Ján Bulík 1897 - 1942

Born 1.1.1897 in Kovačica
Died 30.1.1942 in Mauthausen

Biography

Ján Bulík came from a patriotic peasant family of Slovakian settlers in the Serbian region of the Banat. After finishing primary school he attended the Serbian grammar school in Novi Sad. From 1918 to 1923 he studied law in Belgrade and Zagreb. After university he worked in the Slovakian legal practice of Mičátek in Novi Sad, later taking this over from him.

Before the Second World War he was one of the main organisers of the political and cultural life of the Slovakian minority in Yugoslavia. In 1932, for example, he founded the Slovakian cultural association Matica Slovenská and became its first chairman. In addition he was an official of the Československý zväz v Juhoslávii (Czechoslovakian Union in Yugoslavia). In 1936 he moved his practice to Belgrade. After the breakup of Czechoslovakia by National Socialist Germany in 1939, this served as a point of contact for Czechoslovakian émigrés. Among other things he provided them with the necessary travel documents and residence permits, money and accommodation, and organised their passage to France.

Bulík was one of the most reliable couriers between the local resistance in Prague and Bratislava and the Czechoslovakian exile community in Paris. In particular he established contact between the former prime minister Milan Hodža and members of the Agrarian Party who had joined the resistance. A denunciation led to his first arrest at the end of August 1939 in Budapest as he was trying to get back to Belgrade from Paris via Prague. Only the intervention of some Yugoslavian politicians secured his release. Later the Gestapo learned more about him in particular from Jarmila Papežová, who had infiltrated the Slovakian resistance group led by the Agrarian Ján Lichner.

After the occupation of Yugoslavia, Bulík hid from the Gestapo in his home town of Kovačica but was soon discovered on 27 July 1941 and taken into custody in Belgrade, followed by Vienna then Prague at the end of 1941. After this he was transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp. Here it seems he protested against the terror and torture inflicted on the prisoners by appealing to international military law (and the law governing political prisoners). According to fellow prisoners, as a deterrent to others he was dragged to the area between the barbed wire fences, where he was ripped apart by the guard dogs. Documents list the official cause of death as pneumonia.

After the war he was posthumously awarded the Order of the Slovak National Uprising 1st class and the War Cross 1939, the highest accolades for members of the resistance.

Marek Syrný

 

Translation into English: Joanna White

 

Sources:

Archív Múzea SNP [Slovak National Uprising] Banská Bystrica, Estate of Jozef Jablonický, no archive number.

 

References:

 

Jozef Jablonický: Z ilegality do povstania [From Illegality to Uprising] (Banská Bystrica 2010), pp. 16–37.

Location In room