The Arrival at Yugoslavia's Secret Prison Island
The boxcars that carried the first prisoners to the port of Bakar in July 1949 were designed for livestock. The men inside — Communist Party members, wartime partisans, university professors, factory managers — had been arrested without trial by UDBA, Yugoslavia's State Security Administration. Most had no idea where they were being taken. Some had been pulled from their beds at night. Others had been summoned to routine party meetings and never came home. At Bakar, they were loaded onto boats and ferried across the Adriatic to an island so barren that even its name was a warning: Goli Otok — the Naked Island.
What greeted them on shore was not a lineup of guards. It was the špalir — a corridor of hundreds of existing prisoners, standing in two parallel rows, who beat the newcomers with fists, sticks, whips, and anything else they could find as the men stumbled between them. The gauntlet could stretch the length of the camp. Those who collapsed were dragged forward. Those who made it through bloodied and staggering were then required to identify which prisoners had not hit them hard enough. Those men were forced to run the gauntlet themselves.
This was not sadism improvised by rogue guards. This was the architecture. Goli Otok operated on a principle that made it unlike any other prison camp of the twentieth century: the violence was outsourced entirely to the inmates. UDBA designed a system in which prisoners surveilled, denounced, humiliated, and physically destroyed one another — and in doing so, proved their own ideological rehabilitation. The guards watched. The state kept its hands clean. The inmates did the rest.
The irony was total. Tito had broken with Stalin in 1948 to chart an independent socialist path, rejecting Soviet domination and positioning Yugoslavia as a beacon of non-aligned humanism. Within months, he built a secret island gulag that ran on Stalinist methods — forced confessions, show denunciations, psychological annihilation — refined to a degree that even the Soviet model had not achieved. A 1970 CIA intelligence report would later call Goli Otok Tito's Adriatic "Devil's Island." The prisoners themselves, with the gallows humor of the damned, called it Tito's Hawaii.
The Tito-Stalin Split and the Birth of Political Paranoia (1948)
How Yugoslavia Went from Stalin's Closest Ally to His Greatest Enemy
Yugoslavia emerged from the Second World War as the only country in Eastern Europe that had liberated itself — its communist partisans, led by Tito, fought the Nazis without depending on the Red Army for their victory. That independence bred confidence, and Tito governed accordingly: he pursued territorial ambitions in Trieste, supported communist insurgents in Greece, and floated a Balkan federation with Bulgaria, all without clearing it with Moscow first. Stalin saw a satellite behaving like a sovereign and moved to crush it.
On June 28, 1948, the Cominform — the Soviet-controlled Communist Information Bureau — passed a resolution expelling Yugoslavia from the organization. The resolution accused the Yugoslav Communist Party of harboring "nationalist elements" and deviating from Marxism-Leninism. Overnight, Yugoslavia went from Moscow's closest European ally to its primary ideological enemy. Soviet troops massed on the borders. The Eastern Bloc severed trade. Yugoslavia's economy, heavily dependent on Soviet aid since 1945, teetered.
The whiplash inside the country was staggering. For three years, Yugoslav communists had been trained to revere Stalin. His portrait hung in every government office. His writings were required reading. Party members who had fought side by side as partisans now had to choose: Tito or Stalin. Most chose Tito — or at least said they did. But the regime, terrified of a Soviet-backed internal coup, saw Stalinists everywhere.
The Secret Decision to Build a Prison on a Barren Rock
The decision to establish a prison on Goli Otok emerged from a chain of command so murky that even its architects later pointed fingers at each other. Speaking with his biographer in 1979, Tito blamed his second-in-command, Edvard Kardelj, who had proposed isolating all those in favor of the Cominform Resolution on an island. Kardelj, in turn, had received the suggestion from the Croatian UDBA chief Ivan Krajačić — and, improbably, from the sculptor Antun Augustinčić, who admired the island's marble. Interior Minister Aleksandar Ranković, Yugoslavia's third most powerful man, delegated the logistics to UDBA general Jovo Kapičić.
