Ružica Mihić

If from the direction of Škurinje from the crossroads at the school you go down the street Brothers Pants, the first street on the left is Ružica Mihić Street. It starts at the children's playground above the former shelter, and ends with stairs leading to a large parking lot near the Central City Cemetery. This quiet, tree-lined street rightfully bears the gentle female name of Drenovčanka Ružica Mihić.

Interview

As we occasionally publish articles about our streets in our newspaper, I decided this time for this one, since I know Ružica's brother, Mr. Atilije Mihić. At my request, he gladly agreed to talk about his sister.

Tell me a few words about your family. Where did you live?

Rose is the oldest, and I am the youngest child of the seven of us that our parents had. She was born on October 18, 1921, and I was born in 1939, so there is a full 18 years difference between us.

We lived in our house in the hamlet of Tonići in today's Bruno Francetić Street.

Given the big age difference, I don't know much about her life in her youth. I know that she went to school on Donja Drenova, which had belonged to Italy since the Treaty of Rome in 1924, so the school, like all schools in Rijeka at the time, was Italian. Tonići belonged to former Yugoslavia, but at that time Gornja Drenova did not have schools. Later she finished her course for the spike. According to my parents, I know she should have gotten a job, but the war ended everything. And now I have her workbook, but without one day's work experience.

As you say, the war has begun. How and when did Rose get involved?

At the beginning of the war, Drenova had two men who were partisan fighters from the very beginning of the war: my brother Venceslav Vence Mihić, two years younger than Rose and Vilim Štefan who were the bearers and instigators of the resistance to the Drenos. Gradually, many men from Drenova went to the forest to partisans. Women remained and became the bearers of fieldwork.

In “the Kastav Compendium’ No. 1 of 1978 in art.  “Women of the Kastav area in the National Liberation Army 1941-1942.” by Milka Milenić-Nežić writes:

Ružica Mihić from Drenova is a member of the SKOJ, then a member of the CCP. Her activity is versatile. He brings and distributes the press, collects and carries food, brings new fighters to berth, goes across the border, works with young people and women. . . . She continued to do so until January 1945, when she was arrested by Chetniks, tortured and abused, and then surrendered to the Germans. She was taken to a concentration camp and never came back.

Rose became actively involved in the resistance very early in 1942, at the urging of her brother Vencet, and worked actively in the field, just as she writes in the aforementioned article. I have to say that she was First woman secretary of SKOJ.

Can you remember how it came about that she was arrested?

I know exactly and I remember every detail even though I was only five years old. In 1944, a young fighter, a partisan from Drenova, was wounded and came home for recovery. The Chetniks, who were already retreating westward, found him wounded, spoke in pain and said some names. In a large raid from Benashi to Kablara, they captured about twenty elderly people. Among them was a woman who denounced my sister. Rose, knowing she was in danger, slept at her aunt's house.

On the very day of William of God in 1944, she came home in the morning when a group of Chetniks appeared with whom was also the woman I mentioned and said: “This is the Ružica Mihić you are looking for.” They ordered her to get ready. Like I remember now: She went into the kamarin to get dressed, two Chetniks after her. One of them nakedly ordered her : “Hurry up, hurry up”, while the other said: “Let the woman get dressed because she goes into the unknown”. I mean, there were people among them.

The Chetniks handed her over to the Germans who took her to St. Matthew, then to Trsat and then to prison in Via Roma. At the beginning of February, she was transported to Dachau Concentration Camp in Germany. When the Americans liberated the camp in May 1945, she was still alive. When the Drenovci Marija Tomašić married Fućak, Christina, I don't know her last name even though I knew her husband and children and another woman, who were in the camp together with Ružica, returned to Drenova, they said that Ružica was too weak to withstand transportation home, she had only 38 kg.

The Americans kept her on recovery, but she did not endure it and died in August 1945, at the age of twenty-four, of which we received official notification. Marija Tomašić Fućak brought some small things, mirrors and makeup that Ružica sent to her younger sister, which is why we know that at the time they were going home she was still alive, but too weak to withstand the way to the house. My brother Milutin Milo Mihić He died as a partisan in the battle for the hospital on St. Peter's Mountain, so the war took two children to my parents, and to us, the children's brother and sister.

Logor

Subsequent research at the address Archives of Arolsen We found out that Ružica was staying and, unfortunately, died in the infamous congregation Bergen-Belsen. The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp is one of the most horrific sites of Nazi crimes during World War II. She was imprisoned and died in that camp. Anna Frank.

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We do not know whether Ružica was imprisoned in Dachau and subsequently transferred to Bergen-Belsen, but according to the documents that they kindly submitted at our request from the aforementioned address, we learned that after the liberation of the camp on April 15, 1945. Rose was taken to a hospital near the camp and died on July 15, 1945. (See pictures). She was buried in the common tomb of No. I 3.

Archives of Arolsen – The International Centre for Nazi Persecution, formerly the International Search Service (ITS), is an internationally run centre for documentation, information and research on Nazi persecution, forced labour and the Holocaust in Nazi Germany and its occupied regions. The archive contains about 30 million documents from concentration camps, details of forced labor and files on exiled persons. The ITS preserves the original documents and sheds light on the fate of those persecuted by the Nazis. The archives have been available to researchers since 2007. May 2019 The Centre uploaded around 13 million documents and made them available to the public online. Archives are currently digitized and transcribed through the crowdsourcing platform Zooniverse. As of July 2020, around 27% The archive has been copied.