Ljubičić Lazar & Mila

Ljubičić, Lazar Ljubičić, Mila Lazar and Mila Ljubičić owned a farm in the village of Zasavica, near Šabac, in Serbia. In October 1941, as convoys of Jews were being marched through Zasavica towards the Šabac concentration camp, the local villagers saw from their windows the families with their children being led to an assumedly tragic fate. When one convoy was passing near the Ljubičićes’ house, they noticed a man step out of line, looking at their home. Mila told Lazar that she wanted to help these people, and Ljubičić went outside in the driving rain, approached the Jew, and whispered in his ear that his family could enter his home one by one. Thus, three members of the Schossberger family from Temerin – Ravica and Oskar Schossberger, and their six-year-old son Tomi – and Ksenija Pašćan, a non-Jewish girl who was staying with the Schossbergers at the time they were deported, arrived at the Ljubičićes home, without the guards noticing. Mila accepted them warmly into their home, prepared a hiding place for them in the house and she brought them food and blankets. In a search by the local police of the Ljubičićes’ home, the family insisted that no one was hiding there. Some time later, Nadežda Pašćan*, Ksenija’s mother, arrived at the Ljubičićes’ to take her daughter and Tomi Schossberger away. The three of them returned to Novi Sad. The Schossberger couple eventually decided to continue on their way and to look for another hiding place. Not long after the Schossbergers’ departure, the Ljubičićes’ wheat field was chosen to be used for a mass execution of Jews from Šabac and Jewish refugees from Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia who were stranded in Yugoslavia on their way to the Eretz Israel. Since then, Ljubičić has planted nothing in that field besides cypress trees in memory of the 1,200 victims. On May 11, 1994, Yad Vashem recognized Mila and Lazar Ljubičić as Righteous Among the Nations.