Gonars Concentration Camp

The Gonars concentration camp was located in the town of Gonars, in the province of Udine in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, in the northeast of Italy, near the border with modern-day Slovenia. The region has been a hub for much interaction and exchange between the two cultures for centuries. Although technically on Italian soil, the area was and is a blend of both ethnic Italians and ethnic Slavs as a result of its vicinity to a historically contested border.

As the largest Fascist internment camp on the peninsula, its construction was ordered by the Ministry of the Interior in 1941 and operated from October 1941 to 19 October 1943. Between 1941 and 1942, the camp held 600 Russian soldiers, several Russian commanders, and later, about a thousand Yugoslavian army officers and petty officers. 

From 1 December 1942 – 14 September 1943, under the command of Gustavo De Dominicis, Gonars received the expressed purpose to gather together and intern Yugoslavian civilians. It housed anywhere from 5,100 to 6,500 individuals in wooden barracks, although the total number of internees to pass through the camp is estimated to be higher.

Through an initiative of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1973, Yugoslav sculptor Miodrag Živković created a flower-shaped monument with a red mosaic center at the local cemetery (15 miles northwest of the camp site), which holds two crypts with the remains of 453 Slovenian and Croatian citizens who where interned and died in the concentration camp.