The following text is not a historical study. It is a retelling of the witness’s life story based on the memories recorded in the interview. The story was processed by external collaborators of the Memory of Nations. In some cases, the short biography draws on documents made available by the Security Forces Archives, State District Archives, National Archives, or other institutions. These are used merely to complement the witness’s testimony. The referenced pages of such files are saved in the Documents section.

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Ivan Crnčić (* 1928)

• born on January 23, 1928 in Šola, island of Krk

• 1940s member of the partisan movement, provides goods and roads on the island, carries mail

• In 1960, he leaves agriculture, becomes a driver in Tiha Šola, where he was the head of the labor union

• In the 1960s, he was the manager of the company for two years due to the accusation against the director

• 1985 employed at Autotrans

• In 1998, he resigned from the presidential committee of the Anti-Fascist Association on Krk

• 2000 retirement

He was born in Šola, but originally is from Polje and Hlapa. He spent most of wartime, since his birth in 1928, in Hlapa. There were only twenty-five houses, about 80 inhabitants. His father was from Polje, his mother was from Hlapa. He had neither brother nor sister. His mother raised him with his grandfather. Father worked for 27 years in Montevideo, Uruguay. Worked as a foreman on a construction site. He very rarely sent money, as he used to visiting them. Crnčić finished the first six grades at the school in Dobrinj, and then another two years. As he says, “we took exams until the eighth grade”.

In the village his family raised sheep, oxen, had corn, wheat, potatoes and a large vineyard. That was the main source of money. The whole village bought ten liters of wine on Sunday, because they were drinking for bowling, playing cards and other parties. He hung out with the young people from the village. He keeps coming back to the story, that it was a small, friendly place and that no one had ever betrayed anyone - before, during World War II and after.

During the war, Ivan Crncic became a member of the national liberation struggle, he was very young and not even 16 years old. He did not fight, but was engaged in driving, inserting into bunkers, protecting goods and so on. Goods, usually food, rarely weapons or something else, came by boat from Vis to the coast between Punt and Stara Baška. There, men and women put things on carts. It is important to mention that the horses did not have horseshoes, which means that on the white, macadam road, the horse could be heard. Crnčić, among others, was waiting in the forest further on. There they loaded goods onto vehicles with oxen. Because of the German garrison, they took the path across Vrbovsko polje, and not the road to Vrbnik. Afterwards, they did not go through Risika, but through the village of Paprata and in the direction of Gostinjac. “And so we came to the village of Hlapa. And when we came to the village of Hlapa, we went to the bunkers.” There were three bunkers in the village. All the things were carried there by those boys who stayed in the village and did not allow others, certainly from other places, to see where the bunkers were. Two of them were old water tanks, prepared in such a way that no more water could enter them. The third was im the ground.

All this was controlled by the head of the local NOB District chief, who was from Hlapa. Everyone came to him, from all over Krk. At the time of the meeting with the president, the witness was one of the guards with a rifle. They put, as he says, two people every time, but with a young person and an old one, who was in the army. In addition, Ivan Crncic held a rifle most often looking at the roads, when people were transferring goods from the trains to the boat, which was heading towards the mainland.

12 young men from Hlapa went to the battlefield, and 13 remained in the village, among them Crnčić. Some did not return, some were wounded. Among the team that died was a relative of the witness. He died on Krk, because his company was waiting for the Germans near Malinska, they started shooting at them there, and he died there. And that cousin’s brother was wounded on the battlefield.

As Crncic says, the Germans once set fire to his family home. This happened when they had to put in their cellar the food brought by the partisans after taking the Germans from the ship. Partisans captured the Germans and took the goods, but that was too much for the bunkers. After that, the Germans came to the village. They discovered one of the basements in the house when they found dried figs in the home the day before. They took all the food from that warehouse, and there was so much of it that their cars didn’t want to lift it. So one of the people took his cows. Fortunately, only the boards above the space, where the warehouse was, burned, when the Germans came a day later, set fire to the house and quickly left. The donkey that the Germans took, put a ram on it, returned to Hlapa a few days later. Because they didn’t close the fence gate to him. And his family again continued to cooperate and transfer food.The witness states that the majority of Krk were with the partisans. Especially villages, like his. In others, it was mixed, he states a couple of times. There was one Ustasha in Polje, who was taken away by the partisans and disappeared. In Punt, he mentioned that there were “a lot of Chetniks”, but surely he is thinking about Ustashas. For his village, Hlapa, he repeats that everyone there was in agreement. And worked for the partisans. When asked “When did you sleep?”, he laughs, because they didn’t have time at all. During the day they worked in the fields, at night for the partisan movement. In addition to preserving partisan merchandise, Crnčić also carried the mail between Baška and Punt, and was once on a ship.

He remembers the Germans entering Dobrinj in 1944. Those in Hlapa also saw that the Germans were coming, so it was heard in the village “The Germans are coming, the Germans”. In Dobrinje, because of the protest, the bell tower and the school were demolished, three men were killed, one was taken to a camp, where he died. To this day, there are plaques there that mention what happened and how the bell tower was restored in 1984.

The war ended, according to the witness, when “the partisans came to Vrbnik”. There was joy, drink, food. After that, he went to the city of Krk with his colleagues. Apart from that one spot, he says there was no big shooting. Only in Krk was a battle. And then he saw the corpses, two or three days after the liberation of the capital of the island. But in that city there were the biggest celebration of the end of the war.

After the war, Crnčić took over the family farm. Now there are mainly olive trees on the land. His father returned to them in 1959, and a year later Ivan became a driver. The only important thing Crnčić mentions is that his father brought a car from Trieste to the village. That’s why Ivan passed the test, not only on the car, but also on the truck and the bus. He first worked as a driver in Tiha Šilo’s business, of which he is one of the founders. He was the president of the union there. When there was an accusation against the director for corruption, Crnčić became a manager until the trial ended. After problems in that company, he moved to Autotrans. He became a bus driver and worked there until his retirement in 2000.

The coming to power of the HDZ in 1990. was for him the time when agricultural cooperatives failed, because it was difficult to feed all the members. At that time, the anti-fascist association and memory of partizans were also disbanded. However, a large number of commemorative monumets did not collapse. They are still in their place, like in Dobrinje, he said. He worked for the anti-fascist association until 1998, when he realized that he was too old for that. For him, since the 1990s, the Government no longer respects anti-fascists, nor Yugoslavia, during which he got a house without a loan, which is unimaginable now. You could have no money, but people knew and saw that you were working and they will come when you will have it. Everyone helped themselves, dug vineyards together, built and renovated roads. “And so this is my life. As far as I know,” he says.