Smilja Tišma
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Smilja Tišma | |
|---|---|
| Смиља Тишма | |
| Member of the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia | |
| In office 3 August 2020 – 1 August 2022 | |
| President of the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia (acting) | |
| In office 3 August 2020 – 22 October 2020 | |
| Preceded by | Maja Gojković |
| Succeeded by | Ivica Dačić |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 9 June 1929 [official] |
| Party | Independent |
Smilja I. Tišma (Serbian Cyrillic: Смиља И. Тишма; born circa 1929) is a retired Serbian politician who served in the Serbian national assembly from 2020 to 2022. She was elected on the list of the Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS), but she is not a member of any party.
Tišma was a child prisoner in the fascist Independent State of Croatia during World War II. She survived the concentration camp system and has shared her account of the war years through a series of oral history interviews.
Tišma was born to an ethnic Serb family in the village of Zrinska in western Slavonia and raised in the community. At the time, the village was located in the Sava Banovina of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia; it is part of Croatia today. Official documents say that she was born on 9 June 1929, although she discovered in the post-World War II period that neither the year nor the date is accurate. In a 2010 interview, she said that she was born on an unknown date in June and that her year of birth was in the early 1930s; nonetheless, she has used 9 June 1929 as her birth date for official purposes. Her father was a farmer, and she was raised in a rural household.
Tišma was still a child when World War II began and the Independent State of Croatia was established under the fascist Ustaše. As she has recounted in oral history interviews, she and her family suffered severe hardships under fascist rule. Her father was arrested by the Ustaše in 1941 and is believed to have died in a concentration camp. In the next two years, she and other members of her family were detained in a number of different camps, including the notorious Jasenovac camp; she has recounted the horrific conditions to which prisoners were subjected and has said that her mother is also believed to have died during this time. Tišma was ultimately sent to the Jastrebarsko children's camp and was part of a group of children taken to Ludbreg and required to work on the farms of local peasants. An ethnic Croat neighbour from her home village was able to rescue her and her siblings in late 1943 and bring them home; she spent the remainder of the war living with family members and neighbours in and around Zrinska, hiding in a nearby forest during battles.[1][2]
Tišma and her brother attended the opening of Yugoslavia's Jasenovac Memorial Site in 1964.[3] She later founded the Association of Detainees in Jasenovac.[4]