There was no official law, no parliamentary resolution, no legal framework. Tito simply ordered it done. Goli Otok was chosen for the same reasons that have made islands attractive to jailers for centuries — the same logic that governed Alcatraz and Robben Island. The island sat in the northern Adriatic, roughly five kilometers off the mainland coast, near the resort islands of Rab and Krk. It was 4.5 square kilometers of bare karst limestone, treeless and uninhabited, exposed to the brutal bora wind that could turn the Adriatic into a freezing gale. During the First World War, Austria-Hungary had briefly used it to hold Russian prisoners of war. After 1918, it was abandoned. No one lived there. No one could see what happened there. Escape was impossible — the currents were lethal, the nearest land a fatal swim away.
The first prisoners arrived in July 1949. The island did not appear on any official map.
Inside Yugoslavia's Most Brutal Re-Education Camp (1949–1956)
Who Were the Ibeovci — the Prisoners of Goli Otok?
The people branded as ibeovci — supporters of the Cominform Resolution, or IB — were not a coherent political movement. According to historian Martin Previšić, who spent years in the state archives of Zagreb and Belgrade reconstructing UDBA's files, they were a staggeringly diverse group. Some were genuine Stalinists who believed in the Soviet model and openly said so. Others were lifelong communists who were simply confused — Yugoslavia had been heavily Stalinized between 1945 and 1948, and the sudden reversal left loyal party members unsure of what they were supposed to believe. Others still were victims of personal vendettas: a colleague who wanted their job, a neighbor who bore a grudge, a jealous romantic rival who filed a denunciation. One wrong remark at a party meeting, one overheard comment praising Soviet wartime aid, could be enough.
The latest research estimates that approximately 13,000 political prisoners passed through Goli Otok between 1949 and 1956, though some figures range as high as 16,500. The ethnic composition reflected Yugoslavia's demographics and its internal politics: 44 percent were Serbs, 21 percent Montenegrins — a disproportionate figure attributed to Montenegro's historical ties to Russia — and 16 percent Croats. They included high-ranking politicians, professional soldiers, university professors, students, peasants, factory workers, and managers. Many were wartime partisans who had fought alongside Tito against the Nazis. Some had survived the concentration camps of the Second World War. Previšić put it simply: they were people who had fought for and believed in Yugoslavia, and Yugoslavia destroyed them for it.
The prison system also processed nearly 900 women, held both on Goli Otok itself and on the neighboring island of Sveti Grgur. The vast majority were not political actors at all — they were the wives, mothers, and sisters of convicted men, imprisoned by association.
The Špalir and the System of Prisoner-on-Prisoner Violence
The špalir was only the beginning. After surviving the gauntlet, new arrivals were taken to their cells, where they were required to stand before their cellmates and deliver a full confession: what they had done, what they used to think, and what they were thinking now. Unsatisfactory answers triggered insults, physical assault, and total social ostracism. From that moment forward, the prisoner entered a system designed not to punish the body but to annihilate the self.
UDBA's signature innovation was what it called "self-managed re-education" — a term that borrowed the vocabulary of Yugoslavia's celebrated workers' self-management model and applied it to torture. Prisoners were required to spy on each other constantly. Every evening, political education meetings were held in which inmates were expected to denounce fellow prisoners: who had not worked hard enough, who had complained, who had associated with the wrong person, who had failed to participate enthusiastically in group denunciations. Failure to inform resulted in a black mark on your own record. Those who cooperated rose in the camp hierarchy and received marginally better treatment. Those who refused were destroyed.
The system was designed so that no real community among the imprisoned could form. Everyone was simultaneously victim and perpetrator. Even prisoners who had completed the full cycle of "re-education" were required to participate in beating and degrading new arrivals. Refusal sent them back to the beginning. The psychological torture, as historian Ana Antić concluded, was not aimed at reintegration — it was aimed at the disintegration of personality through compulsory self-analysis.
