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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Dinko Tamarut (* 1941)

• born on September 6, 1941 in Stara Novalija on Pag

• 1952, moved to Rijeka to live with his sister

• 1960, graduated from secondary technical shipbuilding school.

• 1962, employed in the company Vulkan

• 1965, married

• 1969, became a member of the Communist Council and still is a member of the Social Democratic Party

• 1987, moved to the Metis company

• in the war of the nineties, he becomes a member of the territorial defense and participates in securing the most important locations in Rijeka

• 2003, retirement

• from 2005 to 2010 president of the Association of Anti-Fascist Fighters and Anti-Fascists of the City of Rijeka

• since 2010, president of the Association of Anti-Fascist Fighters and Anti-Fascists of the Primorje-Gorski Kotar County

He was born in Stara Novalija in Pag on September 6, 1941. His parents were also from there. Mother, from the Peranić family, was born in 1906, and the father in 1901. They were married in 1925 and had five children, of whom Dinko is the youngest, and Marija is the oldest. His brother died, as did one sister, who died as a child. He spent his childhood in his hometown. Most often, people there worked as fishermen or in agriculture, mainly engaged in viticulture. It was a “typical small maritime town”, but what was specific only “for us and our regions below is sheep farming and the more or less famous cheese from Pag [crot. paški sir].”. The important thing that the witness mentions is that these were the only sources of income and there were no others.

“Without industry” on the island, everything was dictated to the people by nature. What somehow identifies the town of Tamarut and what its residents are proud of, is that one of the first fishermen’s cooperatives on the Adriatic was founded in Stara Novalja (the witness is not sure if it was in 1907 or 1914).

However, life on the coast was difficult and many people left for other countries. As an example, Tamarut tells about his uncle who, at the age of 25, left Stara Novalija in 1929. Together with the inhabitants of the island of Pag, including the inhabitants of Novalija, the uncle went to Uruguay. Some came back, some didn’t, his uncle died in Southern America. All this because of the very difficult econimic situation, but “it’s more or less known and I wouldn’t be able to single out anything special.”

The Second World War is for the witness mainly the stories of others, if “perhaps more than once he heard some stories of people who survived the First World War”. Among those who told him about the Second World War were many young men who had gone to study on the mainland even before War. Many of them to the former Banovina, as Tamarut calls it. Those born in the twenties had to join the army in 1941, “they were normally recruited”, and they were “outside of their house”. Of course, because the Yugoslav army lost quickly, “many of them later joined the NOP and ended up in the partisans,” as he says. A lot of them as “members of our partisan units” - ours in the sense of those from Pag. This is one of the reasons why the war “left a lot of traces” on the island.

His father was a soldier in 1941. Received an invitation to a unit in Slovenia. Mobilized, ended up in an Italian camp. The Kingdom of Yugoslavia capitulated in April, many people returned home, but Tamarut’s father, as the witness says, was “lucky” to end up in Italian “captivity in Udine”. He returned at the end of the tenth or eleventh month. Tamarut’s mother used to come to the municipal office in Pag, she didn’t succeed. Tamarut “participated” in this, because mother was pregnant, with him in her belly. Father stayed at home after his return, but many mobilized, who were in Italian camps, had to join the NDH army. Such said the agreement between Mussolini and Pavelić, as Dinko Tamarut says, remembering his father’s story. Father was saying that all Croats, more known as Catholics, because they were “regarded according to their religion”, were allowed to go home.

Tamarut’s story is mainly the memories of other people, he often says: “what others mentioned to me”, because he was too young. This also concerns the war period, when Pag was part of the NDH (Independent State of Croatia). According to his knowledge, the only Ustashas were mainly in Novalja and city of Pag, but the Italian army was stationed on island for a while. They didn’t come to Stara Novalja because they were only in the town of Pag, and as the interviewer stold, Pag is a large island, “from today’s Pag bridge to Cape Luna is 75 kilometers.” . Live in town of Pag was a little better, because in addition to the same, small-town, island ways of earning, there were also salt pans. However, they were earning only a little more than in a larger villages like Novalja. It is important to mention that communication to other parts of the island from Pag was very poor. The only chance to get to e.g. . the  municipality office was on foot, and it was better to get up in the middle of the night. It took 4 or 5 hours, one way. The war, however, brought new opportunities. The route via Pag became the most important courier connection between the mainland and the headquarters on Vis island.

The Liberation Movement sent information “from Velebit, from Lika and Gorski Kotar through Pag and then on to Olib and Silba and all the way to Vis.” It was, as Tamarut says, the most important link for the partisans and he goes on to mention that “from our, the northern side, which is more towards Rab, there was one connection, on the south side of the island was another connection”. That path also became the cause of love stories, because partisans, couriers, had to visit and stay in some houses. Some of them were crossing region quite often. One was called Nikola Starčević and he was a boy from Velebit. He knew how to get from Velebit to Pag. When the Germans sank his batana, a small boat, he swam across the Velebit Canal on a wooden beam. Ante Zemljar described his achievements. After the war, in 1946, Starčević married Marija, Dinko’s sister, because Tamarut’s house was “the intersection of those courier connections”.

