These are the prison cells at Risiera di San Sabba and the building was a warehouse for the rice-husking business that operated here, so these were hastily constructed by the Nazis in around 1943.
I think that it’s fair to say that they weren’t built for comfort or to cover the sanitary needs of the prisoners.
That’s it, a wooden bed shoved inside and not giving a great deal of space for anything else. They also weren’t single cells, despite looking like that, they were each designed for up to six people.
The rest of the room and it now has something of a haunting feel to it. There are seventeen cells in this room and they were reserved for Slovenes, Croats, partisans, political prisoners and Jews, all of whom were expected to be killed or deported soon after arriving.
When the site was turned into a museum in the 1960s, these cells were kept, although I’m not sure if they had been altered in the period between 1945 and 1965 when the building was used as a refugee camp. I’m not entirely sure what the authorities would have done with them during that time, it hardly seems like suitable accommodation for refugees.