Rade Žigić understood this better than most. A Croatian Communist, former Partisan, member of the Politburo of the Croatian Communist Party's Central Committee, a reserve general in the Yugoslav People's Army — Žigić was one of the most prominent figures to arrive at Goli Otok. According to eyewitnesses, when he was forced through the špalir, not a single prisoner struck him. They only spat. The system that demanded violence could not bring itself to beat a man of his stature — so it offered him the only alternative it knew. Žigić spent three years on the island. In 1954, still imprisoned, he took his own life. Others, faced with the same grinding erasure, made the same choice. The system did not always need fists to break a man.
Hard Labor in the Limestone Quarries of the Adriatic
The physical regime on Goli Otok was calibrated to exhaust without immediately killing. Prisoners worked in the island's limestone quarries, extracting stone that was processed into terrazzo tiles and shipped to construction sites across Yugoslavia. For a time, Goli Otok was the country's sole supplier of terrazzo tiles — the floors of apartments, offices, and public buildings across the federation were literally built on prison labor.
The quarry work was backbreaking in any weather, but on Goli Otok the climate was its own instrument of punishment. Summer temperatures reached 40°C on an island with no shade — the prisoners themselves had to plant the trees that now dot parts of the landscape. Sunstroke was constant. In winter, the bora wind tore across the exposed rock with freezing force, and prisoners worked without adequate clothing or footwear, their feet bloody and their wounds untreated. Venomous snakes nested under the stones they were ordered to lift.
The labor was often deliberately pointless. Prisoners were forced to carry massive boulders from one end of the island to the other, then carry them back. The exercise had no constructive purpose. It was designed to demonstrate that on Goli Otok, even your suffering was meaningless — you would exhaust your body for nothing, and the next day you would do it again. The system's cruelest insight was that senseless labor destroyed morale faster than productive labor. A man quarrying stone for a building could at least see a wall rise. A man carrying rocks in circles could see nothing but the pointlessness of his own existence.
The prisoners built everything on the island with their own hands: the cells, the administration buildings, the workshops, the water tanks, the roads. The structures on Goli Otok represent the first known human dwellings on an island that had been uninhabited since the end of the First World War — and, before that, for all of recorded history. The inmates built their own prison out of the island's own body.
Peter's Hole and the Darkest Corners of Re-Education
For prisoners deemed "incorrigible" — those who refused to confess, refused to denounce, refused to break — there was Petar's Hole (Petrova rupa). A pit near the admission and quarantine building, once surrounded by guard towers, it was the site of the most severe physical torture on the island. Prisoners confined there endured beatings that went beyond the already brutal daily norm. The details that survivors later described were consistent across decades of testimony: isolation in darkness, deprivation, and violence applied with the specific goal of destroying the prisoner's will to resist.
The psychological component was equally systematic. Prisoners were required to write and rewrite autobiographies under the supervision of UDBA agents, who returned each draft with the instruction that the prisoner had not yet identified the deep personality flaws that had led to their betrayal of Tito. The framework was pseudo-Freudian: your treachery was rooted in your unconscious, and until you excavated every last impulse, you had not been re-educated. A man might rewrite his life story a dozen times before it was accepted. Each rewrite demanded deeper self-abasement, more elaborate confessions of ideological corruption. The goal was not truth. The goal was the complete surrender of the prisoner's sense of self.
The psychological methods applied at Goli Otok anticipated techniques that would later surface at Tuol Sleng in Cambodia, in Mao's China, and at Abu Ghraib — systems in which self-criticism, humiliation, and the weaponization of prisoners against each other served as instruments of state control. What distinguished Goli Otok was the scale of the deception: Yugoslavia simultaneously presented itself to the world as the humane alternative to Soviet communism, while operating a secret island prison that ran on Soviet methods refined to a higher pitch of cruelty.
