ABSTRACT: This article examines strategies of survival, negotiation, and postwar restitution pursued by victims of state-sponsored violence in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) through a microhistorical analysis of the correspondence of the mixed Serbian–Jewish Oklobdžija–Flesch family from Zagreb. Focusing in particular on the experiences of Slavica Oklobdžija, the study reconstructs how members of a middle-class household navigated racial legislation, administrative arbitrariness, and the ideological contradictions of the Ustaša regime in an effort to preserve their lives, property, and legal standing. The article highlights the ambiguities inherent in NDH racial policy, especially in cases involving mixed marriages, which challenged the regime’s binary antisemitic worldview and its nation-building project. Drawing on wartime and postwar correspondence with state institutions, the article also traces Slavica’s attempts to obtain restitution after 1945, offering insight into bureaucratic attitudes toward Holocaust survivors and the families of victims in socialist Yugoslavia. By foregrounding the lived experience of one family, the article contributes to broader debates on everyday survival under genocidal regimes, the limits of racial ideology in practice, and the contested place of the Holocaust and Jewish survivors in postwar Yugoslav society.

KEYWORDS: Independent State of Croatia (NDH), Ustaša regime, Holocaust, mixed marriages, restitution, Jewish property, survival strategies

SUMMARY: This article draws on the correspondence of a mixed middle-class Serbian–Jewish household in Zagreb, the Oklobdžija–Flesch family, consisting of Josip, his wife Slavica, and their daughter Renata, to shed light on how victims of wartime terror in the NDH attempted to negotiate their survival within the state and even challenge Ustaša orthodoxies in order to obtain restitution for their losses. At the same time, it explores the often ambiguous and contradictory relationship of the NDH and the Ustaša regime to race and nationality. Slavica’s postwar interactions with state officials likewise provide insight into bureaucratic attitudes toward, and the treatment of, Holocaust survivors in postwar Yugoslavia, as well as the struggles experienced by survivors and the families of victims in their attempts to secure restitution. In doing so, the article brings into focus the complex relationship of postwar Yugoslavia to the legacy of the Holocaust and Jewish survivors in the late 1940s, at the height of collectivization, Stalinisation, and anti-Zionism in economic and social life. Finally, through the story of one family, the article examines the experiences of mixed Jewish–Gentile marriages in the NDH – relationships whose very existence struck at the core of the state’s binary racial antisemitic ideology and nation-building programme – as well as the fate of Gentile spouses following the arrest and deportation of their Jewish partners.