Lešnik Ivan

Junior engineer and electro-mechanical technician Ivan Lešnik (Maribor 1895 – Brestanica 1963) 

Ivan Lešnik was born in 1895 in Maribor into a working class family. He passed five grades of primary schooling in this town, and at the age of 14 volunteered to enrol at the three-year naval engineering school in Pula. After completing his schooling and joining the regular Navy, he served at the military base in the Bay of Kotor and on board the battleship Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand. In 1914, he was transferred to the torpedo cruiser Kaiserin Elisabeth, aboard which he then sailed to East Asia. Initially, the ship cruised in this part of the world between Chinese and Japanese ports. When Japan declared war on Germany on 23 August 1914, she joined German forces in the fighting in Qingdao, China. Owing to the great superiority of the Japanese and British adversaries, the commander ordered the ship to be blown up. Thereupon, the crew joined the German ground fighting forces, and after their defeat, the Japanese took most of the crew, together with German fighters, into captivity in Japan. Ivan Lešnik, who was imprisoned in the Aonogahara camp near Kobe, returned to his homeland with other sailors of South Slavic nationalities as late as 1920. He joined the Navy of the Kingdom of SHS and assumed the role of Chief Engineer 3rd class. Owing to his dissatisfaction with the Navy and his wife's death on top of it all, he left the Navy as early as 1922. As a machinist and electro-mechanic technician, he gained employment in several thermoelectric power plants in Bosnia and Serbia. He returned to Slovenia after World War II and soon got a job at the Brestanica thermal power plant.

Bogdana Marinac