By the end of April 1941, the foundations of the Liberation Front of the Slovenian Nation (Osvobodilna fronta), the central resistance organisationopposing the occupying forces, had already been established in Ljubljana. Through its underground networks, information was transmitted, aid was collected, documents were forged, hiding places were organised, and people were moved across borders. These clandestine routes proved particularly important for Jews and Jewish refugees, especially in the occupiedareaof Ljubljana, where refugee paths from German, Hungarian, and Ustaša (Croatian fascist movement) territories intertwined.
Jews involved in the resistance were not only victims of persecution. They also participated in underground activities, partisan units, courier networks, medical services, refugee assistance, and armed struggle. Because the Jewish community in Slovenia was relatively small, Jewish resistance did not develop as a separate mass movement. Instead, its history is preserved through individualstoriesand experiences, family destinies, partisan recordsand lists, medical archives, testimonies, and memoirs.
Jewish resistance in Slovenia assumed many forms. It included clandestine work in cities, helping people escape across borders, forging documents, hiding children, participating in the Liberation Front, joining partisan units, serving in hospitals, and taking part in armed resistance.At a time when the Holocaust sought to condemn Jews to destruction, every act of resistance carried profound meaning. Whether expressed through a rifle or a bandage, a forged document or a hidden child, resistance became a means of preserving both life and human dignity.
Partisans
Among the young Jews from Ljubljana who joined the partisan struggle was Renato Bolaffio, born in Ljubljana in 1926, the son of Eugenio Bolaffio and Amalija Pegan. His cousin Liana, later married Lokar, was also active in the partisan movement; after the war she worked in one of the federal ministries in Belgrade. She died very young and is buried in the family grave of her father Karlo at the Jewish cemetery in Ljubljana. Her brother Vittorio was likewise a partisan and died in Cascia, Italy, in 1944. Renato himself was killed as a sixteen-year-old partisan fighter on October 6, 1942, near Lužarji by Velike Lašče. Among the fallen Jewish partisans from Ljubljana was also Milenko Oblat, born in 1917, who was killed in combat near Smrjene on March 3, 1944.
Dr. Klara Kukovec, born Chaya Lea Doctor in 1883 in Kherson, worked in Maribor after the First World War as one of the city’s first female physicians. Her son, Dr. Robert Kukovec, a surgeon and partisan doctor, joined the partisan medical service during the war and was killed in 1945.
Hugo Baumgarten and his sons Oto and Jurij were all members of the resistance movement. Hugo and Oto were captured and died in the concentration camps Dachau and Neuengamme in the spring of 1945. Jurij survived and later lived in California until his death in 1989.
Fric Frankl belonged to a family living in Ljubljana during the war; several family members were deported, but all survived. Fric joined the partisans and later became a high-ranking party official after the war. He died in Ljubljana in 1988.
Rudolf Gorjan (Gruenwald), a merchant from Fara in the Kočevje region, had several children, at least one of whom — a daughter — joined the partisan movement.
Robert Neubauer, who before the war became one of the leading figures in surgical treatment of pulmonary diseases at Golnik, escaped after imprisonment in Begunje and joined the partisan resistance in Ljubljana. He survived the war and died in Ljubljana in 1969.
Two members of the renowned Ljubljana merchant family Pollak became partisans: Peter Pollak was killed in 1944, while Fedor Pollak survived the war and died in 1979.
The Polish refugee Halina Szpiro met her future husband Drago Podreka while hiding in Germany in 1944. Together they traveled to Jesenice, where she joined the partisans. She received several decorations for bravery and died in Ljubljana in 2007.
Aleksander “Šani” Ripp from Osijek had a sister living in Slovenia, married to the industrialist Penca in Novo mesto, where he sought refuge from the Ustaša regime. After the capitulation of Italy, he joined the partisans. Following the war, he emigrated to Israel, where he died in 2020.
Gertruda Siedelberger came to Slovenia before the war with her mother and sister after her mother married a Slovene. At the outbreak of the war she joined the partisans and survived. In 1954 she gave birth to her son, the Slovenian writer and dramatist Tomo Rebolj.
