Diana Budisavljević

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Diana Budisavljević , née Obexer, (born January 15, 1891 in Innsbruck , Austria-Hungary , † August 20, 1978 in Innsbruck, Austria ) was an Austrian humanist and activist. During the Second World War , she organized in the years 1941 to 1945 together with several employees, including graduate engineer Marko Vidaković and engineer Đuro Vukosavljević, a private relief operation under the name "Action Diana Budisavljević". The action took care of the supply of humanitarian aid and the release and placement of freed children and women, mostly of Serbian origin, from the death camps of the Ustasha -Regimes. With the help of transport lists and other sources, she and her staff kept a file that contained information on around 12,000 children at the end of the war.

Youth and education

Diana (baptized Frida Olga Diana) was the daughter of the businessman Max Obexer and Anna Roese and spent her youth in Innsbruck, where she attended elementary and middle school.

During a course to become a nurse at the Innsbruck Regional Hospital, she met the assistant doctor at the Surgical Clinic in Innsbruck, the Croatian Serb Julije Budisavljević (1882–1981), whom she married in 1917. They moved to Zagreb in 1919 , where her husband was a professor of surgery at the Medical University.

In 1972 she moved back to Innsbruck with her husband, where she lived at Anichstrasse 24 until her death in 1978. It was on the West cemetery buried the city.

Life's work

Diana Budisavljević's birth house on Maria-Theresien-Strasse in Innsbruck

Budisavljević's family was themselves endangered by the Ustasha regime , but when Diana Budisavljević learned of the conditions in the Loborgrad concentration camp in October 1941 , she decided to do something about it. Together with several employees, she organized a private aid campaign that was named after her ("Diana Budisavljević"). Through the mediation of the Jewish religious community, various relief items were first sent to Lobor and later to Gornja Rijeka, where the Gornja Rijeka concentration camp was located. In the months that followed, women and children were released from the Loborgrad concentration camp and initially placed in the institution for the deaf and dumb in Zagreb until it was possible to organize their return trip to their hometowns.

Grave of the Obexer family in Innsbruck's Westfriedhof

During an aid operation at the main train station in Zagreb to supply the forced labor transports to Germany, Diana Budisavljević learned about a larger group of children who had been interned in the Stara Gradiška concentration camp . With the help of a German officer, presumably Gustav von Koczian, they were given permission in July 1942 to take the children out of the camp. In collaboration with the Sisters of the Red Cross, led by Dragica Habazin, the campaign succeeded in transporting thousands of children from the Stara Gradiška, Mlaka and Jablanac camps and placing them in homes. Prof. Kamilo Bresler from the Ministry of Social Affairs played a key role in organizing the placement of the children in Zagreb, Jastrebarsko and later Sisak. When permission was given in August 1942 to place the children in families, Diana Budisavljević suggested that this action be carried out through Caritas mediation. This enabled thousands of children to be housed, mostly in farming families.

Grave of Diana Budisavljević and her daughter Ilse (part of the family grave)

Budisavljević and her closest colleague, Ivanka Džakula, kept an accurate file with names and photographs of the children, with which the surviving mothers should find their children again. At the end of the war, when the task was to return the children to their families, the relief organization suffered a severe setback when the communists had their card file with all their records confiscated.

From 1941 to 1945, according to MeinBezirk.at , she rescued a total of 15,536 girls and boys, of whom 3,200 did not survive after one and a half years in the concentration camp. According to other information, the number of those rescued cannot be precisely stated and was unclear at least during their lifetime, but several thousand are certain.

Honors and commemorations

The Croatian State Archives and the public institution of the Jasenovac Concentration Camp Memorial published Diana Budisavljević's diary in Zagreb in 2003, which documented the action in 338 entries between 1941 and 1945. Diana's granddaughter Silvija Szabo translated the diary entries into Croatian.

On September 22nd, 2011 the Innsbruck municipal council decided unanimously on the initiative of the Serbian Orthodox Youth Association Innsbruck - SPO (J) I and the Tyrolean Social Democratic Freedom Fighters' Association to award Diana Budisavljević with the medal of the city of Innsbruck. Her birthplace with the label OBEXER-HAUS is located on Maria-Theresien-Straße in Innsbruck. In January 2014, the Innsbruck Cultural Committee recommended that the municipal council name the planned kindergarten in Reichenau (district of Innsbruck) after Diana Obexer-Budisavljevic.

On February 15, 2012 Diana Budisavljević was posthumously awarded the Miloš Obilić Medal for “demonstrated courage and deeds of personal heroism” and was awarded on the Serbian National Day by the then President Boris Tadić . The Serbian Orthodox Church based in Belgrade awarded her posthumously in 2012 with the order “Empress Milica”, at the suggestion of a Serbian Orthodox bishop because of the study “Diana Budisavljević and her rescue operation from 1941–1945 in National Socialist Croatia”. The study was drawn up by the Jasenovac commission in collaboration with the Museum of Holocaust Victims in Belgrade. In Belgrade, a street was named after Diana Budisavljević, and in Vienna in 2014 a park on the Danube Canal.

