By: Sara Bertoncelj (Nova24tv)
These days we remember the dead, also and especially those who died in a horrible way, and some of them have not received their graves to this day. In May 1942, partisans shot a large group of Roma – including women and children – on the so-called Benkov meadow in Iška. The public company Žale and the City of Ljubljana have already rejected the request for the burial of Roma victims of post-war massacres four times. The SDS party also paid tribute to them. The project We Remember of the Women’s Committee of the SDS aims to visit the silent slaughterhouses every year around All Saints’ Day and thus show piety to the dead with prayer and a nice gesture.
“Today, under the motto We Remember, we visited the mass communist massacres in the Municipality of Ig. Iški vintgar, where the communists killed a group of Roma, The Kosec Shaft in Gornji Ig, where the skeletons of fifty men were found a year ago. We ended in Stara žaga under Kurešček,” SDS MP Alenka Jeraj wrote. Last year, the Commission for Concealed Cemeteries inspected The Kosec Shaft in Gornji Ig, where they found the remains of victims of interwar and post-war violence – where communists threw home guards from the Šentvid camp and those who reported to the authorities in the first days of June 1945. In the immediate vicinity of the Roma slaughterhouse is also the slaughterhouse of the disabled and wounded who were brought from Ljubljana after the end of the war in 1945. They should have ended up in the abyss a little higher on Gornji Ig, but because the driver of the truck missed the road, they were killed right next to the road in Iški Vintgar.
On July 26th, 1945, home guards brought from Škof’s institutes were killed in the slaughterhouse in Stare Žage. Each slaughterhouse has been marked with a cross since 1993. On Friday, MP Karmen Furman attended a memorial service for the victims of the post-war massacres at the cemetery in Slovenska Bistrica. In October 2004, the remains of 431 victims were buried there, exhumed in both tunnels. In her address, the MP pointed out that this is a place of remembrance and a reminder to all of us to stop our step, thought, word for a moment, and above all to never allow for a time to come when history in such a form would ever be repeated. Yesterday, by laying flowers on behalf of the National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia, MP Janez Moškrič paid tribute to the memory of those who died in the former Kampor camp on the island of Rab.
“I am at home in heaven, the earth and the sky and every beautiful thing announce it to me”
Dejan Škvarč, President of the SDS Christian Forum, said on today’s holiday: “All Saints’ Day should therefore be a happy holiday, which should infuse a lot of consolation and hope to all who have set out on the path of Christ’s Truth and Life. At the same time, it is a solemn anniversary of our dear heavenly fathers, who rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory (1 Peter 1:8) and show us the way to the victory of Life over death.”