František Kulhavy, Kninsko polje cemetery, Croatia

František (Franto) Kulhavy was born in 1895 in the village of Natnice on the Czech lands. He arrived in Yugoslavia in 1921. Because he was a talented musician, capable of playing a variety of instruments, he obtained a position in the Yugoslav royal army. With his 37th Infantry Regiment, he came to Ribnica after the construction of the new military barracks of King Peter II. as a chapel musician of the military band and settled with his wife and son in Gorenji Vasi near Ribnica.

As many other conscientious objectors from the Ribnica valley, the Italian occupiers also interned Franto in a concentration camp on Rab. After the war ended, his wife, also a Czech, who was living in Gorenji Vasi 61, led him through the Red Cross, or rather his information department, to the partisan Levičnikov a, who investigated his fate.
On 20 December 1945, Marija Kulhavy received an official notice signed by the director of the general hospital and chairman of the Regional Committee of the Red Cross in Zadar, Dr. Božidar Šlajmer. He wrote that the deceased Franjo Kulhavy served in the staff of the XIX. Division of the NOV Yugoslavia as a musician, that he was seriously wounded in combat with the enemy in January 1944, and that he succumbed to his injuries in the hospital in Knin on 29 January 1944. He was buried on the Knin Field cemetery.
With the inscription of his surname and name on the plaque commemorating the fallen partisans from Gorenji Vasi, the wider Ribnica community remembers his contribution to the victory of our national liberation war with gratitude.

Source: Collection of Gorenji Vasi near Ribnica in the Dolenjska region in the national liberation war 1941–1945, Committee for the establishment of a memorial monument to the fallen fighters of the NOV from Gorenji Vasi near the local committee of the ZZB NOV Ribnica, ČZP Kmečki glas, Printing House Ljubljana, Ribnica in Dolenjska, 1978

František Kulhavy. Sistory.