Pavel Kudiš (Kudisz) was a communist and partisan fighter. After the war he emigrated to Brazil, where he died in 2003.
Another partisan doctor was Paul Parin, son and heir of Oton Parin (Pollak), a major landowner in Novi Klošter in Styria. Toward the end of the war, Paul and his wife Goldy — also a physician — traveled from Switzerland to liberated Yugoslav territory, where both served as partisan doctors. Paul died in Switzerland in 2009.
Valter Šaherl (Shacherl), from the family of textile craftsman Robert Shacherl, served during the war in the 7th Kozjansko Partisan Brigade. He died in Maribor in 2009.
The family of the Maribor textile industrialist Rudolf Bock escaped deportation by fleeing to Novo mesto, where both Rudolf and his son Ernst immediately joined the partisans. Ernst was killed in 1943 near Šentjernej, while his father survived the war. Rudolf, who died in 1962, and his wife Adela, who died in 1976, were buried in the Novo mesto cemetery, although their grave no longer exists.
Oskar Eisner, director of the Jugosvila textile factory in Maribor, fled deportation to the Italian-occupied zone and eventually found himself in Albania. From there he escaped to Yugoslav territory and joined the partisans. He was later arrested and taken to Italy, from where he escaped to Trieste and again joined the resistance movement. Soon afterward he was arrested once more and deported to Mauthausen. He survived the war and later moved to Slovakia, from where his family originated, before eventually emigrating to Canada.
There were also Jews from Prekmurje who joined the partisan struggle. Štefan Blau, cousin of Ludvik Blau — the only survivor of his family — was killed in 1945. Bela Pollak, from a wealthy farming family of which only a few survived, later worked as an accountant in the Yugoslav army in Bjelovar, suggesting that he too had been involved with the partisans during the war. Ali Kardoš, a prewar communist and organizer of the Communist Party in Prekmurje, was repeatedly imprisoned and sentenced to forced labor because of his political activities before ultimately being deported to Flossenbürg, where he died in 1945.
A special chapter of Jewish resistance in Yugoslavia began after the capitulation of Italy in September 1943. Former Jewish internees from the Rab concentration camp formed the Rab Battalion, one of the very few specifically Jewish partisan military units in occupied Europe.
Among testimonies of the Jewish wartime experience in Slovenia, a special place belongs to Miriam Steiner Aviezer, born Miriam Biba Steiner in 1935, daughter of the Trebnje pharmacist Bela Steiner and Zora Mattersdorfer. Her story, described in the book Soldier with Golden Buttons, recounts a child’s experience of persecution, camps, hiding, and survival.
An equally important testimony about joining the partisans as a means of survival is found in the story of Anica Mikuš Kos and her family: because of her mother’s Jewish origins, joining the partisans represented both a decision for resistance and a path to survival from deportation.
Hanna Senesh
Hanna Senesh (1921–1944) was a Hungarian Jewish poet, partisan fighter, and British Army paratrooper, remembered today as one of the most powerful figures in Israeli historical memory. She was born into an assimilated Jewish family in Budapest, where, already as a schoolgirl, she wrote poetry, diary entries, and reflections on identity, antisemitism, and the search for meaning. After anti-Jewish laws in Hungary became increasingly severe, she emigrated in 1939 to Mandatory Palestine, where she joined Kibbutz Sdot Yam and devoted herself to agricultural work, the study of Hebrew, and writing. It was there that she composed her famous poem Eli, Eli (“My God, My God”), which would later become one of the most iconic works of Israeli culture and Holocaust remembrance.
In 1943, at the height of the Nazi persecution of European Jewry, she volunteered for the British Army. She was among the very few Jewish volunteers from Palestine selected and trained by the British for special parachute missions into occupied Europe. The purpose of these dangerous operations was to establish connections with resistance movements, assist the Allies, organize the rescue of Jews, and gather intelligence for the fight against Nazism.
