2. Joining the Anti Fascist Fight
Stjepan Filipovic was a Croatian, who was born in 1916 in what become Yugoslavia after World War I. He left home at sixteen and became a metalworker. In 1937, he joined the local workers’ movement and became an activist member. Arrested for political activity, Filipovic was sentenced to a year in jail. Imprisonment only served to further radicalize him, and upon his release in 1940, Filipovic joined the Communist Party.
In 1941, Germany invaded and overran Yugoslavia. Filipovic volunteered to join the partisan resistance against the Nazi occupiers, and was posted to a guerrilla unit near Valjevo, in today’s Serbia. Given responsibility for recruitment and for securing arms, he excelled in his duties, showed so much promise, and displayed so much daring, that by year’s end he had risen to command an entire partisan battalion.