Deportation from Perugia gaol to Dachau and Buchenwald

Between 1942 and the summer of 1943 Perugia gaol hosted several political prisoners including 106 minors and at least 15 adults from Dalmatia, Istria, Slovenia and Montenegro.

Life in prison¹

"With the money they sent us from home we could buy jam and sugar,'' Milivoj Lalin recalled. ''I also received some books – I remember one by Maxim Gorky and an Italian grammar which, as I precaution, I hung out of the window on a string."

Resistance in prison

With the fall of Fascism on 25 July 1943, the Yugoslavs began to organize themselves. "Following the advice of a very experienced Slovenian prisoner, we organized small partisan groups and called them 'Matija Gubec', 'Proleterska' and 'Ivan Cankar' in honour of our partisan heroes,'' Srećko Ozretić recalled. ''With the older prisoners we discussed the political situation, communism, and above all how to free ourselves. To motivate the other detainees, we often sang songs against Mussolini, which boomed down from the top floor filling the entire prison." Pave Matulić recalled a slogan written in the corridor which said, 'Fascism is finished'. "To find some paper on which to write pamphlets,'' Matulić continued, ''some of us pretended to have stomach ache to obtain a medicine in powder form that the prison medical officer gave us inside a piece of folded paper. We had some ink. We made pens from sardine tins."

The revolt and attempted escape

Transported to Dachau

The transport of the Yugoslav detainees from Perugia to Dachau took place on 5 October 1943. The list of Slavic detainees handed to the the German command on 5 October 1943, drawn up by the prison governor² shows the names of 105 Yugoslavs. One of them - Branko Stanišić - appears to have died of pneumonia before departure. If this list is compared with that of arrivals in Dachau on 11 October 1943, the names of 103 prisoners taken from the prison in Perugia can be identified³ as can another 28 detainees from the prison who had been added to the convoy⁴. Most of them were also Yugoslavs, civilians who had fled from internment after 8 September 1943, who had been recaptured and then imprisoned in Perugia gaol. For example, among them was Tomislav Dean, born in Zlarin in 1911 and interned in Urbisaglia concentration camp on 6 May 1942⁵ on the orders of the Governorate of Dalmatia. Among these 28 deportees there are also some prisoners of war - Yugoslavs and three Britons - who had also escaped from prison of war camps after 8 September.

"We got into two cattle wagons on 5 October,'' Ivan Slade continued, ''In the other wagons of the convoy there were also some Italians. We did not know where we were going. We stopped a few kilometres from Bologna for a whole night, as the city's railway station had been bombed; the Germans checked up on us with torches. They gave us bread and margarine. The Italians disappeared from the convoy."

"Whilst crossing the Po Bridge I saw all that water and I imagined I could dive in given how thirsty I was,'' Lalin recalled. ''After crossing the river, we understood that we were going to Germany. We began to sing partisan songs. And we hoped that Germany in three months would have capitulated. We stopped in Padua and the republican Red Cross gave us some pasta.''

Slade remembered that in order to have a container in which to put the pasta one prisoner split his suitcase in two, the upper part serving as a dish from which everyone ate. Both Lalin and Slade remembered the man from the Red Cross saying, "Mussolini has given you this".

The convoy continued on its way and at the end of the sixth day it passed through Munich, which was still on fire from the bombings which had taken place a couple of days before, and they saw the carcasses of still-smoking aeroplanes (Slade) and people with the inscription OST on their clothes (Ostarbeiter, the forced workers coming from of the areas of the Soviet Union occupied by the Germans) who were working along the railway (Matulić).

The train arrived in Dachau on the evening of the 11 October.

Dachau

Once settled into two adjoining barracks they were approached by a Pole who told them they were in Germany, and should be watch their step. "He was one of the camp police, a Kapo. They had not chosen to do that job, they were in a terrible situation. And they were the worst,'' Srećko Ozretić commented.

After two days they were overjoyed to see a group of prisoners arrive from the prison in Sulmona. Among them there were over 190 Dalmatians, Istrians, Montenegrins and Slovenes⁷.

"We were asked if any of us was a butcher, '' said Matošić. ''I am,'' I replied, without thinking twice. ''I am, '' said someone from Sebenico. They were sent to work in the Wilfert sausage factory on the Bohemia border for 15 months. "And to think that the butcher in the family was my brother, not me. I had an easy life in the factory,'' Matošić added.

