Risiera di San Sabba is a five-storey brick-built compound located in Trieste, northern Italy, that functioned during World War II as a Nazi concentration camp for the detention and killing of political prisoners, and a transit camp for Jews, most of whom were then deported to Auschwitz. The cremation facilities, the only ones built inside a concentration camp in Italy, were installed by Erwin Lambert, and were destroyed before the camp was liberated. Today, the former concentration camp operates as a civic museum.

Background

The building was erected in 1913 and first used as a rice-husking facility (hence the name Risiera). During World War II, German occupation forces in Trieste used the building to transport, detain and murder prisoners. Many occupants of Risiera di San Sabba were transported to the German Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau in Occupied Poland. Historians estimate that over 3,000 people were killed at the Risiera camp and thousands more imprisoned and transported elsewhere. The majority of prisoners came from Friuli, the Julian March and the Province of Ljubljana. Boris Pahor was also held at the camp before being transported to the concentration camps of Dachau and Natzweiler-Struthof. After the war, the camp served as a refugee camp and transit point for the mass exodus of soldiers of the Royal Yugoslav Army and their families who were loyal to King Peter II and the 1950s for many people, especially ethnic Italians fleeing former Italian territory in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.