The Ustaša authorities of the Independent State of Croatia [Nezavisna Država Hrvatska] established the Slana concentration camp for men on the Adriatic island of Pag on 25 June 1941, together with the Metajna camp for women and children about three kilometres away. While the latter was located at the edge of the village Metajna, Slana covered an uninhabited barren rock plateau without any vegetation. Both camps were part of the Gospić camp system. The commander of the Pag camps was Ivan Devčić (1904–1974), known as Pivac. He was subordinate to the commander of all Croatian camps, Vjekoslav ‘Maks’ Luburić (1914–1969), who visited the Slana camp several times for inspection.
Camp Conditions, Forced Labour and Massacres
It is not recorded how many prisoners passed through the Slana camp, as the Ustaša succeeded in destroying all relevant documents. Information about the conditions and events in the camp therefore comes exclusively from the statements of surviving inmates, perpetrators involved and other eyewitnesses.1This applies to all historiography on this topic, among others: Deverić and Fumić, Hrvatska u logorima, 44–47; Geiger, Jareb, and Kovačić, Jadovno i Šaranova jama, 57–62; Goldstein and Goldstein, Holocaust in Croatia, 250–258; Peršen, Ustaški logori, 95–102.
The first groups of prisoners had to sleep in the open air and expand the camp. When the wooden barracks for the prisoners were completed, the Slana camp was divided into two sections, separated from each other by barbed wire.
The smaller section with three barracks was for Jewish prisoners who came from Zagreb and other parts of Croatia. The second section comprised ten barracks, in which mostly Serbs, but also Croatian communists, who had been arrested in Lika and Bosnia-Herzegovina, were kept. One of the camp survivors, Otto Radan (1904–1992), stated after the war that there were Roma among these prisoners.2Zemljar, Haron i sudbine, 70.
The prisoners were used to build a road between the camps. Forced labour, ill-treatment, deliberate malnutrition and unsanitary conditions led to the death of many prisoners. When the number of transports to Slana increased in July 1941 and led to a lack of space, the Ustaša guards began to separate out groups of prisoners and take them out of the camp for execution. Some of the bodies were buried on the island, the others are said to have been thrown into the sea.
Most of the murders were committed on 21 August 1941, in the course of the dissolution of the Pag camps, which had become necessary because of the Italian authorities’ decision to take complete control of Occupation Zone B and thus also the island of Pag. Logistical problems with the hasty evacuation prompted the Ustaše to commit further murders in order to prevent prisoners from being liberated by the Italians. The other detainees were deported via Gospić to the Jastrebarsko and Jasenovac camps. Whether the Roma inmates of the Slana camp were among the deported or immediately murdered prisoners, remains unknown.
Italian Exhumations
The lack of reliable documents on the prisoners of the Slana camp led historians to offer widely varying estimates of the numbers of dead. The numbers range from 1,500 to 8,000 and even 13,000.3On the controversy and methodological problems surrounding this aspect of the Slana camp see Geiger, Jareb, and Kovačić, Jadovno i Šaranova jama, 57–62. Objectively, the total number of victims cannot be determined. The minimum number of casualties can be taken, however, from the reports of the Italian army’s sanitary commissions, which also took photos of the remains of the camp. In September 1941, they exhumed the corpses of 791 prisoners (407 men, 293 women, 91 children) and burned them, trying to prevent the spread of possible infection.
Memorial Plaque
Apart from the foundation walls of an unfinished stone barrack for the Ustaša guards, no traces of the Slana camp have remained. On 7 September 1975, on the occasion of the ‘30th anniversary of the victory over Fascism and the liberation of the country’, a memorial plaque was erected on Pag on the shore of Sušac. The inscription reads: ‘Glory to the victims of Fascism / In 1941, at the end of May [sic], the Slana death camp was established here. In the dreadful course of fewer than three months, thousands of innocent people—Serbs, Jews, Croats and others—found death in the clutches of fascist beasts on land and in the sea. / Death to Fascism — Freedom to the People!’.4‘Slava žrtvama fašizma / 1941. godine, krajem svibnja osnovan je ovdje logor smrti Slana. U strašnom trajanju od nepuna tri mjeseca tisuće nedužnih ljudi — Srba, Jevreja, Hrvata i drugih našlo je smrt u kandžama fašističkih zvjeri na kopnu i u moru. / Smrt fašizmu — sloboda narodu!‘. The memorial plaque has had to be replaced several times since the 1990s because of repeated vandalism.5Pejaković, “Slana Concentration Camp 1941”, with a picture of the memorial plaque.