Notable Prisoners and the Scope of the Persecution
Partisans, Poets, and a Future Prime Minister
The roster of Goli Otok's inmates reads like a who's who of Yugoslav intellectual and political life. Vlado Dapčević, a Montenegrin communist revolutionary and partisan hero, was among the first prisoners transported to the island and among the last to leave. He refused to recant his pro-Soviet stance through years of systematic torture and forced labor. After his release, he escaped to Albania in 1958 and continued anti-Tito activities for decades, later claiming that a single day on Goli Otok was worse than his subsequent eleven years in Yugoslav prisons. Nikola Kljusev, who would later become the first Prime Minister of independent Macedonia, survived the camp as a young man.
Venko Markovski, a Bulgarian-Macedonian poet laureate, was imprisoned in 1956 for publishing an anti-Titoist poem titled "Contemporary Paradoxes." He served five years of hard labor under a false name and later wrote Goli Otok: The Island of Death, one of the most widely read accounts of the camp. Ante Zemljar, a Croatian partisan and writer, produced a collection of poems about the island called The Hope's Inferno — a deliberate invocation of Dante that other survivors also reached for when searching for a frame adequate to what they had experienced.
One detail crystallizes the absurdity of the system better than any statistic. In 1953, a group of Goli Otok prisoners was transported to the nearby island of Rab to build a monument honoring the victims of an Italian fascist concentration camp that had operated there during the Second World War. Among the labor detail was a man who had been imprisoned in both — first by the Italians, then by the regime he had helped liberate. As Slovenian historian Božidar Jezernik observed: he was building a monument to himself.
The Women's Camp on Sveti Grgur
The nearly 900 women who passed through the camp system — held on Goli Otok itself and on the neighboring island of Sveti Grgur — occupy a particularly bitter corner of the story. The majority were not communists, not partisans, not political workers of any kind. They were the wives, mothers, sisters, and other female relatives of convicted ibeovci, imprisoned for the crime of being related to a suspected dissident. Their treatment upon arrival mirrored that of the men: the špalir, the beatings, the forced confessions, the labor.
Eva Grlić endured it all. A Jewish woman who had lost her family in the Holocaust, Grlić had fought with the partisans during the war and married the Marxist philosopher Danko Grlić — who was also deported to Goli Otok. In her memoir Memories of a Lost Country, she recounted a life that passed through the destruction of European Jewry, the partisan liberation struggle, and the prison island of the regime that struggle had built. Her son Rajko, who became a prominent film director, later described his parents' refusal to burden their children with what they had suffered. The re-education had not worked on the Grlićs. What survived was not ideology but the simple, stubborn decision to go on living.
The Taboo That Lasted Decades — How Yugoslavia Buried Goli Otok
The Silence After Release (1956–1980)
The prison's political function ended in 1956, after Yugoslavia normalized relations with the Soviet Union following Stalin's death in 1953. The surviving political prisoners were released — but not freed. Each was required to sign a document pledging never to speak about what they had seen or suffered. Most complied, partly out of fear and partly out of a desire to forget. The silence that followed was not merely personal. It was structural. Goli Otok remained a taboo subject in Yugoslav public life for over two decades. The island did not appear on official maps. The state denied its existence. Former prisoners who broke the silence risked re-arrest.
The social consequences for released prisoners were devastating. Ostracized by neighbors who feared association with a suspected traitor, denied employment, shunned by former friends and even family members, the survivors occupied a permanent gray zone. Consul Ivan Antunac, later honored by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations for saving two Jewish families during the war, was deported to Goli Otok and upon returning told his family nothing for decades. His son Goran later recalled that his father only mentioned the island once, at a funeral, years later. The fear never left him. He knew he was always being watched.
Nikola Novaković, a Yugoslav Partisan who had fought the Nazi occupation, was sentenced to twenty years on Goli Otok for a single act of defiance: when asked to declare his loyalties after the split, he reminded the court that it was Russia who had sent arms when the partisans had nothing, and Russia who had helped liberate Belgrade. He served six years, released in 1956 on the eve of his thirty-first birthday. Over the next decade, he rebuilt his life — a small village shop, a furniture factory, eventually a successful company directorship in Novi Sad. He rarely spoke of the island. He continued to praise Russia until his death. The re-education had failed. His grandson, visiting Goli Otok decades later, described the simple cruelty of the place: an open-air prison in sight of home.
