Rab island Croatia - Goli otok (‘Naked Island’)

Rab island Croatia - Goli otok (‘Naked Island’) lies just off the north-east coast of Rab island, halfway to the mainland. Here inmates – Russians during World War I, political prisoners during Tito’s Socialist régime after World War II – were kept in terrible conditions of forced labour. It is thought some 16,000 suffered imprisonment here, around 400 died and no-one escaped.
Wandering around today, you can see the factories where wooden furniture and metal piping were made, and the quarry were rocks were broken. There was even a school and a hospital, and, chillingly, an isolation unit.
Goli Otok is a barren, uninhabited island that was the site of a political prison which was in use when Croatia was part of Yugoslavia. The prison was in operation between 1949 and 1989.