Documentary about the infamous communist prison in the former Yugoslavia.
Yugoslavia was a dictatorship in which the master of life and death was the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. People were imprisoned even if they told a joke that the regime did not like. Yes, that was really happening.
Civilians were sent to "re-education" without a trial, by administrative decision, while military personnel were tried in staged trials where they were sentenced to at least three and up to twenty years of rigorous imprisonment.
The treatment that Yugoslav communists organized for their party colleagues and comrades in the 1940s and 1950s was not only brutal, but also morally degrading.
When a new inmate arrived in the gulag, for a "welcome" the old inmates were lined up in two columns in the fence, and the new inmate had to be beaten to unconsciousness. Those camp inmates whom the guards felt did not hit hard enough, had to go through the "bloody path" as well.
Political prisoners and dissidents were considered a danger to Yugoslavia, to socialism and to Marshal Tito.
Convicts died or were killed in various ways, for example:
- suicides - who could not or did not want to endure the methods of "re-education" of the UDBA (which were carried out by older prisoners, tasked with physically and mentally abusing the younger ones)
- accidents at work in the quarry
- death from starvation or exhaustion
This documentary exposes the lies of those who managed this prison and shows how they systematically tortured the prisoners who often went there without trial.
The Communist Party was the master of life and death in Yugoslavia, and you went to prison even if you told a joke that the authorities would not like.
Yes, that really happened, and one of the more famous examples was the journalist Zeni Lebl, who ended up on Goli Otok (Bare Island) because of a joke she told about Josip Broz Tito, the dictator who ruled Yugoslavia at the time.
We must never forget this, so that it does not happen again.