In March 1944, together with a group of Jewish parachutists, she parachuted into the territory of former Yugoslavia — into the region of present-day Slovenia, specifically Bela krajina, then under the control of the Slovenian partisans. This part of her journey holds special significance in Slovenian historical memory. In Metlika and the surrounding villages, the parachutists were welcomed by local people and partisan fighters who provided them with protection, food, shelter, and assistance in organizing their further journey toward Hungary. At that time, Metlika was one of the key centers of the Slovenian resistance movement and an important link between Allied missions and the partisan struggle.
Hanna Senesh spent several weeks in Slovenia. In her writings, she spoke of the warmth of the people, the solidarity of the partisans, and the feeling that, despite war and danger, she was among people who understood the meaning of freedom and human dignity. Slovenian partisans helped prepare her crossing into Hungary, fully aware of the immense danger of the mission. It was on Slovenian soil that her decision became final: she would return to occupied Hungary and try to help Hungarian Jews, despite knowing that her chances of survival were very small.
In June 1944, while crossing the border near Hungary, she was captured by the Hungarian authorities, allies of Nazi Germany. Radio equipment and coded messages were found in her possession. Despite severe torture, she refused to reveal any information about her mission, her comrades, or resistance connections. Even when her imprisoned mother was threatened, she did not yield. After a brief military trial, Hanna Senesh was executed by firing squad in Budapest in November 1944. She was only twenty-three years old.
After the war, her diaries, letters, and poems became part of Israel’s national heritage. In Israel, Hanna Senesh remains a symbol of courage, moral integrity, and the willingness to sacrifice one’s life for others. Her story also holds a special place in Slovenia. Today, a memorial dedicated to her and the Jewish parachutists stands in Metlika, where annual ceremonies marking Slovenian-Israeli Friendship Day commemorate the solidarity between Slovenian partisans and Jewish fighters during the Second World War.
The Slovenian chapter of Hanna Senesh’s journey is therefore not merely an episode in her biography, but an enduring symbol of solidarity between nations during Europe’s greatest twentieth-century tragedy — a moment when courage, humanity, and resistance to fascism created a lasting bond between Slovenia and Israel.
I fell from the sky
“I fell from the sky.
Yes, I came from the sky, straight into the fire.
Europe was burning. Black smoke rose from the chimneys — the smoke of my people. No one resisted. No one raised their voice. They knew the black beast was destroying my nation, yet they did not do enough. They did not stop it. They could have bombed the chimneys through which rabbis, families, children — entire worlds marked with the Star of David — disappeared into the sky as smoke. But they did not.
Wait, wait, they said. Soon it will be over.
Yes — over for millions of children’s eyes, for millions of extinguished galaxies.
In Hungary they were gathering people who would soon become smoke.
We must save these universes, these countless little stars that still long to become solar systems. We must give a chance to the little Mozarts, to unborn writers and poets, to cooks and rabbis, to future mothers…
We must save lives.
And so I fell from the sky.
Straight into this land I had never heard of before.
I remember descending toward the earth, toward an unknown country, the silk of the parachute trembling above me. I fell among these people who entered my heart — and the heart of my people — forever.
I did not know where I had landed. I expected black devils to seize me before I could reach Hungary and organize the rescue of my people…
But I was fortunate.
The partisans found me.
The ones who had risen up because someone wanted to erase their people — their small nation with its beautiful language, a language in which even poetry is written in the dual form.
They were kind to me.
They hid me.
They led me to safety.
To a territory that, in the middle of the Nazi hell, in the middle of occupied black Europe transformed into a machine for murdering all who were different, had been liberated by partisans in defiance of the greatest force of evil in the world.
This was a people so very similar to my own.
Always on the edge.
Always without a state.
A people of resistance.
A people of partisans.
I was with them.
We sat around campfires.
They sang songs.
I sang with them.
And when I sang the songs of the Jewish people, they were enchanted. I had to teach them the words. Soon they were singing with me.
When my mission is complete, I thought, I will return to Israel and tell everyone about this small and courageous nation that, in the heart of enslaved Europe, dared to resist evil alone.
