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FI 112 10 RAB In early July 1943, the Italians evacuated all 1,200 of us from the camp in Kraljevica. We were trucked some 80 kilometres south along the Adriatic coast and ferried to the island of Rab (Arbe in Italian). The Italiansinternedusinacampafewkilometresfromtheisland’sprincipal town, also named Rab, which had been a lourishing tourist resort before the war. The new camp contained several rows of small wooden huts, rendering the overcrowding even worse than it had been in Kraljevica; as many as ten people were forced to squeeze into a single hut. The only advantage of the new accommodations, as opposed to the large men’s and women’s barracks in Kraljevica, was that family units could now live together, two to three families per hut. I was able to move into one hut with Aunt Camilla and Uncles Oskar and Robert—and ive or six others. Facilities for washing and cooking were very rudimentary, the weather was almost unbearably hot and humid, and, as before, we were encircled by a barbed-wire fence, which was constantly patrolled by armed Italian soldiers. But the humane attitude of our “captors” did not change; on particularly hot days, whoever so wished could go for a swim at a nearby beach—albeit under armed guard—and two vacant hotels in the town of Rab (the Adria and the Imperial) were transformed into hospitals for sick inmates. Over two thousand other Jewish refugees had been living under Italian occupation in various localities along the Adriatic coast; they too were transferred to Rab in early July 1943, and interned in a camp near ours. Although there was no direct communication between the two camps, I soon learned that my uncles Ferdinand and Julius, who had spent the past eight months under “free coninement” in southern Dalmatia, were now on the island with us. 81118 001-226.pdf_out 6/17/114:15 PM K 112 7A 113 10 RAB My most vivid memory of the camp on Rab is linked, perhaps surprisingly, to a literary competition. I was now eighteen and spent most of my time with my friends, a group of eight or nine young men between seventeen and twenty-three. Although we shared interests and ambitions, there was also a considerable degree of intellectual rivalry among us, often rendering our discussions very animated. One day, someone proposed that we hold a short story competition. We convened and, by majority vote, selected a topic for it: paraphrasing Lord Byron’s “We will each write a ghost story,” which he declared one rainy day in 1816 in Geneva (a suggestion that resulted in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), we determined that “We will each write a gruesome story.” A two-week deadline was set, after which we would assemble and each contestant would read his story out loud to the others. Then there would be a vote. The meeting would be moderated by a literature professor, a member of our group who was a little older than we were. Each contestant was required to contribute a two-kune coin (worth very little) to the prize money, and the winner would take all. Iwasgrippedbypanic.Ihadnevertriedmyhandatwritinganything, let alone a short story, and I was unable to get started. I was also daunted by the strength of the competition, in particular by Vlado Gottlieb, son of the master debater and author Dr. Hinko Gottlieb. Vlado was one of the most brilliant and bitingly sarcastic people I have ever known. He already had some writing experience and towered over us all intellectually —although my friends Ivo Herzer, Zdenko Kronfeld, and Vlado Granski were also very bright and talented. I decided to drop out of the competition. The ignominy of being called a coward seemed preferable to the ridicule I expected for submitting an inferior story. I tried to withdraw under the pretext that the requirement of writing in SerboCroatian , the mother tongue of all the contestants except me, placed me at an unfair disadvantage. But my friends were unyielding; they agreed that I could write in German, a language all of them understood well. I was cornered. The evening before the deadline, I inally summoned the determination to write the story. I wrote a basically simple but very contrived story of two sisters working in a travelling circus who fall in love with the lion tamer. Each sister plans a sticky end for the other, hoping to get away with murder without being suspected. One of the sisters manages to...

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