Gonars is a town with approx. 4600 inhabitants near Palmanova in the Province of Udine in northeastern Italy.

Concentration camp

On February 23, 1942 the fascist regime established a concentration camp in the town, mostly for prisoners from present day Slovenia and Croatia. The first transport of 5343 internees (1643 of whom were children) arrived two days later from the Province of Ljubljana and the camps at Rab and in Monigo near Treviso.

The camp was disbanded on September 8, 1943, immediately after Italian capitulation. Every effort was made to erase any evidence of this black spot of Italian history. The camp's buildings were destroyed, the material was used at building a nearby kindergarten and the site was turned into a meadow. Only in 1973 a sacrarium was created by a sculptor Miodrag Živković at the town's cemetery. Remains of 453 Slovenian and Croatian victims were transferred into its two underground crypts. It is believed that at least 50 additional persons died in the camp due to starvation and torture. Apart from the sacrarium no other evidence of the camp remained and even many locals don't know about it.

Further reading

• Alessandra Kersevan, Un campo di concentramento fascista. Gonars 1942-1943., Kappa Vu Edizioni, Udine, 2003 (more)

External links

• Official site of the town
• A brief description of the camp (Google cache as the original site was removed)
• An article from Romacivica.net (in Italian)
• An article from Sanpaolo.org (In Italian)