In 2017 the novel Dianas Liste by Wilhelm Kuehs was published, in which her fate is processed literarily. A documentary film (“Dianina lista”) was made under the same name in the 2010s.

The film The Diary of Diana B. had its world premiere on July 18, 2019 at the Pula Film Festival . and won the Golden Arena for best direction, editing and music as well as the Great Golden Arena for best film.

Diary edition

  • Diana Budisavljević, Dnevnik Diane Budisavljević 1941–1945 , ed .: Kolanović, Josip, Hrvatski državni arhiv / Croatian State Archives. Fontes: izvori za hrvatsku povijest , 8/2002. Zagreb, 2003; ISBN 953-600562-X (Croatian translation of Diana Budisavljević's diary found posthumously by her granddaughter Dr. Silvija Szabo; excerpts in German), available online at: https://hrcak.srce.hr/index.php?show= toc & id_broj = 4356 .

literature

  • Anna-Maria Grünstelder: Diana Obexer-Budisavljević and the children of the Ustascha concentration camp. In: Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance (ed.): Yearbook 8 - focus on anti-Semitism. LIT Verlag, Vienna, 2008, pp. 232–260 (online)
  • Milan Koljanin: Akcija Diana Budisavljević. Tokovi istorije, 2007, pp. 191-207 (Serbian).
  • Wilhelm Kuehs: Afterword [= biographical sketch]. In: Diana's List: A Biographical Novel. Tyrolia-Verlag, Innsbruck / Vienna, 2017, pp. 245–252 (online)
  • Wilhelm Kuehs: Diana's List, a biographical novel. Tyrolia-Verlag, Innsbruck / Vienna 2017, ISBN 978-3-7022-3597-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Innsbruck parish St. Jakob Taufbuch 1876-1897 p. 313. In: Matriken Tirol Online. Tiroler Landesarchiv, accessed on February 4, 2020 .
  2. ↑ a b Katharina Mittelstaedt: Innsbruck's forgotten heroine. In: Der Standard , September 26, 2014.
  3. ↑ Otimala decu ispod kame. In: Vesti-Online.com , May 13, 2011; see also Slobodan P. Đorđević, Dr. Julije Budisavljević (March 2, 1882– May 5, 1981). In: Srpski arhiv za celokupno lekarstvo. Vol. 111, 1983, pp. 861-864.
  4. ↑ PDF.
  5. ^ The grave of Diana Budisavljević. In: knerger.de. Klaus Nerger, accessed on November 2, 2019 .
  6. ^ So Gustav von Koczian. Gustav, Part 4: 1933–1958. In: Michael Eisenriegler's Repository (private website). According to this, the name of the officer "Albert von Kotzian", which used to be often found, is a mistake, see Anna Maria Grünstelder: Work for the reorganization of Europe: Civil and forced laborers from Yugoslavia in the Ostmark 1938 / 41-1945. Böhlau, Vienna, Cologne, Weimar 2010, p. 76.
  7. ^ STANDARD Verlagsgesellschaft mbH: "Diana's List": The bookkeeping of survival . In: derStandard.at . ( derstandard.at [accessed on August 13, 2017]).
  8. ↑ a b Order “Kaiserin Milica” for Innsbruck heroine in MeinBezirk.at , April 28, 2011.
  9. ^ Diana Budisavljević: Dnevnik Diane Budisavljević 1941–1945 . In: Kolanović, Josip, Hrvatski državni arhiv / Croatian State Archives (ed.): Fontes: izvori za hrvatsku povijest . Available online: https://hrcak.srce.hr/index.php?show=toc&id_broj=4356 . No. 8/2002 . Zagreb 2003, ISBN 953-6005-62-X (Croatian).
  10. ↑ Kindergarten is named after Diana Obexer-Budisavljevic .
  11. ↑ Park naming board Diana Budisavljevic in the Vienna History Wiki of the City of Vienna
  12. ^ Wilhelm Kuehs: Diana's list. Tyrolia, 2017, ISBN 978-3-7022-3597-0 .
  13. ↑ Zoran Janković: Radovi u toku: Dana Budisavljević snima film-o Diani Budisavljević. In: Filmski Centar Srbije , June 9, 2016;
  14. ↑ The Diary of Diana B. . Retrieved July 21, 2020.
  15. ^ The Diary of Diana B - Pula Film Festival . Retrieved July 21, 2020.
  16. ^ Awards of the 66th Pula Film Festival . Retrieved July 21, 2020.
personal data
SURNAME Budisavljević, Diana
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Obexer, Diana (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian humanitarian worker
DATE OF BIRTH January 15, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Innsbruck , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH 20th August 1978
Place of death Innsbruck , Austria