Vukašin D. ZUROVAC 

VUKAŠIN ZUROVAC, son of DRAGUTIN, born on April 19, 1911, in Mostar, train operator. Pre-war member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ). Lived and worked in Lajkovac from 1939, where he served as the secretary of the KPJ cell in 1940 and a courier for the Provincial Committee of the KPJ for Serbia. Joined the National Liberation War and the Partisan Detachments of Yugoslavia in July 1941 in the Tamnava Partisan Company, serving as a political delegate of the squad. Captured by Chetniks in December 1941 near Uba, handed over to Germans, and taken to the Banjica camp*, where he was executed in February 1942.

EXCERPT FROM LITERATURE:

“The occupier and quisling police authorities had long been searching for the fighters who conducted the ‘attack from heavy and light machine guns’ on a German armored train near the Lajkovac railway station, carried out during the night between August 14 and 15, 1941. After two weeks of interrogation, a group of locals from Lajkovac and other villages suspected of participating in the attack on the German train were taken to the Banjica camp on December 10, 1941. Since the suspicion could not be proven, only two individuals were executed: Ilija Jeremić, a blacksmith in the Lajkovac depot, and Milorad Stefanović, a stoker in the workshop from Rubrebreza. Vukašin Zurovac, a locomotive driver from Lajkovac who had fled from Mostar, was later arrested and executed himself after someone among the detainees identified him as the commissar of the partisan unit during the attack on Lajkovac.”

*If the information is accurate, the new memorial plaque for Vukašin should read: Vukašin D. ZUROVAC (1911 Mostar – 1942 Banjica)