At dawn, Goli Otok is pale. Grey. An anonymous island against which the oily waves of the Kvarner break. Looking at it from the mainland you cannot see any type of vegetation; you cannot see either trees or shrubs. From the water emerges only a stretch of livid and sterile rock. In summer the sun dries everything, in winter the wind freezes what remains. In the eternal chase between life and death, it is always the latter that wins in Goli Otok. Looking at her, men began to call her in many ways: some called her “bald”, some “naked”. But the most appropriate adjective, perhaps, is “secret”. The back of the island, a cliff over two hundred meters high, does not allow you to see anything of what happens there. It's like a cloak that hides and takes everything away. Goli Otok is a perfect natural prison, so much so that Josip Broz Tito chose it as the place to isolate those who, after the split between Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, remained loyal to Joseph Stalin. Thus, starting in 1949, Goli Otok became a re-education camp through which dissidents were brought back into the orthodoxy of Yugoslav communism. Those who ended up in the sights of Tito's secret police, the terrible Udb-a, were loaded onto a ship called “Punat” and, finally, left on the western side of the island. The first forty steps were the longest. As soon as you disembarked, you ended up in the so-called “kroz stroj”, a human tunnel where you were beaten bloody by the other prisoners and then, battered, you were abandoned to your own devices. That screaming crowd – made up of men who were at the same time victims and executioners of themselves (the camp was in fact self-managed) – is no more. In its place there is a tall black cross that contrasts terribly with the red and yellow train that tourists use to tour the island and with the restaurant called, with terrible irony, “Przun” (prison). In Goli, there are three streets, but everything revolves around the central one, where there were many workshops where the inmates worked: from the wood workshop to the marble workshop, passing through the iron workshop. This was where the prisoners consumed themselves the most. The machines, in fact, functioned only thanks to human power, as survivor Gino Kmet recalls: “The rudimentary machines were operated by human power, employing four people, mostly special boycotts, the toughest ones who had not told the truth as they intended. These, by means of a large crank and special pulleys, set in motion the lathe, the drill and the grinding wheel” (Luciano Giuricin, La memoria di Goli Otok – Isola balva). Today those machines are completely rusted, worn out by time and the elements. The camp is completely abandoned and one can only imagine how the more than 30 internees who were sent to the island between 1949 and 1956 lived. In fact, there are few plaques commemorating those years and they do not describe life on Goli Otok. To find out what a typical day was like, we need to go back to the archives and look for the memories of those who survived, such as the aforementioned Gino Kmet: “We had to wake up at five in the morning, even in the pitch dark of winter, at the signal from the hut chief who would shout like a madman: 'ustaj'. We immediately had to put on a kind of clog, which was outside the hut, because inside we had to walk barefoot. Our uniform was brown, a sort of military fatigue uniform, with a military cap. There was nothing to wash yourself with. Breakfast consisted of a sort of coffee substitute with liquid polenta. Then we went straight to work. You had to leave the camp fence, passing in front of the soldier on duty, towards whom you were required to take off your cap but with your gaze turned to the ground and not towards him. Rules that we had to learn right away, because otherwise we would have gotten a good beating." Thus began the real work, designed solely to weaken the body and soul of these damned. “Everything had to happen in a hurry,” Kmet recalls, “with the famous ‘ziviere’.” A Dantesque punishment, like that of the cowards described by Dante, forced to run after a white flag while a floor of worms welcomed their blood. The memory of Goli Otok is made of rubble, torn off doors, abandoned machinery and even old ice cream refrigerators thrown in a corner. The memory takes the form of a chair that can no longer accommodate anyone and that was abandoned in the middle of a room who knows how many years ago. Or it embodies itself in chipped and useless sinks, incapable of taking away the burning heat of the blazing sun. Or in beds without nets that can no longer provide any comfort. But it is in the “hole” that everything becomes unsustainable. This is where the hardest dissidents, those who were unwilling to give in, were sent. In this hollow the heat sticks to you along with the insects. Every movement becomes difficult. Every step heavy. Like life. Its official name was “Radilište 101” (Department 101), but nobody called it that. The prisoners had given it other names, such as “Monastery” or “Peter’s Hole”, in honor of Peter Komnenic, one of the first deportees who had some political weight. In this pit, eight meters deep and twenty-five meters wide, ended up the highest officials of the party: military, politicians and intellectuals. Or those who had the misfortune of having traveled to the Soviet Union. It was in this hellish pit that the highest death toll on Goli Otok was recorded. Today, the abandoned mattresses are a reminder of the many bodies that this blood-thirsty island has swallowed under the weight of physical and psychological torture. The worst was undoubtedly that of the “tragaci”, or “boycotts”. These were sometimes very long periods during which the internee could be mistreated by everyone. Insulted, beaten and forced to work night shifts where his only task was to stand guard and carry the bins in which the other inmates urinated. The goal was to reduce him to a human larva. To a body without a soul. Without will. Seventy years of history are interwoven on the walls of the island: there are lovers who have decided to swear eternal love to each other, hooligans who have defaced the walls with obscene writings and, finally, prisoners who have found the strength to leave a memory of themselves. Someone, probably during his imprisonment, painted a hammer and sickle, perhaps to demonstrate his attachment to the Soviet Union. Someone else, instead, filled the wall with small vertical bars to keep track of the passing time. Always the same. Always eternal. Four vertical lines. An oblique one. Stop. Where there are no writings, the plaster speaks – or, better, screams. Or what is left of it and which draws screaming faces that still today seem to ask for mercy. A pity that in Goli, however, was not contemplated, as the internee Sergio Borme recalls, and which was replaced by suspicion: “At a certain point you no longer trusted anyone. If someone told you, or reported something, you had to report it immediately, otherwise they would go and report the matter, often acting as agents provocateurs. A mind-blowing system that unfortunately was implemented by almost everyone." The plants on this island are falling. Inmates were once forced to shade them as soon as they were planted. It was their punishment of retaliation. The way to re-educate them. To make them vegetal. But it's only when night falls that Goli Otok truly shows itself: a black shadow that chases you and never lets you go.Matthew Carniletto – 21/07/2021 Source: InsideOver – Photographs by Ivo Saglietti The National Association of Venezia Giulia and Dalmatia participated in the crowdfunding that allowed the creation of this reportage.