She was born on 7 December 1924, to an ethnic Serbian family of Mićo Budisavljević and Milica Svilar in Pećane near Udbina in the Lika region of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (now Croatia). When she was almost 15 years old World War II broke out in 1939. Her family was forced to flee the violently anti-Serb Ustasha regime that took power in the newly created Nazi puppet state Independent State of Croatia in 1941, which targeted one third of the "prečani" Serbs for forced conversion to Catholicism, another third for expulsion and the final third for extermination. Their house was eventually burned down by the Ustashas. She joined the Yugoslav Partisans when she was 17.