Jadviga Golež - Špela

Teacher and functionary of the Maribor resistance movement

Abstract

In this biographical and cultural-historical study, the author examines the life of the teacher Jadviga Golež (1911-1944), who was tragically affected by the Second World War, in the specific conditions of resistance in Maribor, on the border of cultural worlds and at the intersection of national myths. Already at the beginning of the Nazi occupation, the Maribor resident, who taught in the folk school in Šmartno ob Paki in the years before the war, was active in the resistance, and from mid-1943 until the spring of 1944 she was a central figure in the network of the teacher Dušan Špindler, then the main organiser of the Maribor resistance movement. She was a member of the District Committee of the Liberation Front (OF) and the District Committee of the Communist Party of Slovenia (KPS), and the first secretary of the city committee of the Slovenian Anti-Fascist Women’s Union. After leaving for the partisans in the spring of 1944, she became the deputy political commissar of the Lacko Battalion, and after it joined the Pohorje Detachment, she went to Pohorje herself. She continued to work as a courier in Gorenjska, then as a member of the OF district committee in Slovenske gorice. In August 1944, after being betrayed and arrested by the Gestapo and tortured in a prison cell, she committed suicide. The tragic biography of a teacher illustrates the hard and sure penetration of the female gender into the public sphere during the years of the Second World War and especially in the post-World War II era.