The witness remembers that many of his neighbors, young men from the village of Stara Novalija, were mobilized in 1944 and 1945 in partisan units. One such unit came to his parents’ house, which was quite large. He remembers watching the soldiers clean their rifles and other weapons, and most of all the cans he was given. That taste stayed with him all his life. Another important memory of the World War is hiding behind the house. In that “detail” they ran away from the house twice. The cove in Stara Novalija was only a few kilometers long. Now it’s a bit tragic and funny for him, but everyone put out the candles, because they were afraid that the German and Italian ships would shoot at them. They called the ships pinice.

Tamarut often talks about his parents. For his father, the most important thing was to survive and feed the family. Only at the end, in 1944, he was mobilized. He was already 40, 45 years old. He went with the 4th Army to Rijeka, where he stayed to secure the current Jadrolinija building. His unit moved on, to Trieste, but he was too old, as a soldier, for that. In the fall, he returns home and that is one of most important memory for Dinko Tamarut: “I remember that a bearded man was coming and I was running away from him, and he brought some candies which stayed in my memory. These are very tasty candies that had jam inside”. From the great history, it is important for him to mention that without anti-fascism, there would be no return of regions like Istria and Rijeka to Yugoslavia. So it was the September, i.e. Pazin, decisions that allowed the 4th Army to move to that area and fight hard there. Which is, for the Association of Anti-Fascist Fighters and Anti-Fascists of the Primorje-Gorski Kotar County, trying to remember. Tamarut says “if it weren’t for that anti-fascist victory, on the one hand a military victory, and on the other a diplomatic victory, these regions would never have been returned to their motherland.”

The witness did not know, until school in Rijeka, that there was a camp in Pag on the banks of the Slan. None of his were there. He knows that it was a camp where Serbs, Jews and anti-fascists were killed by the Ustasha troops. He knows more about the fact that the plaque on that shore, which remembers the camp, was destroyed in the 1990s and no one from the Government has been coming t1988here in the last couple of years.

He also talks a lot about other things he studied, such as the “white death”. The anti-fascist association commemorates the Memorial of 26 dead partisans since 1962. These are fighters who came from the Lika and Drniška regions to Gorski Kotar (from Jasenko to Mrkopolje) because of wounds, fatigue, etc. 26 of them died on the way due to snow and lower temperatures. and those who survived remembered and still remember that experience for the rest of their lives. That commonality that starts from that is the reason that “in that area

we didn’t have any excesses” and the Homeland War.

In 1952, Tamarut finished school, exactly the fourth grade. The school has been operating since 1948 as an elementary school. In Rijeka, where he lived with his sister and her husband (“they were my parents”), he finished the eighth grade and technical school. Worked most of his life in the company Vulkan. At that time he got married. At the end of the eighties, he went to the company Metis. As he says today, it was luck, because he kept his job. His colleagues often went to war in the 1990s, and when they returned, there were no more of his places of employment, nor the companies where they worked.

About the 1990s and the transition, he says that “perhaps we were all a little too free, so we thought it was possible to do so simply and without worrying much about the workplace, this, or that, but obviously a different time had come when we had to manage in other ways.” This coping also includes the Homeland War. Tamarut did not know that he was coming - “so unreasonable that I could not understand some things”. As a graduate of the officers’ school in the early nineties, he became a member of the territorial defense in Rijeka. Later, it belongs to the Command of the reserve composition of the Croatian Army of the Municipality of that city. He participates in the securing of important military facilities and the completion of the construction of the warship Petar Krešimir. Plenty of stories about how and why there were no Serb casualties or war between them and the Croats in the area around Rijeka in the 1990s. For him, apart from the work of Franjo Starčević and his school, the most important thing is that the idea of brotherhood survived in the fight against fascism from the Second World War. Most of the Rijeka area is related to the 13th Primorsko-Goranska Strike Division, which included Goranians, Primorsans, and Islanders. This means that they were members of different religions and nationalities, including “one third of the fighters who were from other nations, and most of them were Serbs, Slovenians and Italians.” Tamarut thinks that this unity was confirmed even more by the war of 1990. Formally, how says the witness, it was confirmed by the agreement from 1992, when the people of Gorski Kotar promised not to pick up weapons, but to focus on coexistence.

Dinko Tamarut is very involved in society. After retirement, from 2005 to 2010 he was the president of the Association of Anti-Fascist Fighters and Anti-Fascists of the City of Rijeka. The associations are engaged in advocating “for freedom and democracy, for all that anti-fascism has brought, especially in these regions.” Involved in several programs, most often focused on the Second World War (remembering, anniversaries, education of young people) and minorities, e.g. “School of peace”. Before that, he was a city councilor three times. It is good to mention that the associations in which he is involved also struggle with the destruction of monuments erected to victims of fascism and anti-fascist fighters. Because in his opinion, it is not humane, and it is also “advocating anti-fascist ideas”, smearing monuments or destroying them.

Tamarut concludes that “young people are like sponges, they absorb everything they see and hear”, and when, in his opinion, the upbringing of young people should have priority in society, then the first and most important thing is how the family behaves around them. Of course, as he says, so does school, society, but parents have the most work there. He dreams of a united society, regardless of age, which achieves a happy, contented life. And yes, “in that sense, as individuals, let us all prepare together for what awaits us in the future”, regardless of what will be tomorrow, bad or good.

He has a daughter and a grandson, his wife died in 2005.