Metajna was exclusively a camp for Serb and Jewish women and their children, in existence from late June to mid-August 1941. Together with Slana, it formed one of the two concentration camps on Pag, functioning as a component of the larger Gospić-Jadovno-Pag camp system, in which the transit camp in the town of Gospić served as the fulcrum. Within the broader context of the Holocaust, Metajna stands out as one of the first sites in which Jewish women and children were systematically murdered, underscoring the Ustaša regime's proactivity in contributing to the destruction of the Jews of Europe.
The camp was located in the northern outskirts of the village of Metajna, a small settlement positioned in a sheltered bay. Located about three kilometers west of the Slana camp, the camp comprised two vacation villas forcibly requisitioned by the Ustaša authorities to incarcerate the prisoners. One of the villas was owned by a veterinarian from Karlovac; the other by a lawyer from Zagreb. As the number of arriving women and children soared, the Ustaša guard personnel seized another building, this time a house requisitioned from a local resident.
The first prisoners to arrive at the Metajna camp were a small group of Jewish women, who refused to be separated from their husbands, when the latter were deported from Zagreb to Gospić and subsequently to Slana. They were soon followed by larger contingents of Jewish and Serb women and children, reflecting the increasingly gender-indiscriminate pattern of the persecution, as the Ustaša regime ramped up deportations of Jews and Serbs across the Independent State of Croatia. Although the available evidence is fragmentary, the camp's prisoner population appears to have numbered approximately 300 women and children.
Like the Slana camp, the Metajna camp was guarded by elements of the 13th Ustaša Battalion, a unit of the Ustaša Army (Ustaška vojnica) headed by Ivan Devčić. Different postwar testimonies suggest that the camp commander was Maksimilijan Ošić, a cousin of Ivan Devčić, who lived in Zagreb when the Independent State of Croatia was proclaimed.
In late July or early August 1941, Ustaša guard personnel transferred the Jewish prisoners from Metajna to the Slana camp in order to make room for the continued influx of Serb women and children. Following the Italian military's reoccupation of Zone II, the 13th Ustaša Battalion dissolved the Metajna camp. Approximately 200 women and children who survived Metajna were subsequently deported to other camps across the Independent State of Croatia, though the majority of prisoners perished. An internal report from the Italian military documented the exhumation of 293 women and 92 children in the area. While this figure should not be treated as definitive, it is nonetheless indicative of the scale of mass killing of women and children in the vicinity of the Slana and Metajna camps.
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