Martyrdom of an Anti-Fascist Icon
Given responsibility for recruitment and weapons procurement, Stjepan Filipovic excelled in his duties. He showed so much promise, and displayed so much daring, that by year’s end he had risen to command an entire partisan battalion. Filipovic was captured by the Nazis in February, 1942, and was sentenced to be publicly hanged in Valjevo’s town square. At death’s door, he had the courage and presence of mind to seize the moment and defy his captors in his last seconds on earth.
Mounting the gallows, and with the hangman’s noose around his neck, he daringly thrust his hands in the air and struck a dramatic pose that was captured in a photo. Urging the gathered crowd to continue the struggle against the Nazis and their Yugoslav collaborators, he cried out just before he was hanged: “Death to fascism, freedom to the people!“. After the war, Filipovic was designated a national hero of Yugoslavia. A monumental statue was erected in Valjevo in his honor, replicating his Y-shaped pose in a rendition reminiscent of a Goya painting.
