As a teenager in Sarajevo Grlić belonged to left-oriented circles, and with them she went on an organized tours, or winter skiing.

Soon she felt effectiveness of pre-war Yugoslav dictatorship, when police got hold of letters that were sent to her from Spain by her boyfriend Miljenko Cvitković, a volunteer who had joined the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.

In the meantime, she and other members of her immediate family had their apartments in the center of Zagreb expropriated, so with her daughter, mother, grandmother Tereza Kohn and her late husband's parents, the widowed Grlić moved into the apartment of her husband's cousin, Antonia Špicner.

In February 1942, the Ustaša regime started rounding up and deporting the remaining Jews still living in Zagreb, and out of the entire family it was only Grlić, her daughter and mother who managed to avoid arrest.

For three years, Grlić was imprisoned at the Goli Otok prison as the political enemy of the SFR Yugoslavia.

[7] Her second husband was Zagreb Marxist humanist and philosopher Danko Grlić, with whom she had an only child, son Rajko.