Žarko Zrenjanin

Žarko Zrenjanin ( Serbian - Cyrillic Жарко Зрењанин , born September 11, 1902 in Izbište near Vršac , Austria-Hungary ; † November 4, 1942 in Pavliš near Vršac, Serbia under German military administration ), called Uča (Уча), was a Yugoslav politician and Resistance fighters .

As a functionary and partisan of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia , he was the organizer of the resistance against fascism in Vojvodina during the Second World War .

The Yugoslav government declared him a folk hero in 1944 and named the Serbian city ​​of Petrovgrad after him in 1946 .

biography

Zrenjanin as a student.

Zrenjanin comes from a poor farming family from Izbište, attended elementary school in Vršac and high schools in Segedin , Bela Crkva and Pančevo . He trained as a teacher in Sombor in 1923 . While still in training, he joined the revolutionary youth movement.

From 1923 Zrenjanin taught in Kanatlarci , a village in the Prilep administrative district in what is now Macedonia . There he came into conflict with state power for the first time in 1926 because of his political opinion and was imprisoned several times. This was followed by a forced transfer to his place of birth in July 1926. There he organized a literacy initiative , founded a people 's university and opened libraries and reading houses in the surrounding villages . He contributed to numerous educational magazines and textbooks and was politically active through the teaching community from Belo Blato , which he chaired for several years.

In 1927 he became a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPJ) and took over the party chairmanship in Izbište until he was elected head of the administrative committee in Vršac in 1930 and head of the committee of the Southern Banat administrative unit of the CPY in March 1932 .

In his house in Izbište he organized a small illegal printing company that printed the first edition of the Lenjinista newspaper in 1933 , followed by two more editions. Zrenjanin wrote the leading article and most of the other articles in the publication himself. In April 1933 the print shop was discovered by the local police . Zrenjanin was then sentenced to a three-year prison term by the Regional Court for State Security, which he served in the prisons of Sremska Mitrovica and Lepoglava . There he campaigned with Moša Pijade , Ivan Milutinović and other important communists of his time for the rights of politically imprisoned people and initiated hunger strikes , among other things .

On April 6, 1936, Zrenjanin was released from prison and immediately resumed his political work. He made contact with Belgrade communists and the party leadership of the CPY in Vršac. Once again, in July 1936, he became head of the party committee of the Southern Banat administrative unit and was elected to the Vojvodina National Committee in September.

Before the beginning of the Second World War, his party organization, his political agitation and the elaboration of propaganda made him one of the most experienced activists of the CPJ. Among other things, he wrote numerous articles on the national and agricultural issues. Because of this commitment, he was elected at the end of 1938 as temporary party chairman of the renewed Communist Party of Vojvodina and in April 1939 as the political head of the National Committee of the Communist Party of Vojvodina. He held this office until his death.

In June 1939, in Tacen near Ljubljana , Slovenia , Zrenjanin took part in a party conference of the CPY and visited numerous party organizations in Vojvodina during the year. He became a member of the initiative assembly of the Vojvodina Workers' Party. There he stated that Vojvodina in Yugoslavia will "in view of its special economic, social and national structure, become an autonomous unit" .

On May 4, 1940, Zrenjanin was taken into custody in Petrovgrad and only released from it on October 3, 1940. Until the Balkan campaign of the National Socialist German Reich in World War II, Zrenjanin was persecuted by the police and imprisoned four more times. He was severely ill-treated several times in the Petrovgrad prison, in the notorious Belgrade Glavnjača prison and on the Ada Ciganlija prison island . Despite his imprisonment and the associated absence, Zrenjanin was elected chairman of the PC and a delegate to the fifth national conference of the CPY in Vojvodina at the beginning of September 1940. There he was again elected to chair the Central Committee.

Zrenjanin began printing the illegal party newspaper Istina ( German : The Truth) in December 1940 and in January 1941 with the publication of the Trudbenik newspaper and its Hungarian edition A dolgozó (German: Proletarians). After Yugoslav government representatives signed the accession to the Tripartite Pact in Vienna on March 25, 1941 , Zrenjanin led the anti-fascist demonstrations in Pančevo and Vršac.

In May 1941 he took part in a hearing of the CPJ in Zagreb and then organized the liberation struggle in Vojvodina. At that time he mainly operated in the Banat , where he set up partisan units and coordinated their armed actions in July 1941. After severe setbacks that the CPJ had to accept in the Banat and the Batschka in the summer and autumn of 1941, Zrenjanin worked on reconstruction and consolidation the party and, taking into account local conditions, developed tactics for armed partisan warfare.

Zrenjanin was called the Red General by the Gestapo, who had to be captured with the use of enormous forces. At the beginning of November 1942, Josip Broz Tito called Zrenjanin to the liberated territory in western Bosnia to take part in the first AVNOJ meeting. While preparing to leave for Syrmia , a stopover before continuing on to Bosnia, Zenjanin was betrayed and murdered by the Gestapo on November 4, 1942 in the village of Pavliš near the town of Vršac while trying to escape from his arrest.

Award

For his services in the organization of the revolutionary labor movement and the liberation struggle of the Yugoslav people in Vojvodina, Zrenjanin was posthumously awarded the Order of the People's Hero on December 5, 1944 .

City of Zrenjanin

Statue of Žarko Zrenjanin from 1952, in front of the SKJ building in Zrenjanin

Since October 2, 1946, Zrenjanin is the namesake of the city of Zrenjanin, previously called Petrovgrad . After the collapse of communist Yugoslavia in 1991, several cities in Serbia that were named after Yugoslav communists after World War II got their old names back. In a public organized referendum on the future name of the city, the name Zrenjanin was chosen by a majority of the inhabitants of the municipality in 1992 and prevailed against the historical names Petrovgrad and Veliki Bečkerek or Bečkerek.

literature

• Bogdan Džuver: "Žarko Zrenjanin: Kazivanja, poema, sećanja saboraca". 1st edition. Gradska narodna biblioteka "Žarko Zrenjanin", Zrenjanin 1999, ISBN 978-8680051895 .
• Milan Tutorov: "Seva munja biće opet buna: Istorika Zrenjanina i Banata". 1st edition. Gradska narodna biblioteka "Žarko Zrenjanin", Zrenjanin 1995, ISBN 978-8680051505 .
• Narodni heroji Jugoslavije. 1st edition. Mladost, Beograd 1975.