Their struggle, their comradeship, filled me with courage.
Nothing seemed impossible anymore.
We set out on foot toward the Hungarian border, where my mission was to begin. My comrades and I were meant to organize the rescue of Jewish civilians whom the Nazis intended to send to concentration camps and certain death.
The partisans had fulfilled their task.
I said goodbye with the words:
‘Soon in Israel.’
And they answered:
‘Soon in freedom.’
I did not know then that I was seeing them for the last time.
There was betrayal.
They captured me.
They broke my fingers.
One by one.
All ten of them.
They shattered them into tiny pieces.
They wanted me to betray my comrades.
They burned my hair.
They carved the Star of David into my flesh with knives.
Everywhere across my body.
They crushed my knees.
They tore open my stomach.
They wanted me to tell them who had brought me there, who my comrades were, what my mission was…
I told them nothing.
Instead, I flew back into the sky.
I flew away on broken wings.
I thought of my people, whom I could not save.
I thought of them — the Slovenian partisans who had helped me.
And my final thought, before I became part of the sky, before I began to shine in the universe like the brightest Star of David, was of that small land of courageous people who defeated the darkness of Europe.
Thank you.”
(Vinko Möderndorfer, monologue of Hanna Senesh from the performance Jewish Life in Ljubljana, Jewish Cultural Center Ljubljana / Mini Teater, 2022)
Miriam Steiner Aviezer
Miriam Steiner Aviezer was born in 1935. Before the Second World War she spent her childhood in Trebnje, Slovenia, where her father, Bela Steiner, was the town pharmacist. The family pharmacy was not only a place where people came for medicine; it was also a lively meeting point of local life, where customers listened to radio news, read newspapers and discussed a world increasingly sliding into war. Until the age of six, Miriam lived a secure, almost idyllic childhood in a Jewish family integrated into the local community.
In April 1941, this life ended abruptly. Concerned about her mother in Karlovac, Miriam’s mother, Zora, travelled to Croatia with her daughter. There they were seized by the Ustaša and taken to the Nova/Stara Gradiška camp, part of the Ustaša camp system connected with Jasenovac. Miriam was only five or six years old. The experience of the camp, violence, fear and separation from her mother later became one of the central wounds of her memory and the foundation of her literary work Vojak z zlatimi gumbi — The Soldier with Golden Buttons — in which she described the horror of the Holocaust through the eyes of a child named Biba.
Her father, Bela Steiner, went to extraordinary lengths to bring his wife and daughter back to Slovenia. But their safety was brief. Soon afterwards, the Italian occupation authorities interned the family in Ferramonti, a camp in southern Italy. After the capitulation of Italy, the family joined the Partisans; Miriam joined Partisan units in November 1943 and remained with them until liberation. One account describes her as the youngest partisan of the Jewish Brigade.
After the war, Miriam completed secondary school in Ljubljana and enrolled at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana. Around this time she began writing the story of little Biba, later published as Vojak z zlatimi gumbi. The novel first appeared in 1964 in the Pota mladih series and was later translated into Serbo-Croatian, English and Hebrew. It is one of the early literary testimonies of the Holocaust written from the perspective of a child — a child who does not understand historical concepts, but experiences fear, loss, humiliation and the collapse of the adult world with devastating clarity.
In 1971, Miriam Steiner Aviezer moved to Israel, where she built a family in Tel Aviv with the writer Shmuel Aviezer. She worked as a writer, journalist, researcher and witness. As a collaborator of Yad Vashem, she documented testimonies of Yugoslav Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and participated in the work of the commission recognising the Righteous Among the Nations. She later researched the stories of people who rescued Jews during the war and made an important contribution to preserving the memory of the Jewish communities of the former Yugoslavia.
Miriam Steiner Aviezer’s life connects childhood in pre-war Trebnje, the experience of an Ustaša camp, Italian internment, Partisan resistance and post-war testimony. Hers is the story of a Jewish child who survived the destruction of the world into which she was born and later devoted her life to memory. In her work, personal trauma becomes testimony: literature, research and the preservation of the names of those whom the Holocaust sought to erase.
