Angela Vode
Angela Vode (Slovene pronunciation: [aŋˈɡeːla ʋɔˈdeː]; 5 January 1892 – 5 May 1985) was a Slovenian pedagogue, feminist author and human rights activist.
During World War II, she joined the Liberation Front of the Slovenian People, but was expelled in 1942 because of disagreements with the Communist Party of Slovenia.
[3] She referred to this decision as an act of idealism, sprung from a sincere belief in the fight against injustice and support for the weak.
She saw communism as an ideal of social and political emancipation,[4] which would have included the full equality of the Slovene people in the Yugoslavia and the autonomy of Slovenia in a de-centralized federation.
Besides Slovene, Angela Vode was fluent in German, English, French and Serbo-Croatian, and she also spoke Italian and some Russian.
[4] After the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in early April 1941, Vode urged for a united anti-Fascist front, criticising Slovene communists who had been supporting Stalin's collaboration with Hitler.
Vode became one of the members of Supreme Plenum of the Liberation Front of the Slovenian People[3] as a representative of Slovene women's movements.
In late 1941, she joined the group Stara Pravda ("Old Justice") led by the left wing activist Črtomir Nagode.
In the Province of Ljubljana, there were many Slovene refugees that fled the German-occupied zone, in order to escape the brutal anti-Slovene policies of Nazi Germany.
Vode wrote a petition to Benito Mussolini and started collecting signatures, trying to save the lives of the hostages.
[3] Vode was accused of "writing an extensive spy report on the political and economic situation in Slovenia in which she wrote heavy defamations on people's authorities concerning the war and intended to present it to a representative of the American Red Cross in Yugoslavia".
Her first public appearance happened shortly before her death in the mid-1980s, when she gave an interview for the alternative journal Nova revija.
She depicts her clashes with the Slovenian Communists, who treated her war efforts to help Slovene women as an act of collaboration with the occupying forces.
She analyzes the Slovene and Yugoslav Communist regime as a semi-totalitarian society, where a ruling elite misleads the people with lies, promising them a better future, but in fact only satisfying their own greed.
