Survivors

The Gonars concentration camp was one of the several Italian concentration camps during the WW II. It was established on February 1942 near Gonars, Italy. Many internees were transferred to this camp from the other Italian concentration camp, Rab concentration camp (Kampor). Gonars concentration comp remained open until the surrender of Italy to the Allies on September 1943
The history of humankind, charged with bloody testimonies and traumatic memories, leads to identical conclusions. Parallel to the development of humanistic studies, science and technology the modern age has also encouraged the development of methods of elimination of adverse elements in society. Dogmatic ideologies haven t yet lost their potentiality
In his Circular 3C, Mario Roatta, Italian general in the Province of Ljubljana (1941-45) ordered summary executions, hostage taking, reprisals, internments, burning of houses and whole villages, and the deportation of 25,000 people, who were placed in Italian concentration camps Rab (Kampor), Gonars, Monigo (Treviso), Renicci d'Anghiari, Chiesanuova (Padova), Visco (Palmanova). In Italy, after the WW II he was convicted and sentenced in absentia (in Itali) to life imprisonment, but Roatta fled to Spain and lived there under the protection of dictator Francisco Franco.
However, concentration camps were not a novelty at that time. They were already conceived in the 19th century for the purpose of eliminating war prisoners from both sides of the American civil war and refined during the Second Boer War in South Africa when British military forces imprisoned tens of thousands of civilians who might have provided help to the rebels
A concentration camp is thus a place for extrajudicial imprisonment which a government uses to keep people who are either against that government or who it thinks are too dangerous to remain free
Bertok s series of photographs is devoted to the protagonists who either as victims of opposition and rebellion or as collateral damage of Third Reich s demographic policy experienced the horrors of Nazi concentration camps and survived, however, these places where human life is worth almost nothing have left indelible marks on their victims
The portraits of former inmates however do not show explicit signs of violence visible on their bodies, these are instead ambivalent images of the elderly who have already stared into the eyes of death many years ago in front of the spectator
They are reminders of these tragic events for which the entire world has vowed they should never happen again. After 1945 the repressive apparatus of both Western or Eastern powers – didn t essentially soften, innumerable war prisoners and political dissidents were thus taken to forced labour camps in Siberia by Soviets while the American Army locked up and starved to death around one million Wehrmacht soldiers in improvised camps
In her essay On Violence Hannah Arendt stated that power comes from the collective will and does not need violence to achieve any of its goals, since voluntary compliance takes its place. As governments start losing their legitimacy, violence becomes an artificial means toward the same end and is therefore, found only in the absence of power. If powerlessness of this kind lead to the terror of incalculable proportions, only the conscious power of the people could prevent it
After WWII Europe tried to maintain an awareness of the inhumanity of nationally and racially intolerant totalitarian ideologies and thus created the enormous physical and mental infrastructure of memory that in order to avoid the recurrence of ideological violence demands empathy for millions of innocent victims – the ones who died and the ones who survived
Goran Bertok has entitled the cycle of photographic portraits of people who survived the extermination camps of World War II, Survivors. Yet this is no longer the type of survival that is the postponement of death, each survival of this sort is merely temporary
Everything here is beyond life and death. The way in which the image connects the presence and absence of the photographed being, life and death in relation to it no longer represent a simple opposition. Just like momentariness and continuance do not mean it either. (Proust wrote to Madame Straus in a letter that photography is the momentariness of that which lasts in a person
A gaze from eye to eye beyond death and life. The emanation of that presence of the soul from which death can no longer take anything more. This is what I saw in Bertok s exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary History in Ljubljana
During the Second World War, Slovenian territory was divided between German, Italian and Hungarian occupiers, who condemned Slovenians to ethnocide, using some elements of genocide. Between 1941 and 1945 around 12.000 Slovenians died in German and Italian concentration camps
Goran Bertok has never shied away from terror with sen-timentality and ideological appropriation. He has always known that beauty is, just as Rilke says, the beginning of terror that we are barely able to endure. And he has always explored, to where we can endure
During the Second World War, Slovenian territory was divided between German, Italian and Hungarian occupiers, who condemned Slovenians to ethnocide, using some elements of genocide. Between 1941 and 1945 around 12.000 Slovenians died in German and Italian concentration camps
A gaze from eye to eye beyond death and life. The emanation of that presence of the soul from which death can no longer take anything more. This is what I saw in Bertok s exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary History in Ljubljana
A gaze from eye to eye beyond death and life. The emanation of that presence of the soul from which death can no longer take anything more. This is what I saw in Bertok s exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary History in Ljubljana

Survivors

Miha Colner: Confronting the death… again

Goran Bertok’s recent series of photographs is devoted to the protagonists who – either as victims of opposition and rebellion or as collateral damage of Third Reich’s demographic policy – experienced the horrors of Nazi concentration camps and survived; however, these places where human life is worth almost nothing have left indelible marks on their victims. The portraits of former inmates however don’t show explicit signs of violence visible on their bodies, these are instead ambivalent images of the elderly who have already stared into the eyes of death many years ago in front of the spectator. They are reminders of these tragic events for which the entire world has vowed they should never happen again. However, historical memory is indeed very short-lived. After 1945 the repressive apparatus – of both Western or Eastern powers – didn’t essentially soften; innumerable war prisoners and political dissidents were thus taken to forced labour camps in Siberia by Soviets while the American Army locked up and starved to death around one million Wehrmacht soldiers in improvised camps.

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