Survivor in Slovenia turns 100 on Holocaust Remembrance Day
RAKEK, Slovenia — For Marija Frlan it’s as symbolic as it can get: A survivor of a Nazi concentration camp during World War II, the Slovenian woman turns 100 years old Monday, the international Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Frlan, who was held at the Nazi’s Ravensbrück camp in northern Germany for over a year in 1944-45, will join other survivors and officials in Poland on Monday for ceremonies marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.
Ahead of the ceremonies, Frlan told the Associated Press that one could talk at length about what it was like in the Ravensbrück camp, but that only those who were there really know how horrific it was.
“The ones who didn’t survive this, they can’t understand, no,” the energetic woman said at her home in the small village of Rakek in southwestern Slovenia. “It was terrible.”
Frlan said prisoners at the Nazi camp for women were given just enough food to survive and had to work throughout the day. Obligatory inspections were held outside every morning, lasting for at least one hour.
“One time, the inspection was going on for four hours,” she recalled. “It was a rainy day. It is impossible to explain if you weren’t there.”
Women at the camp encouraged each other not to give up, telling one another “Girls, hold on!” and “No moaning!” she recalled.
The Ravensbrück concentration camp was the second in size only to the women’s camp in Auschwitz, according to the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Toward the end of the war, some 50,000 prisoners, mostly women, were held at the camp.
Frlan was shipped to Ravensbrück in March 1944 from a prison in her native Slovenia. After having to clean the the offices of the secret Gestapo police for nine months, Frlan was jailed for helping the resistance movement in Slovenia in a bombing.
“The Gestapo knew that I was responsible for the bombs,” she said. “So they took me to prison.”
It was then that she saw her husband for the last time. He was captured too and executed soon after.
“We even couldn’t say hello,” she said. “That was it.”