Đurđa Gmaz was born in 1950 in Sisak. Her family comes from the Sisak region, and was involved in agricultural work. Her father was wounded whilst a member of the Partisan movement. During the time of Yugoslavia, in search of work, she went to live in Zagreb, and later in Slovenia. In 1979 she returned to Croatia, together with her husband who was one of the co-founders of the HDZ [Croatian Democratic Union] in Sisak. In 1991 she started working for the Croatian Ministry of the Interior. When war broke out in the area she lived in, she remained, together with her family, in her village which was on the boundary with the Serb side. On July 16th, 1993 Đurđa Gmaz’s daughter, who was swimming with some twenty other children in the river Kupa, was killed by a burst of gunfire that came from the other side of the River Kupa, where Serb forces were stationed. Her son was gravely wounded in the same incident. She is active in the Association of the Civil Victims of the Homeland War and she has been advocating the rights of civil victims for a number of years.