In December 1941, a fifteen-year-old girl from the village of Gornja Gračanica, near the small Serbian town of Bosanska Gradiška, was taken prisoner by Croatian Ustaše, the Nazi collaborators who had established a puppet state in the region. The girl’s name was Lepa Svetozara Radić. She, along with her mother, grandmother, and other relatives, was held for twenty days in a Croatian prison. Unlike many who passed through those cells, she was released, and she emerged from captivity with an unshakable resolve: she would join the partisans.
The war had reached the Balkans in 1940, when German and Italian forces invaded Yugoslavia. The occupiers were aided by the Ustaše, a group of Croatian separatists led by Ante Pavelić, who created a puppet state under German control. It was the Ustaše who would come to play a central and brutal role in Lepa’s life. When the fighting began, every man in her family—her father, her uncles, and her cousins—had joined the partisan resistance.
Lepa and her sister Dara soon followed. They enlisted in the Grahovo company of the Second Krajina Partisan Detachment, but because of their age, they were assigned not to combat but to a partisan hospital. Lepa became the youngest nurse on the staff. The wounded soldiers grew fond of the caring young girl, treating her like a daughter or a younger sister.
While working at the hospital, Lepa took short-term party courses and became a member of the Yugoslav Communist Party, making her the youngest communist in her squad. Her leaders noticed that she was sociable and communicative, and they entrusted her with political agitation among the partisans’ youth and the local population. But the relative calm of her hospital work did not last. In June 1942, the Germans, with the help of Ustaše troops, launched a series of offensive and punitive operations against the Yugoslav partisans.
The partisans of the Krajina District were forced to break out of encirclement. Lepa took an active part in the evacuation of civilians, coordinating the movement of people, livestock, and food supplies to keep them from falling into enemy hands. The battles took a devastating personal toll. Her father was killed.
Her younger brother Milan disappeared and was later discovered to have been sent to the Jasenovac concentration camp, where the Ustaše killed him in 1945. The hardships did not break Lepa, who by then was seventeen. They hardened her will to fight the fascists while leaving her as kind and hospitable as before, always willing to help others. Only the creases of worry on her forehead revealed that she was no longer the naive girl who had joined the detachment less than a year earlier.
The unit managed to break out of the German encirclement and, with part of the civilian population, moved to the Podgrmeč area. There, Lepa continued her educational work. She walked through the surrounding villages, distributed leaflets, informed people of the state of affairs at the front, and gathered intelligence for the partisan headquarters. Many locals knew her by sight and welcomed her warmly.
The partisan leadership entrusted her with leading the detachment’s youth organization. She conducted explanatory work among rural youth who came to the detachment, teaching them the goals of the party and the importance of the partisan movement. With her active participation, local branches of the anti-fascist youth organization of Yugoslavia and the anti-fascist women’s front were created. At the end of January 1943, the German Ustaše punitive battalion of the military police, with the involvement of SS troops and Croatian military units, launched another operation against the partisans, codenamed Weiss I.
Lepa was appointed to the headquarters for organizing the evacuation of the population, livestock, and food in the area of Mount Grmeč. She was responsible for the direction of the villages of Horney and Dan Petrovichi and the village of Srednja Duica. The first stage of the evacuation was successful. Lepa’s group of people moved to a zone controlled by the partisans.
She then returned for a second group of refugees. The second detachment consisted mostly of women, elderly people, and children, numbering approximately 150 people. It moved from the area of Bosanska Krupa toward Mount Grmeč. But the 369th Battalion of the German infantry division, composed of Croatian Ustaše, cut off the path and began to surround them.
Of the entire squad, only Lepa had a weapon. The women urged her to discard her rifle and change into ordinary women’s clothing, hoping she might pass as a civilian. She refused. Ordering the detachment to move toward the forest along the path in small groups, she took up defensive positions alone.
She fired back until her ammunition ran out. Only then were the enemy able to capture her. The Ustaše beat the girl brutally. Some of the refugees were unable to escape; they were captured by the punitive forces and taken with Radić to the city of Bosanska Krupa, where they were thrown indiscriminately into prison.
At her first interrogation, the girl asked the Ustaše and the Croatian investigators to release the people, since they were ordinary civilians and guilty of nothing. She alone, she insisted, was a partisan. Even under the threat of death and torture, she thought first of other people. The Nazis offered Radić her life in exchange for information: if she would reveal where the partisans were, name her comrades, and help the Germans and Ustaše, she would be spared.
The proud girl greeted the offer with a contemptuous smile. She endured numerous severe beatings, had her arms twisted, was deprived of sleep, and was drenched with cold water at night, and she faced repeated physical abuse. The seventeen-year-old girl turned out to be more resilient than many men would have been in her place. In early February 1943, a fascist court sentenced her to death.
Among the German soldiers there were many local ethnic Germans born in Yugoslavia who spoke Serbian well. Some looked with respect at the brave, persistent girl. A Yugoslav German approached her and tried to persuade her once more to betray her comrades. “After all, you’re still very young,” they said.
“Why should you die because of grown men? ” The girl’s answer was firm: “I will not betray my people, neither men nor women nor children. My comrades will reveal themselves after defeating villains like you. ”
On February 11, 1943, Lepa was brought to execution on an open truck.
The Nazis carried out the execution in the area of the Bosanska Krupa railway station, not far from the tunnel. They had turned a tree into a gallows. Lepa was without shoes, wearing only socks, trousers, and a sweater. Her hands were pulled back with a telephone cable.
She calmly climbed onto an ammunition box. While the soldier fumbled with the noose, the girl addressed the assembled crowd: “Long live the Communist Party and the partisans! People, fight for your freedom! Don’t give in to the villains!
Let them kill me, but there are those who will avenge me. They will soon! ”
At that moment, the executioner kicked the box out from under her feet, and the girl hung from the tree. The people watched in quiet silence, and within that desperate silence lay the people’s protest against the fascist invaders.
The Nazis refused for some time to allow the girl to be removed from the gallows, preventing local residents from burying her and hoping to intimidate others. But then they realized that a dead Lepa was no less dangerous than a living one. People came to the place of execution every day. Eventually, the Ustaše took the girl down from the tree.
It is unknown where they disposed of the body; most likely they burned and buried what remained along with the bodies of other killed partisans and civilian victims. After the war, Lepa Svetozara Radić was posthumously awarded the title of People’s Hero of Yugoslavia.