Bosnia Capital Names Park After Wartime Resistance Heroine

The Bosnian capital of Sarajevo has voted to honour the memory of a World War II woman resistance fighter by naming a park after her.

City Park, in the heart of Sarajevo, will be named after Jelena Vitas, the city council decided on Thursday, following a local referendum held in April.

The initiative was launched in February 2018 by Damir Arnaut, her grandson and an MP in the state-level parliament. His proposal was inspired by testimonies of his grandmother who was an active member of the National Liberation Movement, Dnevni Avaz newspaper reported in February 2018.

Vitas was born in Sarajevo in 1919. After Nazi Germany and the Croatian Fascist Ustase regime occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1941, she became very active in the Communist-led National Liberation Movement, led by Josip Broz Tito.

The German-allied Ustasa regime arrested her in 1942 and held her in captivity until mid-1943 in one of the buildings in today's park, that will now be named after her.

Despite suffering torture, Vitas never revealed any details about her fellow resistance fighters, saving the lives of many Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats.

In 1944, she was transferred to Jasenovac, the Ustasa-run concentration camp in Croatia, where, 83,145 Serbs, Jews, Roma and anti-Fascists were killed between August 1941 and the collapse of the regime in April 1945, according to the name-by-name list compiled by the Jasenovac Memorial Site.

Her last letter found was dated October 10 in 1944. It is believed she was killed shortly afterwards at Jasenovac.