Diana Budisavljević | Origin of Street Names

Diana Budisavljević (1891-1978), born Obexer, was an Austrian humanitarian and one of the greatest heroines of World War II, whose feat was consciously and unjustly neglected due to political circumstances. She was married to a prominent Zagreb surgeon, Julije Budisavljević, one of the few Zagreb Serbs who were spared from killings, persecution, and property plunder during the NDH regime.

It is no secret that during the general pogrom against the Serbian population in Bosnia and Croatia, an entire region of Serbian villages in Kozara, Kordun, and Bosnian Krajina was destroyed. Villages were burned and looted, and the surviving people were sent to concentration camps and death camps throughout the newly established NDH. The senseless action of ethnic cleansing did not spare children - tens of thousands of little ones were killed, forcibly converted, orphaned, or forcibly separated from their parents, including newborn babies.

In the midst of the brutal Ustasha actions in the fall of 1941, Diana Budisavljević learned that the Jewish Community in Zagreb was organizing aid for its fellow Jews, while realizing that there was no one to take care of Serbian children, who were much more numerous, and that they were left to a horrific fate. Using her reputation and (probably) thanks to her Austrian origin, she managed to form a network of collaborators and helpers, collect voluntary contributions, and risking her own life (11 of her collaborators were killed), she went to the Ustasha leaders and pleaded for the release of children from the camps. She kept detailed records of the origin and health of each child individually, in order to be able to reunite them with their parents after the war. Unfortunately, many of them, exhausted by hunger and disease, died shortly after being liberated from Jasenovac, but around 12,000 of them survived, being placed in foster Croatian families, Catholic institutions, and refugee camps, where they were provided with food, medicine, clothing, and money.

And then liberation came. By order of the OZNA (Department for the Protection of the People), Diana Budisavljević was forced to hand over all the collected documentation to the newly formed communist authorities. Not wanting to join the party and being an Austrian, a "bourgeois," and a devout Catholic, she was deemed unsuitable to be a "people's hero," so her entire work was attributed to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Furthermore, in the newly formed socialist state, in the name of "brotherhood and unity," Ustasha crimes and Diana's contributions were not a popular topic. The identification of children and repatriation was never fully carried out.

Desperate, Diana returned to her hometown of Innsbruck with her husband and lived a reclusive life, keeping her wartime work a secret from everyone. She passed away in 1978, and her personal diary, written in German, was accidentally discovered and translated by her granddaughter. Parts of this diary serve as the basis for several books written about the great heroine Diana Budisavljević, as well as a documentary film recently shown on RTS (Radio Television of Serbia).

For the past few years, two streets in the Belgrade municipalities of Savski Venac and Surčin have been named after Diana Budisavljević.