4. The Partisan Who Went to the Gallows While Spitting Defiance at the Nazis
Croatian partisan Stjepan Filipovic was born in 1916 in what came to be Yugoslavia after WWI, and left home at age 16 to become a metalworker. In 1937, he became a workers’ rights activist, but when that activism landed him a year in jail, he upped the radicalism ante and became a full-blown communist when he was released in 1940. When Germany invaded and overran Yugoslavia in 1941, the new Red Filipovic joined the partisan resistance against the Nazi occupiers. He was posted to a guerrilla unit near Valjevo, in today’s Serbia, and was made responsible for recruitment and for securing arms. Filipovic excelled in his duties and showed considerable promise, so by the end of 1941 was put in charge of an entire partisan battalion.
However, the Nazis captured Filipovic in February of 1942, and sentenced him to publicly hang 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. Mounting the gallows and with the hangman’s noose around his neck, Stjepan Filipovic defiantly thrust his hands in the air and struck a dramatic pose that was captured on camera. Urging the gathered crowd to continue the struggle against the Nazi oppressors and their Yugoslav collaborators, he cried out just before he was hanged: “Death to fascism, freedom to the people!” – a partisan slogan that Filipovic’s martyrdom helped popularize. 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 an artistically classic rendition reminiscent of a Goya painting.
