Slobodan G. VUKOVIĆ 

SLOBODAN VUKOVIĆ, son of GOJKO, born on July 27, 1919, in Mostar. Construction technician by trade. Member of the Communist Youth League of Yugoslavia (SKOJ) since 1939 and the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) since 1940, member of the City Committee of SKOJ for Mostar. His father is the renown revolutionary and communist Gojko Vuković. Football player for FC “Velež”. After the armed resistance against the Ustasha in July 1941, he was arrested and executed.

In the house of the Vuković family, a meeting of the Local Committee of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) took place on July 31, 1941. The Ustasha forces raided the courtyard. Mother Zlatka, who was on guard duty, threw a hand grenade at the Ustasha to enable her son Slobodan and his comrades to escape. She and Ahmet Sefić, a technician and member of the KPJ, were captured, tortured, and shot on the same day in the courtyard of the Gymnasium*. Their tenants Dejan and Vera Popović were also arrested. Slobodan managed to escape to Rodoč, to his godfather Stojan Opančar, who hid him in a cave. However, the next day, on August 1, 1941, he was betrayed to the Ustasha. Slobodan was found by the Ustasha while sleeping. Two young men, Sulejman Rebac and Muhamed Kreso, who were guarding cows nearby, witnessed how Slobodan was “tied around the neck with a leather belt and dragged to a truck. They put him inside, with the belt still around his neck.” They took him through the city “wildly shouting that he had been caught. And there he stood, beaten, with the belt around his neck, leaning against the cabin of the truck, his head drooping.”

On the same day, Jusuf Čevro, a worker and secretary of the City Committee of the KPJ, was also captured. Both of them were tortured in the building of the Mostar Gymnasium, which the authorities had turned into a prison. One eyewitness (Ustasha Cavo, a smuggler who was taken out of Mostar to the battalion by couriers) later recounted that Slobodan was “tied by his feet and dragged down the stairs, so that his head hit the edge of each stone step, all the way to the ground floor.” According to another version of events, as narrated by the publicist Mensur Seferović, during the torture, Slobodan said to the Ustasha who were “forcibly trying to make the victim betray his comrades with stones”: “Yes, I am a communist and I know where many of my comrades are hiding, but it’s all in vain! (…) Blood was flowing, body parts were being torn off, but Slobodan remained silent and died in silence. Looking at his mutilated body, (Ustasha Captain from Poglavnik’s Bodyguard) Herenčić said, ‘If all communists are like this… we will not succeed against them.’ Slobodan and Jusuf were executed on the same day, August 1, 1941, in the village of Ovči near Mostarsko Blato. Posters announcing their execution were prominently displayed in Mostar. A monument to the executed was erected in Ovči with their names engraved on it.

Slobodan is the second son of Zlatka Vuković, the brother of fighters Mladen, Rade, and Radojka Vuković who were also killed in the war.

The Mostar-born and Belgrade-based poet Svetislav Mandić (Mostar, 08.03.1921 — Belgrade, 04.10.2003) dedicated his poem “Onaj sudnji dan” (That Doomsday) to his fallen friends from school days. Some verses refer to Slobodan Vuković.