thesrpskatimes.com
Diana Budisavljevic was born in 1891 in Austria. Diana was married to a doctor, who was of Serbian & Croatian descent, and they moved to Zagreb after their marriage. She found out that there were thousands of children dying in camps run by the Nazis in the Independent State of Croatia. Rather than turning away from this tragedy to her life in Zagreb, Diana decided to take action.
Diana started what became known as the "Diana Budisavljevic Action". In 1941, Diana Budisavljevic created an "action" group, comprised of mostly women. Diana and this small group of volunteers would secretly transport food, medicine and clothing into the camps, creating fake documents, bribing officials and utilising all their compassion to help the thousands of abandoned children.
What Diana did next was something very difficult to believe. Diana gained access to the camps. She went into the camps alone and with incredible bravery, walked out of some of the most dangerous camps in the Nazi-controlled areas of Croatia, carrying children who she would save. She made detailed records of each child’s name, so they would not be forgotten and so hopefully each child could someday be reunited with their family.
Throughout the entire operation, Diana and her team were in constant danger of death. If they were found at the time of their rescue from the camps, they would have been shot and killed on the spot for their actions. But by the end of World War II, Diana and her group of volunteers saved more than 10,000 children.
After the war, though, her heroism was ignored; when Yugoslavia became a new country, her story was politically unfavourable, and the records of her actions were taken away and erased from history.
Decades after, members of the survivor community began to speak of her heroism and the Righteous Among the Nations were named in 2017 to her childhood home of Yad Vashem; now we have begun to remember her legacy and the recognition of her name that it has always had.