Anica Mikuš Kos
Anica Mikuš Kos was born in 1935 in Ćuprija, Serbia. Her father, Radivoj Mikuš, was a Slovenian linguist and professor, while her mother came from a Croatian Jewish family. It was her mother’s Jewish origin that decisively marked the family’s fate during the Second World War. At a time of Nazi and Ustaša persecution of Jews, her mother, the child and the wider maternal family were in mortal danger.
The family faced the threat of deportation to a concentration camp. For this reason, Anica’s parents took her with them to join the Partisans. This decision was not only political; above all, it was a matter of survival. Anica Mikuš Kos later remembered the suddenness of their departure. One image remained especially vivid in her memory: her mother leaving for the Partisans almost without preparation, “in high heels”. This small detail conveys the haste, fear and unpredictability of a time when leaving home could mean saving one’s life.
During the war, Anica experienced hiding, flight, forests, uncertainty and life in the Partisan environment as a child. For her, the war was not distant history, but an experience of the body and memory: cold, fear, movement, danger and constant dependence on the help of adults. The Holocaust almost completely destroyed her mother’s family; most of her relatives on her mother’s side were murdered. This loss remained one of the deepest marks of her childhood.
After the war, Anica Mikuš Kos became a physician, child psychiatrist and one of Slovenia’s most important experts in helping children, families and refugees affected by war, violence and social distress. She led the Counselling Centre for Children, Adolescents and Parents, worked in the field of child psychiatry and became one of the key figures of Slovene Philanthropy.
Her life connects a personal history of persecution with an exceptional humanitarian commitment. A child who had to flee destruction because of her mother’s Jewish origin later became one of the strongest advocates for children, refugees and people in distress. Her work is rooted in a deep understanding that war harms the most vulnerable most profoundly — and that solidarity, professional care and human closeness can save lives long after the weapons fall silent.
dr. Klara Kukovec (1883–1979)
Dr. Klara Kukovec, born Kaja (Chaya Lea) Doktor, was one of the pioneers of women’s medicine in Slovenia and the first woman to establish a private medical practice in Maribor. She was born in 1883 in Kherson, then part of the Russian Empire (today Ukraine), into a prosperous Jewish family. At a time when women had very limited access to higher education, she studied medicine in Switzerland and earned her medical degree in 1908. During her studies she married the Slovenian engineer Janko Kukovec and started a family.
In 1911 she opened a private practice for women and children in Trieste, becoming the city’s first female physician. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the family settled in Maribor, where in 1919 she opened the city’s first private medical practice run by a woman. For many years she remained the only female physician among dozens of male colleagues and earned widespread respect for her professional excellence, compassion and devotion to her patients.
Her life was deeply affected by war and persecution. Because of her Jewish origin, she was forced to leave Maribor in 1941 and spent the war years in hiding in Ljubljana with her husband. The Nazi authorities confiscated her home and medical practice, while after the war the communist authorities nationalised her property. Nevertheless, she reopened her practice and continued treating patients well into old age, receiving them until she was ninety-two years old.
Her sons continued the family’s tradition of public service. The younger son, Dr. Robert Kukovec (1910–1945), became a distinguished surgeon. After studying medicine in Innsbruck and Vienna, he specialised in Zagreb, Strasbourg and Paris. During the Second World War he joined the Slovenian Partisan resistance, organised surgical units and performed numerous life-saving operations under extremely difficult wartime conditions. He was captured by German forces and executed in April 1945, only weeks before the end of the war. Today he is remembered as one of Slovenia’s most outstanding Partisan physicians.
Dr. Klara Kukovec died in Maribor in 1979. She is remembered today as one of the leading figures in Slovenian medical history, a pioneer of women physicians and a symbol of perseverance, humanity and dedication to the medical profession. Together with her son Robert, the Kukovec family represents an outstanding contribution of Slovenian Jewry to medicine and humanitarian values in the twentieth century.
