Višnja Pavelić died on Christmas Day in 2015, at the age of 92. The last photo of the Pavelić family together, taken in 1959 in Madrid months before the death of the Croatian dictator. “I told her, ‘Don’t worry, they won’t come to Spain to look for him.’” Her fears were so deep-rooted that she contacted the Ministry of Justice before she died, to prevent any future exhumation of her father’s remains. According to Almudena Moreno, in charge of the San Isidro cemetery, “She went with a little fold-up chair and spent her afternoons protecting his grave.” Fearing the desecration of the site by Serbs, she placed a heavy tombstone over it and asked the cemetery to reveal nothing of its location to strangers. She did not want people talking about her or photographing her and she watched over her father’s grave zealously. Every time I left her apartment, she would accompany me to the door, her frame small and hunched, saying “But all this before my death, nothing, eh, nothing!” Her Spanish was heavily accented and carried with it nuances from the family’s exile in Argentina. She welcomed me into her home several times in the years before she died, seeming to welcome the company and to enjoy talking about her father, although she made it clear that she didn’t want any of what was said to be published until several years after her death. The dictator’s daughter was serious but friendly and polite, always using the formal address of usted. “Do you want a little piece of chocolate?” Višnja asked. Adolf Hitler (l) and Ante Pavelić in 1944. When he died at the age of 70, the Spanish news agency Cifra reported in brief that he had been buried in the San Isidro cemetery in Madrid “during a funeral ceremony in the strictest privacy,” with no further description of the man other that he had been “head of the Croatian state during World War II.” Spain’s ABC newspaper put his brief obituary at the bottom of a page under a section called “Echoes of Society,” which gave news of weddings and engagements. And while his distinctive thick eyebrows and his enormous ears, with lobes that hung like steaks, remained, he had let a mustache grow. As an old man, he looks harmless – a far cry from the cold, tense and overbearing figure of the 1940s. In an unpublished photograph from that period Višnja showed to EL PAÍS Semanal, he poses at the popular Puerta del Sol square, dressed soberly in a hat and a long, black overcoat. Pavelić spent the last years of his life strolling around Madrid. For me, he is on a par with Hitler,” says Hrvoje Klasic, a historian at the University of Zagreb. “It was a monstrous regime and he was its leader. His fascist rule was sponsored by Nazi Germany with Serbs, Jews, Roma and opponents persecuted and sent to death camps between 19, where more than 300,000 were killed, according to the US Holocaust Museum. The only break in her routine came in the afternoon, when she would rest on the sofa and put on a record of Verdi or her favorite baritone, Gino Bechi.Īnte Pavelić was given refuge by Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and lived the last two years of his life in Madrid where he died in 1959. For 50 years she worked tirelessly in this perpetual twilight on her father’s archives in a room filled with towers of shabby files. The blinds were invariably lowered and the curtains drawn. Before her death in 2015, Višnja Pavelić, the daughter of the Croatian dictator Ante Pavelić, lived alone in a gloomy Madrid apartment.
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