The forum “Belgrade for Beginners” with the subtitle “Great Women in Great Wars” will be held on Friday, April 26, 2024, from 6:30 p.m., in Gallery ’73.
They are guests in the popular space at Požeška 83a on Banovo brdo Jasmina Tutunović-Trifunov and Biljana Marcojevićhistorians from the Museum of Victims of Genocide, and the moderator is journalist Smiljana Popov.
They were Fearless when the whole world was in fear. They knew no fear at the time of the Great World Wars… With their fearlessness, they became symbols of suffering, heroism and the deepest philanthropy… They are the Mothers of Courage, the Mothers of Knežopolje… They are Vasilija Vukotić, Milunka Savić, Milica Tepić, Hilda Dajč, Diana Budisavljević…
Milunka Savić – the Serbian heroine of the Balkan Wars and the First World War, a sergeant in the Second Regiment of the Serbian Army “Knjaz Mihailo” and the woman with the most decorations in the history of warfare… She was wounded in battle nine times, and because of her immense courage the French called her the “Serbian Joan of Arc”.
When we talk about Milunka after victories, exploits, decorations and fame… we must also talk about the culture of memory and forgetting!
Another heroine from the Great War and the Balkan Wars is the “Montenegrin Villa”. Vasilija Vukotić, daughter of serdar Janko Vukotić. The only woman who participated in the battles at Mojkovac. Mojkovac opened the door of salvation for the unfortunate Serbian army and paved the way to victory. If it wasn’t for Mojkovac, there would have been neither the breakthrough of the Thessaloniki front nor the Great Victory won in the Great War.
Milica Tepić, also known as the Mother of the Princess of Poland, was immortalized in the famous wartime photograph by George Scrigin, which traveled around the world. The photograph from January 1944, through the image of the mother Milica with her son Branko on her back and daughter Dragica, is a symbol of the suffering in the Second World War of the people of Kozara and Potkozar, as well as of the whole of Yugoslavia, but also a symbol of the struggle for survival of a mother who did not want to surrender to fate, nor allow her to end up in the notorious Jasenovac camp with her children.
In addition to the photo as a testimony of the single mother’s struggle for survival, her son Branko (who recently passed away) testified about her fate in an interview given in 2008 to the daily newspaper Politika. According to his story, his mother fled from Bosanska Dubica to Garešnica, in Moslavina, in 1942, when his father was a fighter of the Kozar partisan detachment, due to threats from the Ustasha. The house they lived in until they went into exile was burned down, and until the end of the war they moved around Kozara looking for accommodation and help with food. On that occasion, Skrigin met them in one of the zbegs, in the vicinity of the village of Knežica, and took several photographs. After the war, they returned to the homestead, where Milica died three years later, and the children were placed with their uncle in Bosanska Dubica.
The photograph as a witness of suffering and struggle for survival is one of the exhibits in the Holocaust Museum in Auschwitz.
A twenty-year-old Jewish woman from Belgrade Hilda Deich she voluntarily went to the camp at the Old Fairground to help her sick and infirm compatriots. She soon realized that she was treading a path that led to death. She left us touching letters that today bear witness to her fearless, deeply humanistic and tragic journey. The letters written by Hilda Dajč are a rare document, from which we can read the conditions in which the Jews lived in the camp at Sajmište, in the period from December 1941 to May 1942. She wrote the letters to her high school friends Nada Novak and Mirjana Petrović.
Today, you can see the letters of Hilda Dajč in the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade, which is also in possession of the first three letters, while the fourth letter is in the Historical Archive of Belgrade.
Biljana Marcojević, historian of the Genocide Victims Museum, will talk about these fearless women and girls.
“After the attack of the Third Reich on the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the end of the April War in 1941, the entire former country was divided into occupation zones, and the Independent State of Croatia was declared on the territory of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Srem. The fate of the Serbian civilian population, especially the children in the NDH, is inextricably linked to the Austrian woman Diana Budisavljević and various aid actions that she, together with her collaborators (Dragica Habazin, Jana Koch, Ljubica Becić, Ivanka Džakula, the Kogoj sisters and numerous others) organized from the fall of 1941 until the end of the war.
Although she is remembered for taking over several thousand Serbian children from the Jasenovac camps during the summer of 1942, it is also necessary to preserve from oblivion Diana’s persistent struggle to provide accommodation, food, medicine, clothes, shoes and other necessities to the saved children, but also to ensure that the youngest preserve their identity, so that, after the end of the war conflicts, they would find out who they are, whose they are and where they are from,” says Jasmina Tutunović Trifunović, historian of the Museum of Genocide Victims, who will talk about Diana Budisavljević, her associates and her mission, which must not be forgotten. (danubeogradu.rs / S. Popov)
