Refugee and Artist: Ivan Rein, Johanna Lutzer, and Jewish Cultural Life in Kraljevica

chapter 9 Refugee and Artist: Ivan Rein, Johanna Lutzer, and Jewish Cultural Life in Kraljevica

1 Escaping to the Adriatic Coast

The last letter from Ivan Rein to his Belgrade friend, the artist Cuca Sokić, was written on 14 October 1941 in Gorski Kotar, a picturesque mountainous region of Croatia lying between the town of Karlovac, fifty-six km southwest of Zagreb, and the Adriatic coast’s main northern port city of Rijeka.1 At the time Rein wrote the letter this area was under Italian occupation and control. Known as Zone II, it was demilitarized according to the agreements between Italy and the Independent State of Croatia. This meant that from August 1941 the Ustasha government retained civil authority, but was not allowed to main- tain any military or police presence. Initially, as allies on equal footing the Italians stood by passively while the Ustasha operated death camps in the areas under their occupation: in Gospić, on Mount Velebit, and on Pag Island.2 However, the situation changed once the partisan uprising spread in the area in reaction to the mass atrocities perpetrated by the Ustasha against the local Serbian population, also threatening the presence of the Italian military. As a result, the Italians began to prefer ties with the Chetniks and to adopt an anti-Croatian policy in relation to the Serbs.3 In addition, repeated attacks by partisans which interrupted the regular supply of the Italian army in the areas under their control led the occupi- ers to promote aggressive Italianization of the local population, while public shootings of captured partisan fighters and reprisals against their families, supporters, and entire villages became regular practice.4

1 See Ch. 5, 195. Actually, as shown earlier, Rein did not note the place of writing, Gorski Kotar, in his letter. This information was provided by Jelica Ambruš, Ivan Rein, 57, and was most probably based upon her interview with Rein’s sister. 2 Ristović, U potrazi za utočištem, 87 and n. 17. 3 Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, I, 101–4. 4 Suspected supporters of the partisan fighters, their families, and other undesirable individu- als were sent to internment camps in Italy or, from early 1942, were incarcerated in one of the four local concentration camps, where they suffered from overcrowding, lack of food and water, and occasional spread of diseases. See Mladen Grgurić, Talijanski koncentracioni logori u Hrvatskom primorju, 1941–1943 (Rijeka: Muzej grada Rijeke, 2005).

In contrast to how they dealt with the partisans and their supporters, the Italians exhibited a much more benevolent attitude towards the Jewish and Serbian refugees. At first they feared the arrival of large numbers of refugees to the relatively poor coastal areas under their control, and occasionally turned some of them back to the areas controlled by the Ustasha. But once they dis- covered the mass graves and atrocities perpetrated by the Ustasha, mainly in the Slana camp on Pag Island and in Jadovno on Mount Velebit, where between June and August 1941 several thousand Serbian and Jewish men, women, and children lost their lives in the most horrifying circumstances, the Italian authorities stopped this practice.5 Nevertheless, they preferred to concentrate the refugees in Zone II, rather than allowing them to cross over to the annexed area (the so-called Zone I) which was considered part of Italy.6 The Italian oc- cupiers, especially among the ranks of the army commanders and the diplo- mats, actually showed a different attitude towards the “Jewish question.” While approving of the legal segregation of the Jews from the rest of society, they did not blindly follow the Nazi and Ustasha ideology of racial purity. They did not take an active part in their organized murder, which they considered below their military dignity. Moreover, aware of possible repercussions in the case of defeat at the end of the war, they preferred not to be involved in it. Although formally supporting the Axis powers, many Italians, especially in southern Italy, had relatives in the USA, the country of the “enemy” which some even hoped to reach one day. Such an attitude made their dedication to the ideology for which they currently fought much less firm than was the case with the Nazis and some of their allies. The benevolent Italian position towards the Jewish refugees—and sometimes also the opposite, less favorable one—was often that of an individual and varied from person to person. Nevertheless, the regions occupied and annexed by the Italians, stretching from the north- west towards the southeast of former Yugoslavia parallel to and including the Adriatic coast with its islands, became a safe haven for thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis and the Ustasha.7

5 For those camps and the mass murder of their Jewish prisoners, see Narcisa Lengel-Krizman, “Logori za Židove u NDH,” in Antisemitizam, Holokaust, Antifašizam, ed. Ivo Goldstein and Narcisa Lengel-Krizman (Zagreb: Židovska općina Zagreb, 1996), 98; Goldstein, The Holocaust in Croatia, 245–65. 6 Goldstein, The Holocaust in Croatia, 425–27. See also Davide Rodogno, Fascism’s European Empire: Italian Occupation during the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 368–74. 7 Ristović, U potrazi za utočištem, 83–86; Goldstein, The Holocaust in Croatia, 425–27. See also Tomasevich, War and, Revolution in Yugoslavia, II, 597–603. The number of Jewish refugees varies, depending on the author. Tomasevich, 597, esp. n. 35, places their number between 4,000 to 6,600.