Elza Polak

[2] Upon graduating in 1933,[1] Polak started working as a teacher and engineer at the School of Gardening in Božjakovina, a village near Brckovljani, the only such institution in Yugoslavia.

While her brother Leo was shot the same year, Polak survived and procured a part-time job at the School of Gardening in Božjakovina in 1943.

She seized that opportunity to leave the occupied territory together with all her students and flee to the land controlled by the Partisans, the resistance movement of Yugoslavia.

[2] In the immediate aftermath of the Liberation of Yugoslavia, Polak worked for the Yugoslav Ministry of Agriculture and as a high school principal in Brezovica.

Polak was one of the founders of the Horticultural Association of Croatia and of the interdisciplinary postgraduate program of landscape architecture.