Branimir with his mother Branka and father Julije in 1943
This is the fate of the Croatian intellectual – Julije Makanec
It is the fate of a Croatian intellectual who from the very beginning was consciously engaged in the courageous struggle for Croatian independence.
In 1942, the authorities of the NDH invited him to Zagreb, where he took on the task of the head of intellectual education and was appointed associate professor at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb in early 1943.
The Makanec family of three lived in relatively modest circumstances until Dr. Julije Makanec was appointed Minister of National Education in October 1943. “I remember that moment. We were at home, that is, in these offices in Frankopanska, when a uniformed chauffeur knocked on the door. He wanted to know if Julije Makanec lived here.
The father said goodbye to his wife and child and followed the driver. The mother hurried to the window and watched the car from the third floor. From the window she saw the chauffeur kindly open the door of the luxury car for Julije Makanec.
Dad soon returned and said that the chauffeur had taken him to the Prime Minister’s office. ‘Mr. Makanec, in medias res, you have been appointed Minister of Education,’ declared Nikola Mandić, the last prime minister of the NDH government.”
Julije Makanec served as minister for about a year and a half. May was getting closer and closer. The Partisans were advancing towards Zagreb.
A few days before the fall of the Independent State of Croatia, Minister Julije Makanec sat down at his desk and declared, “Here, I will meet them here. I stand behind everything I wrote and said.”
On May 5, 1945, a car parked in front of the Makanec family home.
A man entered the house and told the family that it was time to leave. The ministers were ordered to get into their cars and drive to Austria, where they were to surrender to the British. “All the ministers traveled with their family members, but my mother and I stayed in Zagreb because I had the measles at that time. I was in a darkened room,” Branimir Makanec explains. About a hundred members of the government stopped in the Austrian town of Türracher Berg and waited for the British. Some members of the government continued their journey westward, but Julije Makanec decided to wait.
When the British arrived in the village, NDH Prime Minister Nikola Mandić lined up all the ministers in front of a British officer and declared, “I am the prime minister of the Croatian government, and these are my ministers.” The officer ordered them to get into the trucks. “They expected to be taken to the West, so they were unpleasantly surprised when the truck headed toward Zagreb,” says Branimir Makanec. The new Communist government shot all the arrested members of the NDH government on June 6, 1945, along with their wives and children. “I never found out where my father was killed and buried.
I assume that he was buried somewhere in the Maksimir forest along with the other executed people, and there is a theory that they were buried in a pit near Rakov Potok,” says Mr. Makanec. Branimir lived for a short time with his mother in an apartment on Gregorijančeva Street. “We were waiting for dad and worried about our future. One morning, armed Partisans were at our door. Mom had just left for Dolac (a market in Zagreb, translator’s note). They stormed into the house and threw us out of the apartment. My grandmother and I were only allowed to take some food and a few clothes. We met my mother on the stairs,” he recalls.
The new authorities forbade them to continue living in Zagreb, so they moved to a small country house with a thatched roof near Samobor, which a relative of their mother put at their disposal.
As a student of the Boys’ Real Gymnasium, he was labeled an enemy of the people. He experienced terrible things.
Branimir pl. Makanec (“pl.” is an abbreviation in Croatian for “nobleman”, t.n.) is a descendant of an aristocratic family to whom Emperor Franjo Josip granted a noble privilege at the end of the 18th century, in 1791.
“My last meeting with my father took place two days before the criminal Partisan units entered Zagreb. He gave me a kiss and got into the car. Since then I have never seen him again,” recalls Branimir Makanec.
Uredništvo/crimesofcommunism.net
