Stjepan Filipović

Pause here for a moment and feel the ground under your feet. Bijeljina sits on flat land, and the air often carries a faint smell of earth from the surrounding fields. Listen to the town around you. There may be traffic, footsteps, someone calling out across the street. And in the middle of this ordinary day stands a memorial to a young man whose final seconds became one of the most widely recognised images of the Second World War in Yugoslavia.

His name was Stjepan Filipović. Many people around the world have seen his face without ever learning who he was. In a black and white photograph, a young man stands with a noose around his neck. His arms are thrown up and wide. His mouth is open in a shout. He is not pleading. He is defiant. That single frame carried his story far beyond the Balkans.

Let us start with who he was. Filipović was born in 1916 in Opuzen, a small town near the mouth of the Neretva River on the Croatian coast. As a young man he worked as a labourer and moved between towns in search of work. During those years he became involved in the communist movement. In the Yugoslavia of the 1930s, that movement was illegal. Activists faced arrest, prison and police surveillance.

In 1941, Axis forces invaded and divided the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Resistance groups formed quickly. The largest was the Partisan movement, which was led by the Communist Party. Filipović joined the Partisans in Serbia and fought in the uprising that followed the occupation. The fighting was brutal. Occupying forces and local collaborators answered resistance with mass reprisals against civilians, so every act of defiance carried a heavy cost.

In early 1942, Filipović was captured. The exact details of his capture vary between accounts, so we will not try to fix every step here. What is clear is the outcome. He was sentenced to death. In May 1942, he was hanged in public in the Serbian town of Valjevo. The authorities intended the execution as a warning to the local population.

Now comes the moment that changed everything. Standing beneath the gallows, Filipović raised his arms and shouted to the crowd. His words became a slogan across the whole of Yugoslavia. In the local language it was Smrt fašizmu, sloboda narodu. In English, Death to fascism, freedom to the people. It is said that he also called on the people to keep fighting. A camera captured the instant.

Here is the first surprise for many visitors. The photograph was not taken by a resistance fighter or a war correspondent. It came from the side that carried out the execution. Images like this were often made to document executions or to intimidate. This one had the opposite effect. When the picture circulated, it did not show a defeated enemy. It showed a man who refused to be broken. The executioners' own record turned into a symbol of resistance.

After the war, the new socialist Yugoslavia built much of its public memory around the Partisan struggle. In 1949, Filipović was proclaimed a People's Hero of Yugoslavia. This was the highest honour for wartime bravery in the country. His raised arms appeared in school books, on posters, and in monuments. The best known monument stands in Valjevo, close to the place where he died. It shows the same open-armed pose in a tall, stylised figure.

And this brings us to the second surprise. The man honoured here in Bijeljina was born on the Croatian coast. He fought and died in Serbia. Yet his memory is also kept here, in northeastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. That spread tells you something about Yugoslavia. For several decades, heroes were presented as belonging to all its peoples, not to a single town or region. Memorials to the same figures rose in many cities across the federation.

Take a moment to compare what you see in front of you with that famous photograph. Look at the posture, the face, the hands. Ask yourself what the artist chose to keep from the original image and what they chose to change. Memorials to wartime heroes are rarely realistic portraits. They are statements. They tell you how a society wanted to remember a person, and how it wanted you to feel when you stood here.

It is worth thinking about how this kind of memory has changed. After Yugoslavia broke apart in the 1990s, many Partisan monuments across the region were neglected, damaged or removed. Others were cared for by local communities, veterans' groups or town authorities. Today, some people visit these sites out of family memory. Others come out of curiosity about a country that no longer exists. Each memorial that survives holds a small piece of that shared past.

Bijeljina itself is a good place to reflect on this. The town lies in the Semberija region, a wide and fertile plain near the meeting of the Drina and Sava rivers. For generations, people here have worked the land, traded at markets and travelled the roads toward Serbia and Croatia. Like many towns in the region, Bijeljina went through the Second World War and then the conflicts of the 1990s. Its streets carry layers of very different histories side by side.

Before you move on, stand still for one more breath. Look again at the memorial and at the everyday life moving past it. A young man, still in his twenties, faced death with his arms open and his voice raised. Whatever you think of the politics of his time, the gesture is simple to understand. As you walk away into the streets of Bijeljina, you may find yourself noticing other names on plaques and corners... each one a quiet invitation to ask who they were.