Breaking the Taboo — Literature, Film, and Memory After Tito's Death
Tito died on May 4, 1980. The dam did not break immediately, but it cracked. Antonije Isaković had written his novel Tren (Moment) about Goli Otok in 1979 but deliberately waited until after Tito's death to publish it. It became an instant bestseller. Through the 1980s, as Yugoslavia's economy crumbled and its ideological foundations weakened, the Goli Otok memoir became an entire literary genre. Igor Torkar's Dying by Installments (1984), Venko Markovski's Island of Death (1984), Dragoslav Mihailović's multi-volume Goli Otok — the testimony poured out, each account confirming and amplifying the others.
Film followed. In 1985, Emir Kusturica's When Father Was Away on Business told the story of a boy whose father makes a disparaging comment about a newspaper cartoon attacking Stalin, gets denounced by a jealous romantic rival, and disappears for three years to serve time "away on business" — the euphemism families used when a relative had been sent to the island. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. A year earlier, the dark comedy Balkan Spy (1984) had taken a more satirical approach, depicting a former Goli Otok prisoner so psychologically damaged by the experience that he becomes a paranoid amateur spy, monitoring his own tenant.
The first cultural crack had come even earlier — and from the underground. In 1979, the Rijeka-based punk band Paraf performed a song titled "Goli Otok" at concerts, breaking the silence not through literature or official culture but through the raw defiance of Yugoslav punk rock. The song's writer, Valter Kocijančić, re-recorded it forty years later — a gesture that underscored how long the island's shadow persisted.
The parallel to other communist states' reckonings is striking. Just as the Stasi prison at Hohenschönhausen became a symbol of East Germany's psychological terror apparatus after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Goli Otok emerged into Yugoslav consciousness as evidence that the country's humane image had been built on a lie. The difference was that Germany turned Hohenschönhausen into a memorial museum. Yugoslavia — and its successor states — have done almost nothing.
Goli Otok Today — The Abandoned Prison in the Adriatic
Why Croatia Still Has No Memorial at Goli Otok
The prison closed on December 30, 1988. By 1989, the island was completely abandoned. What followed was not preservation but erasure by neglect. Looters stripped the buildings of anything valuable. Shepherds from the neighboring island of Rab began using the land to graze their sheep. The structures that political prisoners had built with their own hands from the island's own limestone — the cells, the workshops, the quarantine building, the infirmary — were left to the bora wind and the Adriatic salt.
Croatia's government has shown little interest in confronting the legacy. In 2014, a call for development proposals for the island produced suggestions that ranged from educational tourism to the notorious pitch to convert the former prison into a gay tourism resort. None were implemented. The Association of Former Political Prisoners "Ante Zemljar" and the Zagreb-based NGO Documenta — Centre for Dealing with the Past have repeatedly called for the island to be designated a protected memorial site. In 2019, the association formally contested tourism-oriented development plans, advocating instead for a memorial park with educational programming. Their calls have largely been ignored.
A memorial plaque and a memorial cross now stand on the island. A small cinema near the harbor shows an eleven-minute documentary about the prison's history in multiple languages. That is the extent of official commemoration at a site where at least 287 people — and possibly many more — died from torture, exhaustion, disease, or suicide.
Montenegro, whose citizens comprised a disproportionate 21 percent of the prison population, has proven even more resistant to accountability. While most former Yugoslav republics have formally acknowledged Goli Otok and taken steps toward legal rehabilitation of victims, Montenegro has not. The communist narrative that justified the imprisonments has never been formally repudiated. In July 2024, a commemoration marking 75 years since the arrival of the first prisoners drew participants to the island — but no government officials.
