Mirjana Gross

Mirjana Gross was born in Zagreb on 22 May 1922. After finishing school she embarked on the study of medicine in Zagreb.

In 1943, as Jews and "politicals", she and her entire family were arrested by the Ustaše Militia and transported to Graz shortly before the end of the year. From there she was deported to Buchenwald Concentration Camp, where she arrived on 1 January 1944, and where she met Emil Carlebach. Two days later she was transported to Ravensbrück Concentration Camp, where she remained until liberation in April 1945.

Gross returned to Yugoslavia (Croatia) in May 1945. From 1947 to 1951 she studied history at Zagreb University. In 1952 she became an assistant at the Historical Institute of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and the Arts in Zagreb, and in 1958 she gained her doctorate with a thesis on the role of social democracy in the political life of Zagreb from 1890 to 1905. The same year, she was appointed as an assistant in the history department of the philosophy faculty at the University of Zagreb. In the following years she published numerous essays on the history of Croatia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was a member of various scholarly panels. In 1960 she published a book on the government of the Croatian-Serbian coalition in 1906–07; in 1968 she co-authored a history of the Croatian people from 1860 to 1914. Her history of right-wing party ideology came out in 1973. In 1976 she was made a tenured professor; her book on historical scholarship was published the same year. She retired in 1982. In 1985 she published a book on the beginnings of modern Croatia; in 1992 she co-authored a book on Croatian civil society with Agnes Szabo, and in 1996 she published a work on modern historiography.

Mirjana Gross died in Zagreb on 23 July 2012.