Ciril Kotnik
 | This article includes a improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (January 2013) ) |
Ciril Kotnik (20 December 1895 – 29 June 1948) was a Yugoslav diplomat of Slovene ethnicity.
He was born in
Karadjordje's star, one of the highest military awards in the Kingdom of Serbia
.
After the creation of the
Kingdom of Italy
. He lived and worked in Rome for more than two decades and married a local woman, Maria Tommassetti.
After the
Yugoslav partisans of Josip Broz Tito
.
After the
Nazi German persecution. During this time, he established contacts with the political activist Janko Kralj, and Slovene emigrant from Gorizia, who also helped many anti-Nazis and Jews to escape persecution. On October 28, 1943, the Nazis arrested Kotnik and jailed him in the prison on Via Tasso
. He was submitted to heavy torture, but did not reveal his sources.
After the war, he collaborated with the Slovene political emigrants Miha Krek and Ivan Ahčin in helping Slovene refugees fleeing from Socialist Yugoslavia. Kotnik died in 1948 because of the lesions suffered under torture. In 2007, members of the Jewish community of Rome proposed to erect a monument in his memory.
Ciril Kotnik was the cousin of the Slovene philologian and literary historian
Italian Canadian journalist Dara Kotnik Mancini and Ivanka Kotnik, mother of the Italian politician Walter Veltroni, former Mayor of Rome and former president of the Democratic Party
.
Sources
- Ivo Jevnikar: Il nonno sloveno di Walter Veltroni
- Robert G. Weisbord, Wallace P. Sillanpoa (1992). The Chief Rabbi, the Pope, and the Holocaust. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0-88738-416-1.
- Walter Veltroni, La bella politica (Milano: Rizzoli, 1996).