Anton Lipovž

Anton Lipovž (Batuje near Ajdovščina 1892–Ljubljana 1970) was on the last voyage of the Austro-Hungarian warship Kaiserin Elisabeth, which met its end in China. He brought back postcards and photographs. Anton voluntarily joined the Austro-Hungarian Navy in 1912. He attended a recruit training course and artillery school. The following year, he was assigned to the torpedo cruiser Kaiserin Elisabeth, which sailed off to East Asia just a few days later. The ship cruised between Chinese and Japanese ports for a year, and after Japan declared war on Germany on 23 August 1914, it joined German forces in Qingdao, China, in the fight against Japan and Great Britain. After their defeat on 20 November 1914, the Japanese captured both the German soldiers and most of the Austro-Hungarian ship’s crew, taking them to Japan as POWs. Anton was initially imprisoned in the Himeji temple and then in the Aonogahara camp. POWs of Yugoslav nationality were not released from Japanese camps until December 1919. They returned to their homeland in 1920. 

Anton stored the postcards from his East Asian years in an album together with postcards from other places. He kept the photographs from the same period in an album along with photographs of family and from his time in the Yugoslav Royal Navy, in which he continued his professional career after World War I. The East Asian postcards are predominantly from Japan, while the photographs are mainly from his stay in the Japanese prison camps.