Jewish survivors of the Rab concentration camp form battalion to fight the Nazi German forces occupying Yugoslavia.
By Michel Levine
At the beginning of the WWII, without firing a single shot, the Jewish inmates of a detention camp located in Yugoslavia revolted and took control of the site. They then formed themselves into a battalion and took part in the partisan struggle for the liberation of the country. This curious and probably unique episode deserves to be better known.
In April 1941, the Axis forces seized the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
In their occupation zone, German troops carried out mass killings and deportations to extermination camps. In the zone controlled by their Bulgarian allies, Jews were handed over to the Germans and likewise sent to Auschwitz. In the Hungarian occupation zone, after the Novi Sad pogrom, which claimed 4,000 victims, the surviving Jews experienced a certain respite until the German occupation of Hungary in the spring of 1944, which in turn led to their deportation to the gas chambers. At the same time, the Germans created in Croatia a puppet state, the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH), led by the fascist Ante Pavelić, whose program was expressed in three fundamental points: kill one third of the Serbs living on its territory, expel another third, and assimilate the surviving third. To achieve this, concentration camps were opened in which thousands of Serbians, Jewish, Roma, and Croatian prisoners — opponents of the regime or merely suspects — perished. Its troops, the Ustaše, fought both the Communist partisans and the Serbian royalist Chetniks while carrying out numerous pogroms along the way. It is estimated that between 1941 and 1945, out of a Jewish population of 80,000 persons, more than 67,000 were murdered, one of the highest destruction rates in Europe.
Things unfolded differently in the occupation zones held by the Italian army (Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro, southern Slovenia, and the Dalmatian coast), as well as in the territories directly annexed by Rome (Slovenia and Croatia).
Although living conditions for the populations subjected to this armed occupation were made extremely difficult by hunger and mistreatment, Italian occupation officers, supported in this by senior officials of their foreign ministry, refused to commit the mass crimes carried out by their German, Bulgarian, or Ustaše allies. The Italian army even went so far as to establish “protective camps” for Jews in order to shield them from Nazi fury, at Crikvenica, Kraljevica, Selce, Novi Vinodol, and on the islands of Lopud, Brač, Hvar, and Korčula, among others.
Thus, in July 1942, 2,500 Jews captured during operations conducted by the Italian army against the Yugoslav partisans were transferred to the island of Rab (Arbe in Italian), located along the Dalmatian coast. There they discovered a vast complex of barracks and tents situated near the village of Kampor. The Arbe civilian internment camp (Campo di concentramento per internati civili di Guerra – Arbe) already held between 10,000 and 15,000 detainees, mainly Slovenes, Croats, and Jews. Although conditions there were dreadful for all inmates, with cold, famine, dysentery, scurvy, beriberi, and scabies rampant in these makeshift lodgings, Jewish prisoners enjoyed certain concessions, such as exemption from forced labor and a certain freedom of movement. A former Slovenian detainee, Anton Vratuša — who after the war would become Yugoslavia’s ambassador to the United Nations — summarized the situation as follows:
“We were all prisoners, but they were protected.”
He added: “We used their help.” What did he mean by this?
Among the Jewish prisoners, there was far from complete trust with respect to the Italian military authorities. Certainly, they had disobeyed orders by shielding them from the Nazis, but this trial of strength could at any moment turn disastrous: several examples were already known of camps where Italian soldiers had been forced by their German allies to hand over their Jewish prisoners.
It therefore became urgent to leave the island as quickly as possible.
A small group among them, including Viktor Hajon, a member of the Yugoslav Communist Party (and a famous polo player before the war), who had just failed in an escape attempt, established contact with a clandestine committee formed before their arrival. This committee included members of the People’s Liberation Movement founded by Josip Broz — soon to become known under his nickname Tito. Its armed branch, the People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia (Narodnooslobodilačka vojska, or N.O.V.), fought the occupiers. Unlike General Mihailović’s royalist Chetniks, Tito, a seasoned Communist apparatchik accustomed to clandestine work since 1934, had built a structured, hierarchical army highly suited to guerrilla warfare, whose headquarters constantly moved through the mountains of Bosnia and Montenegro. Its strength also lay in uniting within its ranks, on equal terms, Jews, Muslims, Orthodox Christians, and Roman Catholics, in a country where wars of religion were compounded by ethnic conflicts. At its height, his army numbered 800,000 fighters.
Representatives of the Jewish group proposed supplying intelligence to the clandestine committee, taking advantage of their relative freedom of movement within the camp. Their information concerned guard schedules, contacts with the Italian headquarters on the mainland coast, and so forth. The clandestine committee decided to make use of this cooperation. The ultimate goal was to organize an uprising in the camp, but a serious problem confronted everyone: the lack of weapons. While waiting to acquire some, the two groups organized special courses given by doctors and nurses on emergency medical care for the wounded. These would prove extremely valuable in the events that followed.
