Zvonimir J. ORLIĆ 

ZVONIMIR “ZVONKO” ANTON IVAN ORLIĆ, son of JOSIP, born on December 11, 1910, in Pula. Photographer. Activist of the National Liberation Movement (NOP) in Mostar, where he lived. Joined the Battalion in April 1942, along with a group of 15 people from Mostar led by Pavle Neimarović, which included Šćepo Pavlović, Nenad Perotić, Zvonko Orlić, Suzana Lakatoš, and Bisera Puzić, Gojko Grede, Rajko Grede, Danilo Bovon from Bijelo Polje. He was a fighter who died in Ostrožac near Konjic in July 1942.

Pavle Neimarović recalled an episode in which he had to descend a cliff through deep snow to retrieve a typewriter that someone had dropped. In this daring feat, he slipped and barely stopped “just a few meters from the edge of the abyss. I remained still for a while until my consciousness returned, and when I lifted my head and saw the villages down in the abyss, I concluded that only a miracle had saved me. Slowly, I thrust my knife into the ice and turned around its axis in the opposite direction, upwards, towards the machine and the column of people sitting and waiting in horror, observing the entire event unfolding beneath them like a movie. The uphill return was easy, and when I took the machine, I saw that its rubber supports at the bottom were torn from sliding, and the screws holding the rubber had pierced the ice, stopping the machine. When I reached the column, Zvonko Orlić told me that he had captured the moment with the camera he carried, and it looked fantastic because when I flew through the first layer of snow, such a cloud of snow rose as if a bomb had exploded…”

Regarding the moments of Zvonimir’s death, it is recorded: “Early in the afternoon, the enemy bombed Ostrožac, and during that attack, Simo Sarić, a member of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ) and a café owner from Borak, was killed. Zvonimir Orlić, a native of Pula and a photographer in Mostar, was severely wounded and died on a stretcher on the way to the battalion hospital.”