On this day, the final breakout of prisoners from the infamous Ustaše concentration camp Jasenovac took place. During the very breakout, Ante Bakotić Bako—a Yugoslav communist and revolutionary, participant in the National Liberation Struggle, and leader of the prisoners’ escape from the notorious Jasenovac camp, a site of mass killings of Serbs, Jews, Roma, and other opponents of the Ustaše regime—was killed.
He was born in 1921 in Sinj. In 1936, he enrolled in the Military Technical School, chemical department, in Kruševac, which he successfully completed in the class of 1939. He then worked in Sarajevo in one of the military industries as a chemical technician.
In 1939, he was admitted into the membership of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. When the work of his party cell was discovered in January 1942, he was forced to take refuge in his hometown of Sinj. He hid there for a while before joining the partisans. By the spring of 1942, he was captured along with a group of partisans in the Neretva Valley and deported to the Jasenovac concentration camp via the Sarajevo prison.
Fellow inmate Čedomil Huber recalls that Bakotić was among the prisoners with the longest time spent in the camp. Survivor Ilija Ivanović remembers Bakotić as a good acquaintance from the chemical workshop in the camp. Despite the harsh conditions, Ante organized a party cell and worked illegally with members of the CPY and SKOJ.
In April 1945, the Germans and Ustaše held a meeting in Zagreb where they agreed to kill all remaining prisoners in Jasenovac to eliminate any living witnesses to their crimes. By April 21, the Ustaše had begun destroying the camp.
The last group of about 80 female prisoners was killed on April 21, and the remaining 1,073 inmates knew the same fate awaited them. Ante Bakotić was one of the ideological organizers of the breakout preparations from the “Brickworks” section, together with other members of the party organization. Units of ten were formed, each with a task during the breakout, and the escape itself was to begin on Bakotić’s signal.
On the morning of April 22 around 10 a.m., at Bakotić’s shout, the units broke the gates and windows and charged toward freedom. Prisoners soon began to fall under the bullets of Ustaše machine guns, among them Ante Bakotić. His final moments were described by breakout survivors Mile Ristić and Čedomil Huber. Ristić stated:
“When we got through the gate, Ante was fatally shot. I stopped to help him. He ordered me to go ahead and said someone must survive. With his last strength, I saw him crawl to the Sava River’s bank and disappear in its waves.”
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On the other hand, Huber wrote: “I remember seeing Ante Bakotić walking down the path, his lungs swelling like blacksmith’s bellows. I called him to come down and use the blind spot. He just waved his hand and didn’t go down. That’s when he was hit and fell into the Sava.”
Of the final 1,073 prisoners in the camp, 117 survived the breakout from the Brickworks, and 11 from the Tannery.
After the war, a memorial plaque was placed on his birth house.
On October 31, 2009, then-President of Croatia Stjepan Mesić unveiled a commemorative plaque on the birth house of Ante Bakotić, located at Pijaca, at the intersection of King Tomislav Square and Put Petrovca Street, on the same spot where, in the mid-1990s, the original plaque was removed during facade renovation and damaged. The damaged plaque is now stored in the Museum of the Cetina Region.
An award was named after him, which the Public Institution Memorial Area Jasenovac presented on May 12, 2013—on the 68th anniversary of the breakout—to surviving participants and posthumously to all other Jasenovac camp inmates who survived the escape.
During the night of February 23 to 24, 2013, an unknown vandal or vandals attempted to remove the commemorative plaque from the facade. The plaque was partially damaged during this act of vandalism. It was returned the following day, February 25, 2013.
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Source: Novi Dani; Foto: Novi dani