1943 WWII ITALY stationary card with stamp ARBE / Island RAB (today Croatia)
Extremely Rare
About the items
Rarely seen mail sent from Italian concentration camp on the Italian-occupied island of Rab (now in Croatia); established July 1942, it was the largest concentration camp in Italian-occupied territory. Established in July 1942, the camp held 10,000-15,000 people until it was disbanded in September 1943. Rab was notorious for having the worst sanitary and living conditions of all the Fascist camps.
This lot of 2 stationary cards is very interesting, because it was mailed by the same pearson, to provinz Lubiana (Laibach, under german control) in year 1943. It was couple of months before the capitulation of Italy.
What is also interesting, that one stationary card was mailed via ordinary postal service (stamp ARBE) and the other was mailed from the concentration camp. The difference between them is 2 weeks (one being mailed from the camp on the 13.7.1943 with verifiaction censor stamps; the other via standard postal service mailed on the 26.7.1943).
Both cards were written in Slovene language, the prisoner wrote to his children.
About concentration camp ARBE
By 1 July 1943, 2,118 Yugoslav Jews were recorded having been interned by the Italian army. Starting in June 1943, they were moved into a newly constructed section of the Rab concentration camp, alongside the Slovenian and Croatian section.
According to historians James Walston and Carlo Spartaco Capogeco at 18%, the annual mortality rate in the camp was higher than the average mortality rate in the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald (15%). According to a report by Monsignor Jože Srebrnič, Bishop of Krk on 5 August 1943 to Pope Pius XII: "witnesses, who took part in the burials, state unequivocally that the number of the dead totals at least 3,500".
According to Yugoslav estimates of the Commission for Determining the Crimes of the Occupiers, 4,641 detainees died at the camp, including 800 inmates who died while being transported from Rab to the Gonars and Padua concentration camps in Italy.
By mid-1943 the camp's population stood at about 7,400 people, of whom some 2,700 were Jews. The fall of Mussolini in late July 1943 increased the likelihood that the Jews on Rab would fall into German hands, prompting the Italian Foreign Ministry to repeatedly instruct the General Staff that the Jews should not be released unless they themselves requested it. The ministry also began to put in place a mass transfer of the Jews to the Italian mainland. However, on 16 August 1943 the Italian military authorities ordered that the Jews were to be released from the camp, although those that wished could stay.
The island remained in Italian hands until after the Armistice with Italy was signed on 8 September 1943, when the Germans seized control. About 245 of the Jewish inmates of the camp joined the Rab Brigade of the 24th Division of the People's Liberation Army and Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia, forming the Rab battalion, though they were eventually dispersed among other Partisan units.
Although most of the Jews from the camp were evacuated to Partisan-held territory 204 (7.5%) of them, the elderly or sick, were left behind and were sent to Auschwitz by the Germans for extermination.