Mapping the Holocaust in
Croatia

Đuro Oberson, son of Rosa Oberson, was a physician in interwar Vukovar and one of the town’s well-known and well-connected citizens. Like other Jews, Oberson was subjected to Ustaša persecution, but was fortunate that the regime was in desperate need of medical doctors. Drafted into Croatian Home Guard as a military physician, Oberson and his family members—mother Rosa, née Gottlieb, and grandmother Berta, née Weil—were spared from deportation. Note that Oberson’s prewar connections with Croat notables such as Dr. Pušić and highly-placed Franciscan friars helped him evade Ustaša attempts to incriminate him as an enemy of the Croat nation, which speaks to the continuation of prewar intergroup ties into the wartime; such connections, however, represented an advantage that most Jews unfortunately did not have. In 1943, Oberson defected from Home Guard to the Partisans and contributed to the antifascist resistance as military physician in Partisan ranks. He survived military service and the Holocaust, but never made Vukovar his home again.

Rosa Oberson, née Gottlieb, like her son Đuro Oberson, was a well-known citizen of Vukovar before the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia. Involved in local charities and intergroup initiatives aiming for social welfare and improvement of the town’s common spaces, Oberson left a felt presence in pre-1941 material record of Vukovar’s public life. Together with her mother-in-law Berta, née Weil, she received a stay of deportation due to her son Đuro serving as an army doctor in the Croatian Home Guard. In 1943, after Đuro defected from Home Guard to the Partisans, Oberson and her mother-in-law fled Vukovar and joined him in “the forest”—swaths of countryside liberated by the Partisans—where they remained until the end of the war.

Antun Velić was an industrialist hailing from a prominent Vukovarian Jewish family. His father Lavoslav was a known local attorney who was active in the political life of the city, Vukovar’s Red Cross, and the Jewish community. Baptized on July 11, 1941, Antun Velić was among the earliest converts to Catholicism after the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia. Ha was married to Vera, a Catholic Croat woman, which allowed him to receive a stay of deportation. This privilege did not extend to Antun’s mother, Matilda Velić, née Weiss, who was deported to Jasenovac death camp in summer 1942 and killed there. Antun and Vera had two children during the Second World War: Ljerka, born in 1941, and Ratko, born in 1943. It appears that Velić family remained in Vukovar until the liberation in April 1945; shortly thereafter, they emigrated to Israel.