Nada Dimić

In memoriam

Yugoslav Partisan, proclaimed a People's Hero of Yugoslavia. Born into a Serbo-Croatian family from Divoselo, near Gospic, in southern Croatia. She had successfully finished high school and had begun to attend a school of economics when her existence, like that of millions of Yugoslavs, was disrupted by the Nazi invasion in the spring of 1941. Since 1938 she was part of the youth section of the Communist Party. The girl alternated between study and political militancy and, with the invasion of the Italian-German forces, she soon chose what to do, she joined the partisans of the 1st detachment of Sisak, the first partisan unit in Croatia. From her books Nada moved on to pistols, rifles, bombs and acts of sabotage. A war against a much stronger and better armed opponent. But the Germans and the Italians were not the only enemies to face, the Ustaše had also organized themselves alongside them, a Croatian far-right movement that supported the occupying armies. As often happens in similar situations, the local collaborators were among the most bloodthirsty and ferocious troops used in the repression of the partisans. It was they who captured Nada for the first time, in 1941, and brought her to Zagreb for questioning. It was then that the girl swallowed poison to kill herself and avoid undergoing the torture of the Ustaše. But the Zagreb partisans rescued her in time. Nada had come close to death, but this was certainly not a sufficient reason to stop the fight. Once she was back on her strength, in fact, she set off for Karlovac to infiltrate as an undercover agent. This time it was the Italians who captured her, towards the end of 1941, she had shot a Ustaše who wanted to identify her. The Italians again handed it over to the Ustaše on 3 December. Weeks of continuous torture followed, which was followed only by her silence, Nada did not say a single word about her comrades and the partisan activities in the area. In February 1942, she was then transferred to the infamous Stara Gradiska prison camp. Finally, on March 17 she was shot. Nada died like this at not even nineteen years old.

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