Slovenian Refugees in the Italian Camps 1945–1949

After World War II, in May 1945, more than 20,000 Slovenians left their country, among them almost 12,000 members of the Home Guard who would be sent back only two months later and killed. Meanwhile, a lot of the Slovenian economic, cultural, political, and educational elite left as well. After the war, six thousand Slovenian refugees remained in the camps in the Austrian Carinthia, while several thousand Slovenians ended up in the Italian camps. However, unlike the camps in Austria, where almost all of the Slovenian refugees were assigned to only four and later even three camps, the Slovenians in Italy were sent to many different camps and were relocated often during the years they spent there. For precisely this reason it is all the more difficult to ascertain how many Slovenians in fact spent the post-war years in the Italian camps. The imprecision of the camp resident list was also contributed to by the fact that practically in all of the Italian camps, Slovenians were registered as »Yugoslavs«, together with the members of the other nations who had arrived from Yugoslavia; while in Carinthia, the Slovenian refugees were consistently registered according to their nationality. The documents of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration – the UNRRA, which was in charge of the camps located in the Italian Peninsula for a while – rarely mention Slovenians explicitly. The central »Slovenian camp« – if we may refer to it as such because this was where the largest group of Slovenians had gathered – was located in Servigliano and later in Senigallia. The number of the Slovenian refugees here is comparatively easy to determine, as we can in this case, at least to a certain degree, resort to the reports on the elections for the Slovenian camp committees; to the vow to Mother Mary, made by almost all Slovenian refugees in Italy in case they should return home happily; or to the individual letters of the Allied administrations. Meanwhile, quite a few Slovenians sought refuge in Rome to get away from the communist authorities at home. Due to all of the above, the number of Slovenians that in fact ended up in the Italian camps can only be 437 approximated. In his book »Salezijanci med begunci” (Salesians among Refugees), Bogdan Kolar states that their number was around five thousand. He bases this estimate on the information provided in their articles by Marijan Marolt and Milica Strgar. In his article »Slovensko šolstvo v begunskih taboriščih v Avstriji in Italiji od 1945 do 1949” (Slovenian Education in the Refugee Camps in Austria and Italy between 1945 and 1949), Janez Arnež states that, according to his own calculations, the Italian camps housed around 4,500 Slovenian refugees. The actual number that can be ascertained from the information available must have been between four and five thousand refugees.