Executed Teenage Partisan Fighter Commemorated in Croatia

The Serbian National Council, which represents Croatia's Serb minority, and the Youth Initiative for Human Rights NGO organised a trip to the former Stara Gradiska and Jasenovac camps on Sunday on the anniversary of the execution of Nada Dimic, a member of the anti-Ustasa resistance movement in WWII.

The group of 50 people laid flowers and held a minute's silence in honour of Dimic by the anti-fascist monument in Stara Gradiska, and also visited the Jasenovac memorial complex, where there is a huge monument to the victims of the Ustasa-run camp called 'Stone Flower'.

Dimic, born in Divoselo near Gospic in Croatia in 1923, was Communist Party member who joined the first Partisan unit in Brezovica in June 1941 and participated in sabotage raids on the Zagreb-Sisak railway. The Ustasa police captured her in December 1941.

"At the beginning of February 1942, she was taken to the Stara Gradiska camp where he was killed at the end of March," Branka Vierda from the Youth Initiative for Human Rights said at the commemoration.

After being tortured, she was executed on March 17, 1942, at the age of 19.

Vierda concluded her speech by saying that Dimic deserved "eternal glory and praise".

Dimic was among 83,000 Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-fascists who were killed by the WWII fascist Ustasa regime at the camp between 1941 and 1945.

Jasenovac functioned as a system of camps; an important sub-camp was based in a former prison in nearby Stara Gradiska.

Unlike the Jasenovac Memorial Site, the location of Stara Gradiska is not often visited.

The poor condition of the monument dedicated to the victims of Ustasa crimes in Stara Gradiska is an indication that the memory of the victims of Ustasa movement is being neglected, the...

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