The site sits in liminal territory, caught between the competing pressures that define so many places of atrocity across Eastern Europe: the impulse to remember, the desire to forget, and the commercial temptation to monetize. The same tension shapes sites like Buzludzha in Bulgaria and the Pyramid of Tirana in Albania — communist monuments stranded between ruin and repurposing. Goli Otok is different only in that the suffering was not symbolic. It was physical, documented, and personal. And none of the former prisoners are still alive. Their children and grandchildren are left to manage a legacy that the state does not want to touch.
Visiting Goli Otok — The Atlas Entry
Goli Otok is accessible by boat excursion from the resort islands of Rab and Krk during the summer tourist season. Ferries depart from Rab's harbor; the crossing takes roughly thirty minutes. Travel agencies on both islands offer organized day trips that include a guided tour of the prison ruins. Visitors who prefer to explore independently can do so — the island's sixteen numbered stations are laid out along a road that loops through the former industrial zone, the administrative buildings, the quarantine and admission area, the workshops, and the quarries.
The Goli Express, a small tourist tractor-train, runs a twenty-minute circuit of the island for those who want a faster overview. Near the harbor, a former administration building houses the small cinema screening the documentary film. A souvenir shop operates from a concrete shack marked with the hand-painted word "SUVENIRI." A harbor-side restaurant serves grilled ćevapi under parasols branded with Croatian beer logos. The contrast between the holiday infrastructure and the site's history is disorienting — and, in its own way, a continuation of the silence that defined Goli Otok for forty years.
The ruins themselves are unprotected and in advanced decay. Roofless buildings expose their interiors to the sky. Paint peels in long strips from cell walls. Plants push through shattered windows. The quarantine building, where Petar's Hole once swallowed the most defiant prisoners, still stands near the harbor. The quarries where men carried boulders in circles for no reason are visible on the island's higher ground. From the northern ridge, the outlines of Krk and Rab shimmer across the cyan sea, and the mainland glows six kilometers away — close enough for a prisoner to see the country that had condemned him, too far for him to ever reach it.
There is no national museum here. No guided audio tour narrating the testimonies that survivors spent decades suppressing. No dignified memorial to the 13,000 people who were brought to this rock and told to destroy each other. The island's story is carried instead by the stone itself — quarried by prisoners, shaped into tiles, shipped across a country that pretended the island did not exist, and walked on by millions of Yugoslavs who never knew what was beneath their feet.
Frequently Asked Questions About Goli Otok
What was Goli Otok used for?
Goli Otok was a top-secret political prison and forced labor camp operated by the Yugoslav government between 1949 and 1956. The camp was established after the Tito-Stalin split of 1948 to imprison suspected supporters of the Soviet Union and other political dissidents. Approximately 13,000 people were interned on the island during this period, where they were subjected to hard labor in limestone quarries, systematic physical violence, and a uniquely brutal system of psychological "re-education" in which prisoners were forced to beat, denounce, and surveil each other. After 1956, the island continued to function as a prison for ordinary criminals until its closure in 1988.
How many people died on Goli Otok?
The exact death toll remains disputed. The most conservative estimate, based on archival research by historian Martin Previšić, places the number at 287 confirmed deaths from torture, exhaustion, disease, and suicide. Other sources, including commemorative organizations, cite figures of 413 or higher. Some accounts, largely based on individual survivor testimony rather than state records, claim as many as 4,000 deaths, though most historians consider this figure inflated. The discrepancy reflects both the secrecy that surrounded the camp for decades and the incomplete nature of UDBA's surviving records.
Why was the Goli Otok prison kept secret?
Yugoslavia under Tito positioned itself internationally as a humane alternative to Soviet-style communism, eventually co-founding the Non-Aligned Movement. The existence of a political prison camp using forced labor, torture, and psychological coercion directly contradicted this image. The island was removed from official maps, prisoners were transported in livestock boxcars to prevent identification of the route, and all released inmates were forced to sign pledges of silence. The topic remained taboo in Yugoslav public life until after Tito's death in 1980, when survivors began publishing memoirs and the first literary and cinematic works about the camp appeared.
Can you visit Goli Otok today?
