Many buildings in the square thus belonged to Jews as owners or tenants. These buildings are striking examples of modern architecture, and in 1938 Ivan Meštrović built the House of Fine Arts of King Peter I the Great Liberator in the middle of the square named after the same king.
Shortly after the proclamation of the NDH, most Jews were evicted from their apartments, and high officials of the NDH moved into some of them. An illustrative example is Robert (1884–1943) and Hilda Deutsch Maceljski (1899–1943) and their daughter Vanja (1923–1996), who lived at Trg N 2. In May 1941, Robert took all the works of art, paintings, carpets and antique furniture under the protection of the Croatian National Museum of Arts and Crafts (now the Museum of Arts and Crafts). Soon, under the pretext of better preservation, representatives of the Croatian Conservation Institute inspected the apartment and identified "arts of significant artistic and national significance". The process of cataloging in the Deutsch Maceljski apartment began in May 1941, and the collection was seized in September 1942. A high-ranking NDH official, Milovan Žanić, moved into the apartment in the meantime. Robert and Hilda Deutsch Maceljski were arrested in May 1943. They were deported to Auschwitz where they were murdered. Their daughter Vanja survived. She tried to recover her parents' collection but failed.
Jola Gelb talks about what Zagreb looked like before and at the very beginning of the war. Watch her testimony and read some background information about her life.
Jola Gelb (née Davidović) was born in 1909 in Ungvar, in the part of Austria-Hungary that is today in Hungary. At the age of three, together with her parents and younger brother, she moved to Budapest. After the war broke out in 1914, and her father was conscripted, they returned to their native Ungvar. At the age of 18, she got a job in her uncle's pharmacy in Uzgorod, and not long after, her grandmother's brother, who was visiting, invited her to Zagreb. She met her future husband over a random coffee and remained in Zagreb. At the beginning of the war, she was imprisoned in the concentration camp Metajna on Pag.