At the end of May 1950, the Gornja Radgona department of the State Security Administration (UDV Gornja Radgona) arrested Ivan Štrafela Don, and the Party’s district committee questioned him and ...accused him of overt action against the state as a Cominform member. He admitted almost all of the actions he was being accused of and was willing to present them before the workers and the members of the Party as well. At the end of October 1950, after being expelled from the Party, the District Court in Maribor sentenced him to eight years of imprisonment with forced labour and five years of loss of civil and political rights. The attempts of the convict’s wife to achieve a lower punishment were unsuccessful; however, Štrafela was nonetheless pardoned in 1955, and he returned home. He did less demanding and responsible work in the industry and local politics, but he remained under surveillance and was preventively detained during Tito’s visit in the Pomurje region (in 1966 and 1969). His wife’s attempts to achieve a revision of the procedure after his death (1986) were unsuccessful between 1999 and 2001.
The text concerns the camp for political prisoners established in 1949 in Yugoslavia on Goli Otok island. This theme was almost entirely absent from public discourse before the 1980s, and real ...changes and developments in discussions about this part of the history of postwar Yugoslavia occurred only after Tito’s death. Goli Otok as the largest and most infamous camp in communist Yugoslavia is considered a symbol, its name recognized as a synonym of a physical and psychological system for destroying people. In the text I analyze autobiographical texts written by women prisoners (such as Milka Žicina and Vera Cenić). A large number of female inmates were sentenced just for being related to or keeping close contact with a male “enemy of the state”. Thus women were treated not as independent subjects, but as mothers, sisters and wives subordinate to male family members. The social exclusion of women prisoners and their families exacerbated the feeling of isolation and continued after leaving the camp. I am interested in the detail of the strategies of storytelling which are related to spirituality (focusing on nature) both during the period of isolation, when they searched for a way to survive it, as well as after release when the women tried to start a new life.
Paper analyses political fall of Stanko Opačić Ćanica in year 1950, his arrest, interrogation, incarceration on Goli otok labor camp and subsequent surveillance after the release by the Yugoslav ...secret police. The paper is based on State security documents, scientific literature, published documents and oral history of former Goli otok inmates. The goal of this paper is contribution to the analysis of causes and consequences of Opačić’s political fall, closely tied to the fate of so called “ministerial troika“, group of Serbian ministers in the government of Peoples Republic of Croatia. This case is, of course, part of wider analysis on causes of purges of real alleged supporters to Soviet Union during the
Tito-Stalin split.
Goli Otok (Barren Island) was a site of the master political prison and forced labor camp of the socialist Yugoslavia between 1949 and 1956. The imprisoned, accused of siding with Stalin in the ...Tito-Stalin political rift, were sent to undergo 'self-managed re-education' through 'socially beneficial labor' in the island's limestone quarries. The inmates were forced to build their own prison out of that very limestone - the first known human dwellings on the previously uninhabited island. They were also often forced to break, crumble and to carry massive stone loads from one place to another and back, with no constructive or productive purpose. However, the labor camp authorities also operated a lucrative business, oriented towards country-wide distribution, and sometimes towards international export of the island's limestone. The quarried stone of the island therefore travelled more widely than its excavators, whose movements were limited to their island-prison. Set at the intersection of labor history and environmental history and drawing on the archival materials of the Yugoslav State Security Service, oral history interviews with the former prisoners, and their published and unpublished written memoirs, this paper examines the interrelations of the prison-island, its stone material, and the prisoners' laboring bodies.
The primary objective of this text is an analysis of Eva Nahir Panić’s biography (she lived from 1918 to 2015) titled Eva, written by Dane Ilić. The protagonist of this story is a Jewish woman born ...in Čakovec, who married a Serbian officer, survived the Holocaust, went through the camp for the Cominformists, and finally immigrated to Israel. An interpretative category that creates a framework for reading the text is the term “borderline,” which encompasses two meanings here. The first includes borderline situations (such as the Holocaust and the stay in the Sveti Grgur prison camp) which Nahir Panić had to face in her life and which left an indelible mark on her (the burden of her traumatic experience is passed on to the next generation, in Eva’s daughter, Tijana—signifying a postmemory issue). The second pertains to how she functioned in the borders between cultures which directly influenced her fate. With reference to Ewa Domańska’s concept of the rescue history project executed in Poland, I suggest that the life of Eva Nahir Panić, though undoubtedly filled with painful experiences, ought to be considered not in terms of victimization, but of rebirth and affirmation. Nahir Panić’s life story is a highly personalized narrative, which presents her own identity project, and through it the reader discovers the potential of the community. This may also provide a starting point for reflecting on the history of Yugoslavia.
