Historical Research and Present-Day Socio-Politics: The Multiethnic Effort behind the Rescue of the Jews of Kampor
Author(s) Danijel Matijević Publisher Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade Regional Center for Advanced Studies of Humanities, Rijeka Published 2024 ISBN 978-86-82324-78-2 Pages 8 Edition Square
The focus of this research is the rescue of the Jewish internees of the Italian concentration camp Kampor, which operated on the island of Rab in 1942–1943. In the fall of 1943, as Fascist Italy capitulated, the Yugoslav Partisan movement, which coalesced from the antifascist uprising that started in the summer of 1941, evacuated the Jews of Kampor to the liberated territories of Lika, Banija, and Kordun, and housed them there for the remainder of the war. Beside the rescue operation itself, the housing of the Jews of Kampor was a complex operation, dependent on intergroup cooperation and with a focus on coexistence, involving the efforts from a broad spectrum of Croatia’s and the region’s diverse ethno-confessional groups. This essay argues for committed state and socio-cultural stakeholder support and advancement of such histories, because they challenge established collective historical narratives that habitually favor a self-affirming, nationalistic view of the past, conducive to intergroup division and historiographical myopia.