Ljubljana

I meet a 91-year-old woman. As a 20-year-old, she belonged to a group of young people who had the courage to rebel against the Italian Fascists that occupied Slovenia. They wrote “Viva la libertà” and anti-Fascist slogans on walls of houses in the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana. In July 1942 she was caught and arrested. She was in prison in Venice and Perugia, where she was put in a cell with serious offenders. Then Mussolini fell and she was finally able to return to Ljubljana, but only briefly. She was arrested again, this time by the Nazis, and was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Compared to what she experienced there, Perugia had been harmless. Now she was faced with working to the point of collapse, beatings, hunger. But she was young, strong and survived. Her brother, though, was deported by the henchmen of the Nazi regime to Dachau and murdered. We meet at a presentation by the Italian historian Carlo Spartaco Capogreco of his book about the camps of the Duce. It was published in Italian in 2004 and was now translated into Slovenian. Capo Capogreco worked in archives in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. The old lady was already in her hat and coat when I addressed her following the book presentation. She took a few moments to answer my questions. But then she was suddenly in a hurry and I was unable to ask her name. Now she and her brother must remain nameless in this article. What a mistake!