Croatia: see the haunting ruins of a prison once known as a "living hell"

Goli Otok was once described as a “Living Hell” by those who were unlucky enough to be sent to the prison.

Lying just two miles off the coast of Croatia, the prison was less a place for petty criminals and more a dumping ground for prisoners of war and later political dissenters. During World War I, Austria-Hungary used the island to house Russian soldiers.

In 1948, as Cold War tensions began to rise, Yugoslavian leader Josip Broz Tito—a communist revolutionary—broke ties with the Soviet Union. Goli Otok soon became a political prison and labor camp for those in Yugoslavia who still supported Soviet leader Joseph Stalin or otherwise opposed Tito’s rule.

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