Magris’s text addresses the circuitous and lengthy creative process that led to the conceptualization and writing of his latest novel Alla cieca (2005; Blindly, 2010). It offers, at same time, a ...reflection on the core dialectical binary of the work: the relation between inventing History and creating History and thus on the relationship between History and the contemporary novel. Magris sheds light on his own formal and stylistic approach to his text and on his ethical quest among the ideological utopias and individual tragedies of pre- and post-WWII Europe.
The immediate motive for organizing the Belgrade symposium ?Socialism and
Culture? held in late 1969 were prohibitions. After June 1968 there were
about forty political interventions in Serbia (while ...there had been none in
the previous twenty years), considerably more than in other Yugoslav
republics. The conclusion that was reached was that cultural life was
provincialized and underdeveloped. The author in this paper extends the topic
to a more global level since the intentions of the dialogue allowed for that.
Data on Goli Otok, provided by Milovan Djilas, fit well with these facts. The
Otok was the most drastic and dramatic prohibition in the entire history of
the Second Yugoslavia. From both contemporary and presentday perspectives,
the symposium may be interpreted as a cry for freedom. In this conversation,
the members of the Belgrade wing of the Praxis group played a crucial role.
Some of these same people would later participate in the events infamously
marking the 1990s, above all the civil and religious wars. The Zagreb
?headquarters? of Praxis was, on the contrary, never affected by the
nationalist virus. Finally, arguments are proposed about Dobrica Cosic as the
Serbian Faust, and the thesis of this writer being the Father of the Nation
is contested.
Povod za beogradski skup ?Socijalizam i kultura? s kraja 1969. godine bile su
zabrane. Od juna ?68. u Srbiji je bilo oko cetrdeset intervencija (a nije ih
bilo u poslednjih dvadeset godina), sto je znatno vise nego u ostalim YU
republikama. Izveden je zakljucak o provincijalnosti i nedovoljno razvijenom
kulturnom zivotu. Autor ovog rada je prosirio temu na siri plan jer su
intencije dijaloga to dopustale. Paralelno s tim cinjenicama, dobro se
uklapaju podaci o Golom otoku, koje daje Milovan Djilas. Otok je bio
najdrasticnija i najdramaticnija zabrana u celokupnom postojanju Druge YU. I
iz negdasnje, i iz sadasnje perspektive, skup bi se mogao protumaciti kao
krik i vapaj za slobodom. Razgovoru su presudno doprineli predstavnici
beogradskog krila Praxis grupe, uz potonje, mahom neslavno, ucesce u
dogadjajima, pre svega versko-gradjanskim ratovima; za razliku od glavne,
zagrebacke ?centrale? Praxisa, koja nije bila zahvacena nacionalistickim
virusom. Izlazu se, najzad, argumenti o Dobrici Cosicu kao srpskom Faustu, te
se dovodi u pitanje teza o piscu kao ocu nacije.
On the basis of archive documents from CK KP BiH fond, available in the Archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina and a document called Book with the list and basic data for all DKR prisoners and IB ...convicts, available in the Croatian state archives, the author gives an overview of prosecutions of the Cominform supporters in the counties Glamoc, Mrkonjic Grad, Jajce, Drvar, Bosanski Petrovac and Kljuc as well as in the economic and traffic committees (traffic one in Jajce and Banja Luka and economic in Drvar and Elektrobosna and Energija in Jajce. The main part of the paper is the report from the field work of the UDBA employees, which was published in the autumn of 1949 in the area of the above mentioned counties. It can be found in the Archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the fund of Central Committee of BiH, in the box 22 under the number 15. Besides that the author used reports of the Regional Committee Banja Luka on the people punished for Cominform. They are also available in the Archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Due to the fact that the mentioned documents from the Archive of Bosnia and Herzegovina do not contain further information about destines of the people arrested under the accusation that they were Stalin supporters (Cominform supporters), the author finds the answer for most of them in the above mentioned document from the Croatian state archive in Zagreb. That is in fact a list of convicts on Goli otok.
The essay focuses on the modalities adopted by Magris in his novel, Alla cieca, to merge literature and civil engagement through a fine narrative construction. By populating his writing with precise ...documentary research and taking advantage of the possibilities of invention, the author succeeds in giving voice to minimum destinies of History and save their high moral lesson. This can also be seen through a comparative reading of the pages of the novel dealing with Tito’s gulag, Goli Otok, and Scotti’s book, which is a historical reconstruction provided by witnesses of the events suffered by Italians who lived there.
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