Jeremić's paternal grandfather, Bogoljub, was an officer in the Royal Yugoslav Army. In April 1941, at the height of World War II, he was captured by the Germans during the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia and imprisoned, first at Matthausen and then at Dachau. He returned to Yugoslavia by foot, only to be arrested as a political dissident by the country's new communist authorities and jailed at the Goli Otok prison camp, where he spent the next five years. Through his mother, Jeremić stems from the prominent Pozderac family, widely considered the most influential Bosnian Muslim political dynasty in post-war Yugoslavia. Jeremić's maternal great-grandfather, Nurija Pozderac, was a prominent Bosnian Muslim politician in Depression-era Yugoslavia. A staunch anti-fascist, he joined Josip Broz Tito's Partisans in the early 1940s and was killed in action in 1943. Nurija and his wife Devleta were posthumously declared Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem for saving Jews during the Holocaust, and Jeremić accepted a medal and certificate identifying them as such at a ceremony in Belgrade in November 2012. According to survivors, the couple sheltered Jews who snuck out of a train destined for the Jasenovac concentration camp, which was operated by Croatia's fascist ruling party, the Ustashas. Pozderac's nephews Hamdija and Hakija featured prominently in Yugoslav political circles during the 1980s.