Миодраг Ивковић / Miodrag Ivković 1917 - 1944

Born 30.10.1917 in Trnava
Died 15.6.1944 in Hartheim

Biography

Miodrag Ivković was born on 30 October 1917 in Trnava. Already a well-known Communist before the war, at the end of May 1941 he was added to the wanted list of the special police force for his involvement in the partisan movement, for the organisation of armed resistance and for his contacts to the Soviet embassy.

Miodrag Ivković began studying electrical engineering in 1936 in the Technical Faculty in Belgrade. One year later he became a member of the illegal Communist party. He also turned to political work. In 1939 he became chairman of the Central Association of Technical Students. He rose to prominence under his nickname Cust, taken from the first letters of the student organisation (Centralno Udruženje Studenata Tehnike). In March 1941 he was an active participant in the mass demonstrations against the signing of the Tripartite Pact by the Yugoslavian government under Cvetković-Maček and stood out as a persuasive speaker.

He left Belgrade after the war in April 1941. Two months later he married Zora Begenišić and worked in an antimony plant in Krupanj. During the joint uprising of the partisans and the Chetniks in the autumn he took over the organisation of the armed resistance as a commissar of the partisan movement. He formed a unit of partisans who carried out several acts of sabotage.

In autumn 1941, under the command of General Franz Böhm, Wehrmacht troops began a punitive expedition with the aim of intimidating and pacifying the Serbian population and quelling the armed resistance. In some parts of Serbia entire villages were burned to the ground and members of the resistance and civilians were arrested. The rebellion against the occupiers was supressed.

A violent settling of accounts on both sides between the Chetniks and the partisans now began. Among the partisans there were arguments and a split between Cust and the commander Danilo Lekić, who had fought in Spain. Cust fled his unit. He was arrested along with three other partisans from the Trnava unit in April 1942 and handed over by the local police to the special police force. Among those arrested at the same time was Trajko Stamenković, who had been sentenced before the war to a long prison term for his membership of the Communist Party. Stamenković was shot shortly after his arrest, yet Cust was still being asked about him and their joint activities as partisans some two years later in Mauthausen.

After his arrest, his mother Fema wrote to the military commanders in Serbia asking that her only son be released or – if this was not possible – to spare his life and send him to Germany to work. But as a category II political offender, Cust set off on 1 May 1943 with 240 other prisoners on the journey to Mauthausen concentration camp. He was assigned prisoner number 28953. On 18 May he was transferred to the Gusen branch camp, where he was later assigned prisoner number 48513.

Cust spoke French and very quickly made contact with other antifascist prisoners. He was involved in the organisation of resistance in the camp and did all he could to help his fellow prisoners. But then something unusual happened in Cust’s case: the Serbian police belatedly found out who they had had locked up over a year ago and asked that Cust be brought back to Serbia so that they could continue their investigations. The camp administration at Mauthausen concentration camp refused the request but did allow questioning to take place in the camp’s Political Section. The Serbian police submitted their questions by post and received a report by return of post. One month before Cust had been deported to Mauthausen, his father, the engineer Ljubomir Ivković, had sent a plea to the minister asking that his son be released on the promise that he would volunteer for work in Germany. It was precisely under this pretext that Mile Cust had been sent to a Grade III concentration camp where he was therefore subjected to backbreaking forced labour under the harshest conditions and exposed to extreme hunger, which led to a general deterioration in his health and extreme exhaustion and weakness.

The consequences of such treatment meant that he was categorised as unfit for work. He was killed by poison gas at the Hartheim killing facility and cremated on 14 June 1944.

Tamara Ćirić-Danilović / Ljubomir Zečević

 

Udruženje zatočenika koncentracionog logora Mauthauzen Srbije

 

Translation into English: Joanna White 

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