Guardians of the Spoon: Shedding Light on Italy's Past

Martina Košak’s silver spoon. Martina was a nurse on the island of Rab. She was with the children who were lying on the floor. They had no water, no paper to place under the children, who had such terrible diarrhea that the floor beneath them became infested with worms. She said it felt so terrible that as a woman and a nurse she could not bear it, could not endure it. © Manca Juvan

In 1942, a sudden violent storm flooded the concentration camp site on the island of Rab. It only took moments, according to survivors’ testimonies, for the tents to become soaked and be blown away. Children were found the next morning on the barbed wire and in the nearby spring. Dead. Drowned. © Manca Juvan

Herman Janez. "I was interned as a seven-year-old boy, together with my family, at the Bakar, Rab and Gonars camps. I survived, but as an orphan. My worst experience – worse even than seeing my father for the last time – was in Gonars, when I heard that he had died. It was the biggest blow I’d ever known. I went back to my bunk bed in barrack no. 21 and cried, cried, cried. I became so weak I had to be taken to the infirmary." © Manca Juvan

A replica of a whip on Rab island, Croatia. The whip was used by general Cuiuli, who was nicknamed serpente (snake), and was the commander of the Rab concentration camp, where more than 1,400 people died of hunger and disease. He was buried with honors back home in Italy. © Manca Juvan

Fanika Baraga gave birth in Gonars concentration camp. "There were no facilities for babies in the camp. Where to wash the baby? Nowhere. Where to warm the milk they gave once you could no longer breastfeed? Women would tear whatever they had to give me rags, so I could wrap the baby up. One woman made a surprise gift for my baby girl – she sewed a beautiful dress from an apron, which I kept until her death. My baby died at three months." © Manca Juvan

Before she died, Martina Košak gave a silver spoon to Janez Herman, a former, and fellow, internee at a World War II Italian Fascist camp. She wanted Herman to become the guardian of both the physical object, and the historic memory it symbolized. Košak, who had been a nurse at the Rab concentration camp, had carried the spoon with her always – in jail, in camp, and when she joined the National Liberation Army.

“Guardians of the Spoon,” a book by Slovenian photographer Manca Juvan, journalist Saša Petejan, and historian Urška Strle, “is an act of remembrance, and a way to pay respect to the past victims and survivors of Italian Fascist camps and their relatives,” write the authors. The book looks at the shifting conditions of memory.

As opposed to Germany’s Nazi concentrations camps, the history of Italy’s camps has gone largely unacknowledged. During World War II, Italy created hundreds of camps within its borders and inside what was then Yugoslavia, parts of which Italy occupied between 1941-1943. Under the command of dictator Benito Mussolini, the camps interned more than 50,000 Slovenes, Croats and other South Slavs. It’s unknown how many people died in the camps, but their stories recall extreme cruelty and an unyielding threat of death.

The women who created “Guardians of the Spoon,” a collaborative project that includes a dedicated website in addition to the book, wish to illuminate fragments of the fates of the victims of Italian Fascist camps. The project also sheds light on those who outlived the survivors, becoming the guardians of their memories.