In recent days we remembered the dead, and among them, especially those who died horrible deaths – and some of them still do not have their own graves to this day. In May 1942, in the so-called Benkov meadow in Iška, partisans shot a large group of Roma people – including women and children. The publicly held company Žale that takes care of funeral and cemetery services, and the Municipality of Ljubljana have rejected the request for the burial of Roma victims of post-war massacres four times so far. This year, the SDS party decided to pay tribute to these victims. The project We Remember (Spominjamo se) by the Women’s Committee of the SDS party aims to visit locations of the massacres that were formerly kept hidden every year around All Saints’ Day and thus show piety to the dead with prayer and a nice gesture.
“Today, as part of the We Remember project, we visited mass graves of communist victims in the Municipality of Ig. Namely, we visited the gorge Iški vintgar, where the communists killed a group of Roma people, and the Kosec Shaft mass grave in Gornji Ig, from which the skeletons of fifty men were taken out about a year ago. Our day ended at Stara Žaga near Kurešček,” SDS MP Alenka Jeraj wrote on Monday, the 1st of November. Last year, the Commission on Concealed Mass Graves in Slovenia inspected the Kosec Shaft in Gornji Ig, where they found the remains of victims of interwar and post-war violence – the communists threw the bodies of home guards from the Šentvid concentration camp and those who reported to the authorities in the first days of June 1945 to that shaft. In the immediate vicinity of the Roma murder site is also the location of the massacre of disabled and wounded who were brought there from Ljubljana after the end of the war in 1945. They should have ended up in the abyss a little higher up on Gornji Ig, but because the driver of the truck missed the turn on the road, they were killed right next to the road in the Iški Vintgar gorge.
On the 26th of July 1945, in Stare Žage, home guards who were brought from Bishop’s Institution were killed at the murder site there. Since 1993, every murder site has been marked with a cross. On Friday, SDS MP Karmen Furman attended a memorial service for the victims of the post-was massacres at the cemetery in Slovenska Bistrica. In October 2004, the remains of 431 victims were buried there, who were exhumed from two mine shafts. In her address, the MP pointed out that this is a place of remembrance and a reminder to all of us to pause in our step, thought, word for a moment, and above all to never again allow for a time to come when history would repeat itself in such a form. By laying flowers on behalf of the National Assembly of the Republic of Slovenia, SDS MP Janez Moškrič paid tribute to the memory of those who died in the former Kampor concentration camp on the island of Rab.
“Heaven is my home, the earth, and sky, and every beautiful thing is telling me this.”
Dejan Škvarč, President of the SDS party’s Christian Forum, said on the 1st of November, All Saints’ Day: “All Saints’ Day should therefore be a happy holiday, which should bring a lot of consolation and hope to those who have embarked on the path of Christ’s Truth and Life. At the same time, this is also a solemn anniversary of our dearly departed who are now in heaven and are already rejoicing in inexpressible and glorious joy (1 Pet 1:8) and who show us the way to the victory of Life over death.”
Sara Bertoncelj
