It’s Monday, and the second full day of our 2024 Croatian Language and Culture Course based on Rab island. The temperature is rising but that has not put off our adventurous and studious band of explorers from venturing to a mysterious neighbouring island. Read on, as our on location blogger, Julia Molden, reports.

By Golly We’re Off To Goli Otok

After lessons on Monday, where we quite sensibly returned to basics and still found ourselves making very fundamental mistakes, we set off on our visit to the barren island which, for many years in the twentieth century, had been kept a secret from the outside world and had held, as prisoners, many people who disagreed with Tito’s form of communism, as well as many Russian soldiers prior to that and more recently ordinary criminals.

It all started in the Austro-Hungarian period when Russian prisoners of war from the Eastern Front were incarcerated there in World War One. In 1949 the entire island was made into a high-security, top secret prison and labour camp, and it endured as a prison right through until 1989.  From 1949 until 1956, following the split between Tito and Stalin, it was used to incarcerate political prisoners, including alleged Stalinists and other members of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia, and even non-party members and intellectuals, who were accused of being in sympathy with Stalinism and the Soviet Union. Many anti-communists from a number of neighbouring countries were also imprisoned on the island and, as well as political prisoners, normal criminals were also sent there to serve out their sentences, particularly in the later years.The weather could be very harsh, with freezing temperatures and the bora wind in winter, and summers as hot as 40̊ C, but the inmates worked as forced labourers working in a stone quarry or making tiles and pottery as well as furniture, regardless of the conditions.  The prison was run by the inmates and the hierarchical system forced convicts into beating, humiliating and denouncing each other.  With the barren ground and strong tides around the island, escape was virtually impossible and it was known as the Croatian Alcatraz because of its location and high security.

As we approached the island in our small motor boat, watching dolphins swimming and leaping about in perfect freedom, I couldn’t help but imagine how it must have felt for prisoners making that same journey all those years ago.  I daresay the dolphins would still have been there, and the surrounding sea was still beautiful, but they were bound for something indescribably awful. Many returned to normal life after serving their sentences, some wrote books about their experiences which were published after Tito’s death in 1980, and one became president of Bosnia Herzegovina, but hundreds, or maybe thousands, also died on the island.

When we arrived and disembarked we made our way towards a small road train, which has been laid on as more and more visitors have come to the island to see the conditions for themselves.  Since the prison closed in 1989, nothing has been done to prevent the island from falling into decay and a lot of the buildings have been stripped of anything that can be reused elsewhere.  As our train climbed slowly up the hill we saw many ruined structures and we got out to view some of the cells, which were just lying in ruins.  On our return to the small port we stopped for drinks at a small restaurant that had been set up for visitors and tourists.  There, groups of youngsters were eating supper and watching the Euros 2024 match on the television.    They were too young to even remember communism and they made a stark contrast to life on the island within the lifetime of most of our group.  This trip had given us plenty to think about of a totally different past which actually happened only a few decades ago.