Dinko Tamarut

"It is also a detail... As our house was the intersection of those courier connections, one of those couriers was a boy from Velebit, Starčević, who probably... My sister was born in 1926, and he was born a couple years earlier. There was probably some sympathy, so that at the end of 1946, my sister married that Nikola Starčević, about whom later Zemljar... That is the first generation of partisans from the island of Pag. Ante Zemljar described his adventures in one of his books. He knew that in the summer, he would escape in the Velebit Canal, because Italian and German ships cruised there... He was making some kind of batana, some kind of small boat that was broken, so he swam across the Velebit Canal several times on a wooden beam in order to carry courier mail. At the end of the war, he remained in the JNA, i.e. the Yugoslav People's Army. He held the rank of captain and was demobilized in 1952. Than he went through the fronts or the battlefields after the Second World War, and in the end, he and my sister ended up in Rijeka."

"My father, who was born in 1941, sorry, in 1901, received an invitation to join the army and he did it. His unit was stationed somewhere in the territory of Slovenia and as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia capitulated in April, they were simply disbanded and returned home, however, he was “lucky“ enough to end up in Italian captivity. So that, until the tenth month of 1941, he was in captivity in Udine, and my mother went to Pag with me in her belly and begged and tried in every possible way, believed that there was some kind of possibility that maybe he can be left from captivity. However, none of that came out, but as far as I can now follow it, that agreement between Pavelić and Mussolini that was signed sometime in the tenth month, and that was what my father once told me that all those who were prisoners, that was the Yugoslav army, there were also Serbs, and Montenegrins, and all other nations... Then the Croats, i.e. at that time they were even looked at according to their religion, so the Catholics were allowed to go home with the aim that they should report themselves to the NDH army. So he came home sometime in the tenth or eleventh month. He spent all the time of the war until 1944 at home helping, i.e. fighting for his life in those war conditions. Already at the end of the war, when there was mobilization, he ended up in the units that were going towards Trieste, i.e. the units of the 4th Army. I remember him telling me, I'm sorry that we didn't talk more, you know when you're young, you look at these things differently. He didn't talk much, especially not about those horrors while he was in Italian captivity. He ended up there in Rijeka and he told me that... I know this well now, at the Pećine school, that was their barracks where they were... They were supposed to be the next wave that was supposed to move towards Katarina on the 3rd. in May, they failed to release the previous units. He stayed again as... He was already over forty years old, forty-five years old, the boys continued their journey towards Trieste, and he stayed in Rijeka and kept watch as an older soldier today's Jadrolinija building, i.e. the port building. Then he returned home sometime in the fall. I remember that some bearded man comes and I run away from him, and he brought some candies that stayed in my memory. These are very tasty candies that have jam inside."