5. Sublimely Defiant Final Words
Stjepan Filipovic volunteered to join the partisan resistance against the Nazi occupiers, and he was posted to a guerrilla unit near Valjevo, in today’s Serbia. He was given responsibility for recruitment and for weapons supplies, excelled in his duties, and showed significant promise. Between that and conspicuous daring, he rose to command an entire partisan battalion by the end of 1941. However, he was captured by the Nazis in February 1942, and was sentenced to be publicly hanged in Valjevo’s town square. At death’s door, Stjepan Filipovic had the courage and presence of mind to seize the moment and defy his captors during his final seconds on earth.
Atop the gallows, and with the hangman’s noose around his neck, Filipovic daringly thrust his hands in the air and struck a dramatic pose that was captured on camera. He urged the gathered crowd to continue the struggle against the Nazi oppressors and their Yugoslav collaborators, and cried out just before he was hanged: “Death to fascism, freedom to the people!” It was a preexisting partisan slogan, and Filipovic’s martyrdom helped popularize it. After the war, Filipovic was designated a national hero of Yugoslavia. A monumental statue was erected in Valjevo in his honor, replicating his Y-shaped pose in an artistic rendition reminiscent of a Goya painting.