History itself would come to the aid of the internees.
On 8 September 1943, news of Italy’s capitulation spread through the camp, giving the signal for action. The prisoners disarmed their guards without encountering any real resistance — it must be said that the guards themselves had only one desire: to return home as quickly as possible. This remains the only example of the liberation of a concentration camp during WWII that caused not a single casualty. But the Italian soldiers, aware that they themselves now risked capture and execution by their former German allies if taken prisoner, often chose instead to join the insurgents.
Two days later, a large gathering took place in the camp’s “Square of Hunger”, during which the “Rab Partisan Brigade” was created. Numbering around 1,700 future fighters, it was incorporated into the 24th Division of Tito’s People’s Liberation Army of Yugoslavia. For the Jewish internees, integration into this force posed no problem: they knew that within this partisan army — then the strongest and best organized in Europe — a number of leaders were themselves Jewish, such as Moša Pijade. They would therefore be recognized as Jewish fighters “in their own right.”
The Rab Island Brigade was structured into five battalions. The first four were mainly Slovenian, while the fifth consisted of 250 Jews, generally adolescents, together with a medical unit of around 35 Jewish nurses, some of whom would later be assigned to other battalions. The unit was commanded by David Deča Kabiljo, a reserve officer, assisted by Edvard Ehrlich, the political commissar, who would later be killed in combat.
Yet the joy of liberation was mixed with deep apprehension: German soldiers could land on the island at any moment to retake control. It was necessary to leave as quickly as possible. It was decided to leave behind 204 Jewish detainees who were in too poor a physical condition to be transported. Tragically, they would later be deported to Auschwitz when German troops regained possession of the island.
On 17 September 1943, after a short crossing, the brigade landed at Novi Vinodol, a port on the mainland coast, where it joined the partisans of the People’s Liberation Army. A long march then began northward toward territories controlled by the N.O.V.’s 7th Banija Division. For sixteen days, the fighters advanced through the mountains and dense forests of inland Croatia, passing through areas sometimes held by the Chetniks, with whom relations could be tense. The battalion’s men were then incorporated into the 7th Partisan Division, which had just suffered heavy losses against the Germans. They received accelerated military training and were deployed in the regions of Banija, Kordun, and Lika — three inland Croatian areas that were theaters of particularly intense operations, where the partisans had to fight both Wehrmacht troops and Ustaše forces, who did not hesitate to execute prisoners. More than one hundred members of the Jewish battalion fell in combat between the autumn of 1943 and the end of the war in May 1945.
After peace returned, Tito’s Communist regime, from the moment it seized power, granted a place of honor in its official pantheon to the struggle of the partisans, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. Among the Jewish fighters, seven received the supreme distinction of National Hero — posthumously, with only two exceptions: Moša Pijade and General Voja Todorović, later appointed commander of the state’s land forces. In 1948, the year the State of Israel was created, the Communist authorities officially declared themselves hostile to Zionism, but Tito remained one of the few Eastern Bloc leaders to allow Jews to leave his country freely and emigrate to their new homeland.
Today, a memorial erected on the island of Rab commemorates the Jewish brigade, and each year gatherings known as Beyachad (“together” in Hebrew) bring together its descendants in remembrance. The memorial also serves as a reminder of the existence of the Italian concentration camps, for those inclined to forget. At the Shoah Memorial Museum in Paris, one may admire a striking photograph of the Jewish battalion of Rab Island cheerfully marching toward its future battles.
The battalion’s epic was also celebrated in song. In 1944, a young fighter, Shalom “Shani” Altarac, descended from a family of cantors from Sarajevo, composed in the Croatian forests of Kordun and Banija a Judeo-Spanish parody of the ritual songs of the Haggadah (the liturgical text recounting the liberation of the Jews under Pharaoh), which he called the Partisan Haggadah. The text reinterpreted the Exodus story to match communist ideology, viewing the insurrection of slaves against Pharaoh as a parallel to the proletariat uprising against capitalist and Axis oppressors. It famously begins with the line, “This is the bread of affliction that the Jewish partisans ate in the Croatian forests…”
Rather than being a one-time wartime artifact, Sarajevo’s Jewish community continued to recite this humorous parody at the very end of their community seders for decades after the war.
About the writer:
Michel Levine is a historian of Human Rights and the author of a work dedicated to the major cases of the League of Human Rights (Unclassified Cases. Unpublished Archives of the League of Human Rights, Paris, Fayard, 1973).
Further publications include a historical investigation on the repression of Algerian demonstrations in Paris in October 1961 (The October Ratonnades. A Collective Murder in Paris in 1961, Paris, Ramsay, 1985; reissue Jean- Claude Gawsewitch Publisher, 2001.)
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