Life in an enormous concentration camp like Dachau, which had opened in 1933, with tens of thousands of prisoners speaking a myriad of languages, clearly had a violent impact on the young Yugoslavs coming from small prisons such as the one in Perugia. Moreover, the fact that they were in Germany and no longer in Italy meant that is was impossible for them to receive food and clothes from home. This was not the case with the Slovenes who, taking advantage of the fact that part of their territory had been annexed by Germany, and also that a large number of prisoners had come from these territories, managed to get food and clothes sent to them. However, not all the Slovenes were then willing to sell some of their possessions to the other Yugoslavs. The Communist detainees, on the other hand, did not use nationality as the criterion for sharing their few possessions, but rather that of the political persuasion of the individual concerned.
However, the young Yugoslavs, sympathizers of Tito's partisans and pro-communists, managed to survive in Dachau thanks to the support of their compatriots and probably thanks to the bond created between them during their experience in Perugia. They had seen Italy capitulate and now awaited the surrender of Germany.
From the second half of 1944 and especially during the winter of 1944-45 Dachau was, like any other German concentration camp in the territory of the old Reich, overflowing with prisoners transferred from the camps to the east following the advance of the Red Army. They arrived in their thousands, exhausted after having travelled hundreds of miles on foot in what were called 'the death marches'. In the camp at Dachau, now overflowing with internees, dozens of people died every day from hunger, typhus and other epidemics. Between 1941 and 1945 it is estimated that there were about 41,500 deaths in Dachau⁸.

Despite this, of the young Yugoslavs deported from Perugia prison only a few failed to return from the camp at Dachau.

If according to the order issued on 2 January 1941 by Heydrich, the head of the Reich Security Directorate (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA), Dachau was classified as a level one detention camp (Schutzhaft), that is for people accused of less serious crimes and therefore re-educable through work, the Buchenwald concentration camp was instead classified as level two, where people who had committed serious crimes were to be re-educated by means of forced labour⁹.

The central camp at Buchenwald, which was a short distance from Weimar, was opened in 1937. "I was the last to arrive, in July 1943, '' said Ivan Slade. ''At the start of the war it was a camp for Germans: criminals, politicians, Jews, Sinti and Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals and people socially incompatible with Nazi society (the so-called 'asocials'.) The camp was run by the SS , whose main tasks were to allocate the detainees to those contract firms that were to exploit them as a workforce, and to control the perimeter fence. The internal management of the camp was however entrusted to the prisoners themselves. Divided hierarchically, the detainees were responsible for monitoring work, drafting lists, conducting roll calls and checking the barracks. For these tasks, the SS usually favoured the common inmates, as they were considered more able to stand up to the abuses and the violence of the regime. But in Buchenwald the German political prisoners, mainly members of the German communist party, rose to prominence through an internal struggle which didn't exclude the use of force, took the place of the common prisoners and offered a surveillance service acceptable to the SS¹⁰.

The leader of the Yugoslav detainees in Buchenwald was the Slovenian communist, Janez Ranciger. A native of the Slovenian territories annexed by Germany, Ranciger was deported to Auschwitz in 1941 and later transferred to Buchenwald in March 1943 through the help of Polish and German communists¹¹. He gathered around him the first group of Yugoslav resisters, mainly Slovenians who, through his intervention, managed to avoid being transferred to the sub-camps attached to the main camp.

The Yugoslavs, in particular the youngsters from Perugia who arrived in Buchenwald on 30 October 1943, were sent to work in a quarry breaking stones for a few months. "It was a kind of test,'' Lalin recalled, ''after which we were included in the collective, almost all of us having been politicized in the previous months." ''They - those making up the collective,'' Srećko Ozretić remembered, "could decide whether to put you on transport or leave you in the camp ... it was within their remit." Sending people to transport meant leaving them to the arbitrary mercies of the SS managing the sub-camps, some of which were built underground, such as the terrible camps of Laura, Dora-Mittelbau and Ohrdruf. In fact, it was possible for the communists employed by the SS as auxiliaries in the camp's administration offices to change the names of people on the transport lists. For the SS it was the number of persons transported, not their names, which was important.

In the second half of 1944 Buchenwald, like Dachau, became a collection centre for all the prisoners forced by the SS to march away from the eastern zones in order to escape the arrival of the Red Army. The detainees built a second camp for the new arrivals. The new 'lager' at Buchenwald was filled with hungry and desperate men, but remained separated from the older one which continued to function as before. From time to time some internees of the old camp went to see if there were any Communists in the new camp in an attempt to have them transferred. Thanks to this activity, Buchenwald's political collective managed to save a substantial number of Jews, including numerous children.

The Buchenwald collective is also remembered for having taken military possession of the camp at the end of the war before the Americans arrived. Tomislav Erak recalled the day of the liberation of the camp on 11 April 1945, by saying, ''I remember very well how my friend Ivo Juraga started chasing after the SS."