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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Sanja Tabaković (* 1950)

• was born on March 31, 1950

• her mother’s family went through a difficult experience during World War II

• attended a Jewish kindergarten

• completed primary and secondary school and studied law in Zagreb

• got a job as a judge of the First Instance Misdemeanor Court

• got a job as a judge of the High Misdemeanor Court

• is included in the governing bodies of the Jewish Municipality of Zagreb

• became the president of the Council of National Minorities of the Republic of Croatia

• was a member of the Council of the Public Institution of the Jasenovac Memorial

• is the founder and head of Shoa Academy since 2012.

• she was elected as a representative of the Jewish National Minority in the Assembly of the City of Zagreb

Sanja Zoričić Tabaković was born on March 31, 1950 in Zagreb. She studied law and worked as a judge throughout her working life, first at the First Instance Misdemeanor Court and then at the High Misdemeanor Court. Although her family lived in Zagreb, her father came from Šibenik, from the family of a merchant who had four children. Due to bad business and lack of money, his father left early for America, from where he was sending money to his wife and children all his life, in order to save the house and the shop that was in it. Her father’s family was of Croatian origin. On the other hand, Sanja’s mother was born in Osijek, but the family moved to Zagreb when she was a child, where Sanja’s mother Vera lived with her parents and two sisters. Her father was a builder, he had his own company together with his partner. Vera had two sisters, the older Jelka and the younger Esther. Their mother was the daughter of a rabbi and was raised in a very orthodox Jewish family. That’s how Sanja’s mother Vera was raised as an orthodox Jew, and the rest of the family also lived according to the rules of Judaism - they ate kosher, celebrated holidays and went to the synagogue. Although both of her parents belonged to the middle class, Sanja describes that her father, due to his father’s departure and financial difficulties, lived a much more difficult life as a child, while she describes her mother’s life and growing up in Zagreb as very happy and carefree. Since she talked to them a lot and was very interested in their stories and lives before she was born, she knows many of them and feels for many of them as if they were her own, as if she herself lived through them.

Her mother had many friends, as did her parents, and they often hung out and went to parties. There were many stories and anecdotes from those parties, and it shows that the life of young people in the time before the Second World War in Zagreb was full of content, cheerful and somewhat carefree. Sanja’s mother, Vera, was active in the Jewish sports club Maccabi all her life. She was engaged in competitive gymnastics and spent all her free time in the club. Sportsmanship, endurance and good physical condition, which she acquired while actively playing sports, later helped her a lot.

After the annexation of Austria to the Third Reich, many Jews from there, especially those who had relatives in Zagreb, fled to them in the face of danger. Sanja points out that there were about 5,000 of them in Zagreb at that time. So her mother’s two cousins also came and, since they had nowhere to live, they took shelter with them and spent some time with her mother’s family. Sanja believes that this should have been a sign to her grandparents, as well as to her mother and other Jews, that something is brewing and that they will soon find themselves in danger. However, when she asked her mother if they were expecting anything, she replied that she was not, that she was too young and had other interests at the time. Also, neither the grandparents, despite the fact that they spoke German at home and regularly listened to the radio, even Hitler’s speeches, had no premonitions. Even if they had, Sanja believes, they wouldn’t have been able to do much because they weren’t rich enough to sell their property and run away.

Jelka, her mother’s older sister, was studying and working in a bank at the time and had a large circle of friends and acquaintances. As she herself was left-oriented, she quickly joined SKOJ (Communist Youth Union of Yugoslavia) and became active in their meetings and actions. She soon introduced Vera, her younger sister, to politics, and she herself participated in SKOJ meetings. During one such meeting, a raid took place and she was arrested and taken to prison. Then her mother’s sister’s husband, who was the chief of the Zagreb police, helped her. He ordered her release from prison and deleted her name from the arrest list. It will later turn out that he saved her life because after the establishment of the NDH, the lists of previously arrested opponents of the regime served to ensure that these people were among the first to be taken to the camps and killed.

