Description

A small-size well-designed pamphlet was printed by an underground partisan press during WWII and includes a first-hand account on a Fascist concentration camp on the island Rab, given by a partisan and teacher Jože Jurančič (1902-1998).

The report on the Rab concentration camp is thorough and mixed with personal experiences with other inmates and the guards. The text describes the prison grounds, barracks, gives details on the quantity and type of the food they have received, describes diseases, health care etc.

The concentration camp Rab was founded in July 1942 and had a mortality rate of 18%, well above the average. The prisoners were men, women and children. By mid-1943 7,400 people, of whom some 2,700 were Jews, were imprisoned on Rab.

The introduction to the pamphlet was written by Makso Šnuderl (1895-1979), a lawyer, partisan, author, and later a professor at the law faculty and rector of the University of Ljubljana.

The author of the epilogue Jože Jurančič (1902-1998) was a Slovenian teacher and intellectual. He joined the Communist party in 1925 and entered the partisans in 1941 at the beginning of the war. In April 1942 he was arrested by the Fascists and sent to a concentration camp on the Dalmatian island Rab. After the war Jože Jurančič was arrested again, this time by the Yugoslav government at the time of the so called Informbiro (after the Tito-Stalin fallout in 1948, many Yugoslav Communist were tried as Soviet sympathisers and traitors) and served a prison sentence until 1954.

The two black and white illustrations in the pamphletwere made by an academic sculptor Nikolaj Pirnat (1903-1948), who finished the Art Academy in Zagreb and schooling at Ivan Meštrović. He was mostly active as an illustrator and a caricaturist, and worked for the underground press during WWII. After the war he worked as illustrator of books and an artist.

Worldcat records four examples in Slovenian libraries and none abroad.

References: OCLC 444481944. Iva Habjanič, Knjižnica Ivana Potrča Ptuj, JURANČIČ, Jože (http://www.spodnjepodravci.si/osebe/jurančič-jože-/422/). Škorjanec, Viljenka (2011). Italijanske metode pri izpustu iz koncentracijskih taborišč. Zgodovinski časopis, letnik 65, številka 1/2, str. 152-175.