Erich Šlomović

Erich Šlomović (Erih Šlomović, also known as Erich Chlomovitch) (1915–1942) was a Yugoslav art collector. He was an assistant and protégé of Ambroise Vollard.

Early life
Šlomović was born in Đakovo (Austro-Hungarian Empire) in 1915 to a Jewish family of Bernard and Roza Šlomović. He had a brother, Egon.

Career
In the 1930s, Šlomović moved to Paris, where he was befriended by legendary art collector Ambroise Vollard. Through Vollard, Šlomović met the greatest artists of the age, including Picasso, Matisse, Cocteau, Rouault among others, and was able to amass an impressive personal collection of some 600 works. Vollard died in a car accident in July 1939. Shortly after that, with France on the brink of Nazi invasion, Šlomović decided to return to Yugoslavia, where the war had not yet spread. He left about 200 artworks in a vault in the Société Générale in Paris, and the rest he had shipped via diplomatic pouch to Belgrade. These were exhibited at a highly acclaimed exhibition in Zagreb in 1940.

World War II
During World War II, with the Independent State of Croatia establishment in 1941, Šlomović and his family moved to the village of Bačina in Serbia in an attempt to save themselves. While in Bačina, Šlomović hid the paintings he brought with him in a double wall. Later, as a part of the German reprisals of 100 Serbian men shot for every German soldier killed, Bernard, Erich and Egon were taken to detention camp in Ćuprija. Soon after, they were all killed. Erich's mother Roza and a female distant in-law Mara, born a Serbian Orthodox and converted to Judaism when she married Roza Šlomović's nephew Fridrih Hercler, were not touched and neither was his collection. Roza died in a train accident, together with Mara's children, while transporting the collection to Belgrade which had been liberated by the Red Army and the Josip Broz's partisan units. The accident happened on 31st Dec 1944 in Velika Plana, Serbia. Mara survived the Holocaust hidden by the local population. (7) Mara then went on to remarry with a person who had also lost his wife and children during WWII and became the mother of David Albahari and his sister.

Legacy
After his death, Šlomović's mother donated his collection to the National Museum of Serbia. In 1989 Veljko Bulajić directed Donator, a movie dedicated to Šlomović's tragic life while in 2004 Momo Kapor wrote a book about his life. The paintings in the Société Generale bank were discovered in 1979 when the bank was allowed to open the vault to recover unpaid storage fees. There is a legal dispute over the ownership of those paintings.