VERA PEŠIĆ. CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH IN THE REGION OF LESKOVAC

Abstract

During the childhood and growing up of Vera Pešić in Leskovac and its surroundings in the period from 1919 to 1938, several events and personalities had a great influence on her later intelligence and propaganda activities during the German occupation of Serbia in World War II. When she moved to Belgrade in 1938, she carried with herself two social stigmas that marked her life so far and which made her different in comparison to her environment. The first was that she was a child born of her mother’s extramarital affair with the occupier in World War I, and the second stigma was that she married at a very young age and soon separated from her husband. The political activity of her husband, as well as the activity of the publicist and lawyer Milivoje Perović with whom she had a love affair, will influence her to develop interests for politics and the ambitions to improve her education and to try her hand at public activities. The loss of her father, her separation from her husband, as well as the failure of her love affair with Perović, certainly contributed to her feelings of loneliness and confusion, which led her to seek emotional and political shelter and support from the German intelligence service.