Nazi regime. The »Independent State of Croatia« was established as a result, in reality a puppet state of the Third Reich led by the regime of terror of the Croatian Ustasha and their »Poglavnik« (leader) Pavelić. The policy of persecution and extermination adopted by this regime was primarily directed against the large Serbian minority as well as Jews, Roma and religious and ideological opponents. In summer 1941, the ruling authorities in Jasenovac established the largest concentration camp in the Balkans. More than 80,000 people met a violent death here, including around 48,000 Serbs, 13,000 Jews, 16,000 Roma and over 4,000 Croats.
Summer 1941 also marked the start of the armed campaign of the communist partisans led by Marshal Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980). By 1942-43 Tito’s troops had gained control over a large part of Croatia and in 1944-45 they took the whole of Yugoslavia. Pavelić fled and Tito became head of state. He had tens of thousands of former opponents and civilians – including many Croats – persecuted and murdered.
Prior to the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991, around 6,000 highly diverse memorial sites had been established in Croatia commemorating the »victims of fascism« and the resistance. They were dedicated to victims of the terror regime of the Croatian Ustasha, of the German and Italian occupation, but also of the royalist Serbian militia (Chetniks). The victims were generally remembered as »patriots«, the state version of events being that all victims had been persecuted and killed by »treacherous fascists«. Fallen or murdered members of the resistance, above all leading partisans and members of the Croatian and Yugoslavian communist parties, were also commemorated.
After Croatia declared independence in summer 1991, the Serb-dominated Yugoslav People’s Army launched a war against the country, which was to last until the end of 1995. During this war, the Jasenovac memorial site was occupied and badly damaged by Serbs and the museum was looted. Once Croatia had regained Jasenovac, President Franjo Tudjman (1922–1999) sought to establish a memorial site there to remember all Croatian victims of the Second World War and the 1991-1995 war. However, it was not until 2006 that a permanent exhibition on the history of the camp was opened on the site together with an education centre. There have been conflicting approaches to the Second World War in Croatia since 1991. By 2000, over 3,000 sites of memory, including graves, had been damaged and removed from the public domain. Other parts of the country continue to remember the legacy of the »anti-fascist people’s liberation campaign«.
The most important memorial site of the country is still Jasenovac, where there have been decades of controversy around the exact number of victims and their ethnic composition. By now some leading Croatian politicians acknowledged the responsibility of today’s Croatia for the crimes of the Ustasha in speeches at the historical site.
In 2022, a new holocaust memorial was inaugurated in Zagreb that commemorates above all those Jews who had been deported from the capital city.
Remembrance
The Kampor memorial cemetery was designed by the Slovenian architect Edvard Ravnikar in 1953. There are several grave groups at the cemetery, an open stone hall with a mosaic and a stone column. The mosaic depicts the prisoners' lives. The Italian foundation »Fondazione Ferramonti«, which is dedicated to researching the history of Italian camps under Fascism, set up a memorial plaque with an inscription in Italian and Croatian on the cemetery wall in 1998. In 2002, a metal plate bearing the names of 1,433 victims of the Kampor camp was added to the complex. Behind each name is a five-pointed star as a symbol of resistance.
