Before her death in 2015, Višnja Pavelić, the daughter of the Croatian dictator Ante Pavelić, lived alone in a gloomy Madrid apartment[…]For 50 years she worked tirelessly in this perpetual twilight on her father’s archives in a room filled with towers of shabby files
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The dictator’s daughter was serious but friendly and polite, always using the formal address of usted. 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
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Initially, she would get up every so often to look for documents to try to prove that her father had not been as despicable as history paints him. Even when she became crippled by osteoporosis, she would reach for her files and repeat, “It’s all a lie. Everything they say about my father is a lie. Everything, everything”
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“Jasenovac is a complete exaggeration,” said Višnja. “It was a labor camp, and there was poverty, but they had doctors, their own leaders, everything they wanted. It wasn’t Auschwitz, understand? They were all alive and well”
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Višnja was especially upset by an anecdote told by the journalist Curzio Malaparte in his book Kaputt[…]Ante Pavelić lifted the lid of the basket[…]“It is a gift from my faithful ustasa: 20 kilos of human eyes.”
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In another photograph from her personal collection, she is shown at the grave accompanied by a young man in traditional Croatian dress. Small and bird-like, she was still an unrepentant ultra-nationalist who expressed a genocidal hatred of the Serbs: “They are born criminals,” she said. “There is no Serb who is not a criminal. They have done nothing but kill! Nothing else. Killing is genetic in them, and all we have done is defend ourselves”