When the war started, in 1941, the coach of Maccabi, a person who had successfully led it for many years, who was close to the Jewish community and received a good salary from the Jewish owner, was one of the first to put on the Ustasha uniform and join the army . This was one of the first shocks for Sanja’s mother’s family. Then, in September 1941, they were kicked out of their apartment in Masarykova Street and without their belongings. They stayed with relatives, who very quickly managed to obtain false documents for them to leave the country. And after that, the Schwabenitz family fell apart. The eldest daughter Jelka immediately joined the partisans and died very quickly. Vera went to her aunt in Belgrade and actively sought a connection to join the partisans. The mother and father went to Italy with their youngest daughter, Esther, where they spent the entire war, and hid in a monastery. Vera returned to Zagreb several times before joining the partisans, even though it was very dangerous for her. However, as both her parents and herself had many friends, she always found help. She first hid with the Belić family, whose daughter was her friend. The parents immediately agreed to welcome Vera into their home, even though a German telephone operator was also staying with them. The family knew who Vera was and why she was hiding, but they decided to help her anyway. After the war, mother and daughter Belić were declared Righteous Among the Nations on the initiative of Vera Zoričić. The second time, Vera hid with the Sirovatka family, with a lady who was a good friend of her mother, and whose children Vera also socialized with as a child. She found mother and daughter Sirovatka at home and they welcomed her without any problems and opened the door to her. However, Vlado, the son of the Sirovatka family, was in the Ustasha and was the warden of one of the most terrible prisons in Zagreb. He came home, found Vera there and almost handed her over to the authorities. At the begging and crying of his mother and sister, he agreed not to report her, but she had to leave immediately. She was also helped by the director of Vrtlarija Jankomir, Petranović, who got her a pass for the whole of Croatia, which she never used out of fear. Later, she went to her aunt and uncle in Caprag, near Sisak, and then they all came to Primorje together, from where Vera finally joined the partisans.

She spent the entire war in the partisans in the area of Gorski Kotar and Lika. At the beginning, she worked as a nurse in the partisan hospital in Drežnica. Despite the efforts and dedication of the nurses and of  two excellent doctors who worked there, many people died in the hospital every day, often in severe pain. Vera took care of them, that the dead were properly buried, and she kept the list of those who died in the hospital. However, after a year, that job was too heavy for her mentally, and she asked to be transferred to a partisan unit, which was done. It was much more difficult for her there, but mentally she could handle these tasks better. Although she worked in very difficult conditions and many times her life was in danger, Vera remembered her days in the partisans as beautiful, even happy, and she was friends with many people who survived until the end of her life.

After the war, they all returned to Zagreb, and at the beginning, they lived quite hard. Soon the mother decided that she wanted to move to Israel, and the father followed her. The daughters stayed in Zagreb, but after a few years, the younger Esther also moved to Israel to help her parents, later she got married there and moved to Canada with her husband and children. Vera stayed in Zagreb, worked in the Ministry of Tourism and shortly after returning from the partisans, she met her future husband, whom she married when her parents moved to Israel.

Sanja remembers her childhood as very beautiful and pleasant, without any worries and problems. She went to a Jewish kindergarten, and then, when she started school, she spent the afternoons in the Jewish community. After grandfather’s death, her grandmother returned to Zagreb and lived with Sanja and her parents. She claims that she was not interested in politics until the 1990s, that she only started to follow what was happening in that sphere just before the start of the war in the 1990s. She studied law, and from that period she remembers the events surrounding the Croatian Spring, which she remembers because she first came face to face with Croatian nationalism in Yugoslavia, which was completely unknown to her until then. She believed in brotherhood and unity and that Yugoslavia had successfully solved the national question. In general, she considered Yugoslavia to be a successful country, where people lived well and peacefully and where they had security, which was important to her. However, in 1989, she sensed war and feared for the safety of her family. She and her husband have already agreed to leave the country and move to Israel. However, in the end, at the persuasion of her husband’s parents, whom they could not leave, they stayed. She supported the introduction of multi-party system in Croatia and the country’s independence, but she soon realized that the country was going in the wrong direction. At that time, she most resented Croatia’s renunciation of the heritage of the National Liberation Struggle and anti-fascism, which she believes must be the foundation of the state and the pride of its citizens. Since she was a judge at the High Misdemeanor Court at the time, Sanja witnessed the dismissal of numerous judges just because they were of Serbian nationality. Among them was her best friend. She could not do anything then, but later, until her retirement, she would advocate for their rehabilitation. She became the president of the Council of National Minorities, and from that position she launched an initiative in Parliament to rehabilitate those judges. Unfortunately, she never received support for that. At that time, she became active in the leadership of the Jewish Municipality of Zagreb, as part of which she began to implement educational programs for young people. She was motivated when she heard that a group of 12-year-old students from Zagreb did not know who Jews were. First, they conducted seminars on the topic of the Holocaust and Jews, and in 2012 it was formalized and the Shoa Academy was created, which Sanja still leads. In addition, she was on the Council of the Public Institution of the Jasenovac Memorial for a long time, which she herself describes as an unsuccessful period of her work, that is, the work of all of them in the Council, because she believes that almost nothing was achieved regarding the issue of Jasenovac. Also, she was elected representative of the Jewish national minority in the City of Zagreb, and she advocates for Jewish rights and works to improve the atmosphere and position of national minorities in general. However, due to the very small number of Jews in the community, as well as the lack of support from the state, she believes that the future of the Jewish community in Zagreb, as well as in Croatia, is not bright. Finally, she sent a message to the young people to look at everything critically and to react when they see injustice, not to be observers. Because it was passive bystanders that caused the Holocaust to happen the way it did. To prevent it from happening again, we need young people who are critical, brave, honest and active citizens.