Draft:Mila Dimic

Mila Dimić (Belgrade, Kingdom of Serbia, 13 November 1902 — Belgrade, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, 16 December 1942) was writer, stage actress, a long-term manager of the Student House and a participant in the National Liberation Struggle during German-occupied Europe.

Biography

She was born on 13 November 1902 in Belgrade. Her father's name was Ivan Dimić, and her mother's name was Sofia, née Hacker. Although she came from a poor Serbian family, she continued her education after finishing elementary and secondary schools. She first worked as a clerk in a bank, but was attracted to the arts.

In 1921, she joined the amateur acting troupe Otadžbina, of which Mata Milošević was also a member at the time. This amateur troupe grew into the Academic Theatre in 1922, which was then led by Milan Dedinac and Branimir Ćosić in addition to Mata Milošević. Mila was very friendly, so the apartment where she lived with her mother was a gathering place for her friends and fellow actors. Nevenka Urbanova, brothers Dragiša and Raša Plaović, Aleksandar Janković, Branko Tatić, Pavle Bogatinčević, Sveta Milutinović, Dule Ilić, Momčilo Milošević and others visited her. It was a circle of poor people who socialized and practiced art. She got her first engagement at the National Theatre in Belgrade in 1926, but was "unclassified" until 1928, when she became a permanent member of the National Theatre Drama troupe. She played mostly supporting roles, and at the same time she continued to play in the Academic Theatre.

From the mid-1930s, Mila moved in the circle of left-leaning intellectuals and communists, among whom were Pavle and Meri Bihali, Velibor Gligorić, Veselin Masleša, Nikola Popović, Hugo Klein, Milka Žicina, Dragica Srzentić, Sveta Popović, Velizar Kosanović, Jovan Popović and others. Under the influence of socializing with them, she started her social and social engagement. This resulted in the dramatization of Branimir Ćosić's novel Pošeno pile, from which the play Sila (Force) was born. This play premiered at the National Theatre and after several performances it was banned and removed from the repertoire, and Mila was fired from the theater in May 1936.

Principal of the Student House

Through her friend Dragica Srzentić, who knew Leposava Mihailović Opika, who at the beginning of May 1936 was elected president of the Association of Female Students, Mila immediately after being dismissed from the theater was elected the manager of the then-opened Student Dorm Kraljica Marija (today Student Dorm Vera Blagojević). She was elected despite the opposition of the then Minister of Education, Dobrivoje Stošović. As a former bank employee, she did well in the position of manager and treated her home and modest means very carefully. She took care of inventory, inventory and money. She lived in the Dormitory and received the parents of female students every day, who came to visit, and she also answered their letters. With the help of employees and students on duty, she managed to maintain extraordinary order in the House.

As the manager of the dormitory, Mila was very sympathetic to female students who were members of the revolutionary student movement, which was intensively active at Belgrade University in those years. She prevented the attempts of the police to enter the Dorm to arrest some female students, justifying that the Dorm was under the patronage of Queen Mary and that she would let the police in only with the permission of the court to enter the Dorm. Since the Dorm of female students was a safe place to which the police had no access, the archive of the Action Committee of student professional associations, the Peace Committee, student associations, sections, etc., were transferred there. She was active in the Women's Movement and collaborated in the newspaper Žena danas.

While she worked in the House, her apartment at 22 Majke Jevrosima Street served as a gathering place for left-leaning intellectuals. For the publishing house Nolit, which was organized and managed by the Bihali brothers, Mila translated "Bismarck" by Kurt Kersten from German. She also continued her artistic work. In the Art Theatre, which was founded in 1938 and one of the founders and members of which was Viktor Starčić, she dramatized her short stories Četvorka and Baba Jec, Radoj Domanović's Stradia and Svetolik Ranković's "Village Teacher", in which she played the main role before the war. In 1940, she printed a collection of short stories, "Tales of Zaga".

National liberation struggle

In April 1941, after the German bombing, she left Belgrade and took refuge in the vicinity of Belgrade. After a few days, she returned to the already occupied Belgrade. Since the Germans moved into the dorm, Milo was ordered to move out. She resented it and demanded that the home be returned to the female students. Together with Živka Gavrilović, who worked as a maid in the Dormitory, she managed to save the archive of the Student Association from the Dormitory. After the occupation, she befriended and collaborated with Leposava Mihailović Opika and Lepa Laloš-Vujošević, with whom she lived together in an attic.

Mila Dimić was arrested in November 1941 under the accusation that in the Dorm she tolerated communist propaganda and events organized in favour of Red Aid. Since she was not a member of the then illegal Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ), she was not registered in the police archives, so agents of the Special Police accused her of having ties to Pavlo Bihali and Nolit press. At the hearings, she denied all accusations, denying that any political activity took place in the House. During her stay in prison, she used to encourage female inmates and put on little plays to lift their spirits. After an extensive investigation, she was released because of lack of evidence.

After her release, together with her friends Lepa Mihailović and Lepa Laloš, she continued her involvement in the National Liberation Movement (NOP). They operated in Čukarica, where even before the war Leposava Mihailović worked as an engineer in the Sugar Factory and was the secretary of a party cell, and Lepa Laloš was the secretary of a street party cell. Their activity was particularly intense, after the March burglary and arrest of the secretary of the KPJ Local Committee for Belgrade, Jelena Ćetković, in March 1942. At that time, they worked on rebuilding party cells and connecting KPJ members who had escaped arrest. In May 1942, she was accepted as a member of the Communist Party.

At a street meeting in October 1942, Leposava Mihailović Opika was arrested, who was then severely beaten and transferred to the Banjica concentration camp, where she lay motionless for seven months, after which she was shot on 14 May 1943. Another friend of Mila's, Lepa Laloš, left Belgrade in the middle of 1942 and went to Paraćin on assignment to establish a connection with the partisan groups operating in Bukovik. After her return to Belgrade, the Special Police (Gestapo) intensively searched for her and on 11 December 1942, they broke into the building where she lived. Since Lepa and Mila lived next door to each other, when the police arrived they found Lepa in Mila's section of the dorm, and so, they arrested both of them, even though there was no warrant for Mila's arrest.

Mila and Lepa were brutally beaten by the Nazi German police. Mila was taken to the cell in an unconscious state, and at the insistence of the other inmates, she was transferred to a prison hospital. A few days later, on 16 December 1942, Mila died as a result of police torture. After that, the police buried her in Marinkova Bara, and after liberation, her remains were transferred to the Alley of executed patriots at the Belgrade New Cemetery.

References

• Adapted from Serbian Wikipedia.