He was most definitely no supporter of Hitler or Mussolini. Some of you may consider Mihailovic’s forces as collaborators but my father would have vehemently contested that suggestion. He was also very much a product of his time. Both of them spent a great deal of that time working for a light engineering company called Woodmet.Īs these documents show, Petar was a proud Serb, a proud member of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and a proud follower of Gen Draza Mihailovic. They moved to Dukinfield, Cheshire, in November, 1951, and remained there for the rest of their lives. She was 19 years younger than Petar but the marriage endured. When his wife, Jelena, refused to move to Britain, he divorced her and married Stanislava Djurovic (nee Ramovic) who was known to all and sundry as Stella, a name given to her by the US Army, by whom she was liberated at the end of the war when she was working as a slave labourer in a Nazi munitions factory near Vienna. His first marriage collapsed because of the war. He joined the Royal Yugoslav Army in 1922 and came to Britain in 1948. It later became part of Yugoslavia but is now part of Croatia. Petar Pavasovic was born in Northern Dalmatia in 1905 in what was then a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire. I have no idea why he wrote so many accounts of the German invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941 but I have thought it best to include them all. The other recollections were all written in the 1970s and 1980s after his retirement. My translations are taken from typed notes which he no doubt edited. My father’s actual war diaries, which were handwritten and effectively illegible, are now with the Imperial War Museum in London. In many cases the translations are literal and, because of that, may not be entirely accurate. Also, while I have studied Yugoslav history, I am no expert on the structure of the Royal Yugoslav Army. Although I have a command of Serbo-Croat, passed down to me by my parents, I have had very little cause to speak the language since my mother died in 1997. It is not my desire to begin by making apologies, but I do believe that I need to place the various items into some kind of context. Nenad Kovacevic’s murder of Rade Djorovic in 1950.Ljubisa Djordjevic’s involvement in the March 27, 1941, putsch.A biography of Petar Pavasovic written by himself.Diaries 1944-49: fighting in Bosnia, Eboli Camp and Germany to the UK.Memories of the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April, 1941.Petar’s recollections of his service in the Royal Yugoslav Army 1922-1941.The sixth tells the story of Nenad Kovacevic, who was hanged for murder, and the seventh is a brief life story of my mother, Stella Pavasovic, who spent time in an Italian concentration camp and as slave-labour in a German munitions factory. THE first five documents come from the papers left by my father, Petar Pavasovic, who died in 1991, and represent my attempts to translate them.
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