Zvonimir Panić, killed in Lepoglava in 1949
Zvonimir Panić
Women’s Group “Krug” (The Circle) organized on 5 May 2010 in Zagreb the annual commemoration for the victims of Bleiburg and Ways of the Cross. The goal was to hold regular annual commemorations in Zagreb and other Croatian cities, with a central commemoration to be held on the Bleiburg Field in Austria. Namely, Tito’s Yugoslav prisons were one of Croatia’s sad “ways of the cross”. In the prisons of today’s Republic of Croatia alone, more than 50 000 political prisoners were imprisoned, with more than a thousand of them liquidated or dead as a result of torture while serving their sentences. Below is one of the testimonies presented at the commemoration of the death of Zvonimir Panić.
Zvonimir Panić was a boy when they imprisoned him. He was 16 years and 3 months old. He was son of a peasant from the village of Podturen near Čakovec. He went to high school in Čakovec. He was sentenced to twenty years as an assistant of the Crusaders.
In the Lepoglava prison, he was included in the penal battalion. Prisoners who were thought to be the hardest to break and needed to be destroyed were thrown into the penal battalion.
The “militiamen” hit with fists, boots, clubs, iron bars. They suffocated people, tied them with chains so that their feet would not reach the floor, tied their legs to their heads, threw them half-naked into icy solitary confinement, took them out on false executions, injured them. The convicts did not know when they would be called out and beaten, and when they would be taken to the sand pit and killed.
The camp warden was Josip Špiranec, major of the KNOJ (People’s Defence Corps of Yugoslavia), a native of Bedekovčina near Zlatar. He was blindly executing the arrangements with his superiors, probably with Josip Manolić. He personally made drafts for different kinds of shackles: weighing 12 kg, 20 kg and 50 kg. He is responsible for the death of at least two hundred people. In the sixties, he was rewarded with high political duties. He lived to see the Croatian state, in a nursing home in Naumovac, Zagreb. He was never held responsible!
Zvonko was, however, underwent ghastly sufferings at the camp. Young man… Child… But he would not be subdued! He was honest and firm.
Once he dared to file a complaint to some commission. The division commandant Mirko Martinac could not forgive him for that. He openly threatened him: “I will be a snake to you!” He threw him in solitary confinement and put him into shackles. One night they started beating and torturing him. His co-sufferers from the neighbouring solitaries and cells were listening to the bloody drama. They heard Zvonko’s moans and sporadic cries: “Long live Croatia! Long live Croatia!”. That took place on 13 April 1949.
In the register of the deceased convicts, it is written under Zvonko’s name: “Died of a heart failure”. Years later, Zvonko’s father succeeded in obtaining the permission to transfer Zvonko’s remains to Podturen. By looking at his bones, it was clear that he had a skull fracture and both shins broken…
At the top of the criminal pyramid, alongside his superiors – in the beginning Petar Muller, after him Josip Manolić – there was the prison warden Josip Špiranec, born 18 April 1917 in Bedekovčina in the municipality of Zlatar. He became warden on 15 November 1945. As a major (his conspirative nickname was “Pintar”) of KNOJ, he introduced a horrible torture in the camp which was at time freshly formed correctional facility, later penitentiary Lepoglava. His govern lasted until 31 December 1953. After that he serves as a public representative for the county of Ivanec and later he becomes the president of the Faith Commission of the Federal State of Croatia in Zagreb. During his reign of terror in Lepoglava, for more than eight years, many horrific events unfolded, as well as numerous tortures and killings of the convicts. There is no doubt about him being the most merciless, the most arrogant and the cruelest man ever running the Lepoglava prison. His actions were more beastly than human. He blindly executed the orders, or better said, arrangements with his superiors in the Ministry of the Interior in Zagreb, in the Department for Sentence Executions…
He was a craftsman by profession, so he looked with hatred at every educated convict, which was in fact in line with the existing policies of the commanders. When he was ordered from Zagreb (P. Muller) to forge shackles, he acted out the sick imagination of the torturer… For every presented and mostly imaginary offense of evil and pathologically ill subordinates, he forcibly put shackles onto people’s bare feet, in the winter, with pleasure. In correspondence with Muller, he complains that he has crammed more chained convicts into one cell, but he is comforted knowing they will have much less air.
With his criminal imagination, Špiranec enriched the request of the Ministry of the Interior to “tighten discipline” and, according to their wishes, had three types of fetters made: small, medium and large. Some were from foot to foot (about 12 kg), medium wieghed 25 kg, the largest weighed about 50 kg. Those of 25 and 50 kg had, in addition to the chain that connected the legs, an iron ball behind each leg.
When a guard beat a convict or killed him ostensibly while fleeing, but also out of the blue, he immediately found a justification to release him from any investigation. He often gave speeches on loudspeakers and attacked intellectuals at that, which was, after all, the policy of the communist regime.
On 5 July 1948, when three desperate convicts jumped on a bunker and tried to escape, shooting ensued. His guards on that occasion shot at all the convicts in the yard – at the working site. The convicts from the “black battalion” say that during the shooting, Špiranec came to the bunker above them and himself shot the convicts lying on the ground. He allowed for the convicts to be stripped naked and beaten on the way to their cells. He also collectively imposed all imaginable disciplinary sanctions on the convicts for a whole month, and allowed the guards to do what they wanted with the convicts in their cells 24 hours a day. It was a dreadful night…!
The here described monster Špiranec and his order-issuers are persons not worthy of mention, but all this was evidenced so that the ugliness of the past Tito’s regime can be noted.
Sources:
Augustin Franić, KPD Lepoglava – mučilište i gubilište hrvatskih političkih osuđenika, drugo, dopunjeno i prošireno izdanje (Lepoglava Prison – A Torture and Execution Grounds of Croatian Political Convicts. Second, expanded and revised edition), Hrvatsko društvo političkih zatvorenika, Dubrovnik 2010.
Portal of the Hrvatsko kulturno vijeće (Croatian Cultural Council), published: 14 May 2010.
From the lecture of the Women’s Group “Krug”, 5 May 2010 in Zagreb
Editorial/komunistickizlocini.net