Goli Otok is accessible to tourists during the summer season via boat excursions from the Croatian islands of Rab and Krk. The crossing from Rab takes approximately thirty minutes. Visitors can explore the ruins independently or take a guided tour of the island's sixteen numbered stations, which include the former administrative buildings, workshops, quarries, and prison cells. A small tourist train called the Goli Express offers a twenty-minute overview circuit. A harbor-side cinema screens an eleven-minute documentary about the prison's history. The ruins are unprotected and in advanced decay, so visitors should wear sturdy footwear and exercise caution.
What was the špalir at Goli Otok?
The špalir, also known as the "gauntlet," "blood row," or "warm rabbit," was a ritualized form of violence administered to every new prisoner upon arrival. Existing inmates were forced to form two parallel rows, creating a corridor through which newcomers were made to run while being beaten with fists, sticks, and improvised weapons from every direction. After completing the gauntlet, the new prisoner was required to identify which inmates had not beaten them hard enough — and those prisoners were then forced to run the špalir themselves. The practice was a cornerstone of UDBA's "self-managed re-education" system, in which all violence was delegated to the inmates.
What films and books have been made about Goli Otok?
The most internationally recognized film about Goli Otok is Emir Kusturica's 1985 Palme d'Or winner When Father Was Away on Business, which depicts the camp through the eyes of a child whose father is denounced and sent to the island. Key literary works include Venko Markovski's Goli Otok: The Island of Death (1984), Igor Torkar's Dying by Installments (1984), Antonije Isaković's novel Tren (1979, published after Tito's death in 1980), and Dragoslav Mihailović's multi-volume documentary work Goli Otok. Eva Grlić's memoir Memories of a Lost Country offers a rare female perspective on the camp. David Grossman's 2019 novel More Than I Love My Life also features a character based on Goli Otok experiences.
Sources
- [The History of Goli Otok] - Martin Previšić, University of Zagreb (2019). Comprehensive monograph based on UDBA archival files in Zagreb and Belgrade.
- [Goli Otok: The Island of Death — A Diary in Letters] - Venko Markovski, East European Monographs (1984). First-person account by the Bulgarian-Macedonian poet laureate imprisoned for anti-Titoist writings.
- [Barren Island (Goli Otok): A Trans-Corporeal History of the Former Yugoslav Political Prison Camp and Its Inmates, from the Cominform Period (1949–1956) to the Present] - Milica Prokić, PhD thesis, University of Bristol (2017).
- ['We build Barren Island, Barren Island builds us': Of imprisoned humans and mobilized stone in the Yugoslav Cominformist Labor Camp (1949–1956)] - Milica Prokić, Labor History, Vol. 64, No. 6 (2023).
- [The Goli Otok Camp: Torture Justified by External Threats?] - Chapter in Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Torture, Brill (2019).
- [Goli Otok: Yugoslavia's 'Barren Island' Camp for Stalinists] - Sven Milekić, Balkan Investigative Reporting Network / BIRN (2019). Interview with historian Martin Previšić.
- [Goli Otok: A Short Guide Through the History of the Internment Camp on Goli Otok] - Martin Previšić, Boris Stamenić, and Vladi Bralić. Published by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and Documenta – Centre for Dealing with the Past, Zagreb (2020).
- [Goli Otok — Titov Gulag] - Božidar Jezernik, Modrijan založba, Ljubljana (2013). Slovenian historian's account drawing on survivor interviews and archival sources.
- [The Tragedy of Goli Otok: A Call for Justice] - Ambassador (ret.) Zorica Maric Djordjevic & Prof. Milena Sterio, Public International Law & Policy Group (2025).
- [Kosovo Political Prisoners Recall Brutal Internment on 'Barren Island'] - Xhorxhina Bami, Balkan Investigative Reporting Network / BIRN (2022). Based on testimonies published by the Pristina-based NGO Integra.
- [Letter from Goli Otok: I visited the 'Croatian Alcatraz' where my grandfather was imprisoned] - Nick Novaković, The Calvert Journal / New East Archive (2019).
