Slavko Malnar

When we arrived on Rab, we were housed in tents with 6 people each, these were small military tents, tent wings made of that rubberized canvas. At the beginning of August it was terribly hot inside, terrible heat and there was no water on Rab, there were some pipes installed there, it can be a bathroom but there was not a drop of water in those pipes. As a child, I cried because I was thirsty, then my mother took me to a cistern. There was water that was supposed to be brought by boat and that cistern, it was actually warming up, it was a tin cistern, it was hot, it wouldn’t even be for washing hands let alone for drinking. And as a child I cried but mom couldn’t help. So there were such things, there were a lot of them. Food, I mean when you look at that table, I looked, some Slovenian found that table somewhere, it looks quite decent, but on paper it looked nice and a person could survive from it or with it, and in practice it was completely different because those who had those warehouses, they also smuggled, so by the time it came to the final consumer, it was half less than what was prescribed. And I say that the heat lasted there until about the middle of September, and the carabinieri forced us children to swim during the day, they took us away, God forbid that we keep fit, and where you go without food, no, no fitness. And that smell, the smell of that Mediterranean scent of grapes, figs, it’s still in my nose today, but we couldn’t escape this machine.

But I also say on the 26th when they set fire to my birthplace, they drove us to the Collection Center that was, one was in Čabar, the other was in Prezril, the third was in Gerovo and a few days we were in that Collection Center and after they transported us in trucks to the camp in Bakar, because the Rab camp was not over yet, so they took us to Bakar for a few days. In Bakar we were in a former stable with air on both sides of that stable, the wooden floors were raised, they call that stories, and sprinkled with straw and here we are, we slept there for a few days and then they moved us, I think it was August 2, we went to the island of Rab. On the island of Rab, they immediately separated men from women and children and put everyone over the age of 15 or 16 in a men’s camp, and women and children over the age of 70 in a so-called women’s camp. This women’s camp was filled mainly with people from the Kvarner province, because only those who cooperated with the Partisans and even some former Partisans ended up in the camp from Ljubljana. There was a much more tolerant attitude in that Ljubljana province than in Kvarner. And that women’s camp, I say, was about 80%, I think that’s my free estimate, it was filled with people I mean children and women from this Kvarner Province or District Čabar, and there were two Slovenian municipalities.