A young Jewish woman’s public execution by a brutal method of hanging was a calculated act of terror by occupying forces in World War II Yugoslavia. On November 25, 1941, in the city square of Novi Sad, 20-year-old Lili Böhm was put to death before a forced assembly of thousands. Her crime was resistance.

The Hungarian soldiers who occupied the city just months prior stood guard as the noose was placed. The method was pole hanging, a slow death by strangulation designed for maximum suffering and public spectacle. This was not merely an execution; it was a message to a terrified population.

Lili Böhm was born in 1921 in Novi Sad, a vibrant, multicultural city in the Vojvodina region. Her Jewish community was an integral part of the social fabric. As a young woman, she joined Hashomer Hatzair, a Zionist youth movement that combined socialist ideals with preparation for life in Palestine, and which instilled a powerful sense of justice.

That world shattered in April 1941. Nazi Germany and its allies, including Hungary, invaded and dismembered Yugoslavia. Novi Sad was annexed by Hungary, which immediately imposed draconian anti-Jewish laws. Jewish property was seized, men were sent to lethal forced labor battalions, and a climate of pervasive fear took hold.

Watching her community be systematically destroyed, Böhm made a fateful choice. She joined the nascent resistance movement. Operating underground, she worked with sabotage cells and couriered messages and weapons. Her activism was a direct challenge to the occupiers’ authority.

It ended on September 20, 1941. Hungarian gendarmes caught her carrying a pistol. The military trial was a swift formality. The sentence for a Jewish resistance fighter in occupied territory was inevitable: death. For sixty-six days, she waited in a prison cell.

The authorities chose to make an example of her. Posters announced the public execution. Citizens were compelled to attend. The pole, roughly three meters tall, was erected in the central square. A hook held the noose at the top.

Witness accounts describe Böhm, hands bound, walking to the pole with her head held high. There was no dramatic speech, only the brief reading of the sentence. The noose was positioned not to break her neck, but to strangle.

When the support was removed, her descent was short. The rope tightened. Death came not in an instant, but over agonizing minutes as she struggled for air in full view of the silent crowd. The Hungarians documented the scene; a photograph of her lifeless body guarded by soldiers survives.

The intended message was clear: submit or face a horrific end. Yet, this act of terror failed to extinguish resistance. Instead, it foreshadowed a greater horror. Just two months later, in January 1942, Hungarian forces conducted the Novi Sad raid, a three-day massacre.

Under the pretext of anti-partisan operations, they rounded up and murdered approximately 1,300 Serbs and Jews along the frozen Danube, throwing their bodies through holes in the ice. The brutality shocked even Budapest, though later German intervention allowed perpetrators to escape justice.

Lili Böhm did not live to see that atrocity, but she understood the genocidal trajectory of the occupation. Her decision to fight, knowing the almost certain cost, places her among the often-overlooked ranks of Jewish resistance in Yugoslavia.

Her story is not one of a large-scale partisan operation, but of a profound individual choice. In the face of incremental annihilation, she chose to act. The pole hanging was meant to humiliate and break the human spirit. Instead, it immortalized her standing defiance.

Today, Novi Sad memorializes the victims of the 1942 raid. While no specific plaque marks Böhm’s execution site, her name is recorded at Yad Vashem. Her legacy is a stark reminder of the human cost of tyranny and the courage required to resist it.

The photograph of her execution challenges us to witness the reality of fascist occupation. It forces a question about the price of principle and the line where submission becomes impossible. Lili Böhm’s resistance, though ending in a brutal public death, stands as a testament to the unbreakable will of those who choose to die on their feet.