SLOVENIA: Donate for Winter Help

SLOVENIA, February 28 - A propaganda poster by self-taught painter Jože Beránek (1913−1945) with the slogan Donate for Winter Aid was created to appeal to people on the streets of Ljubljana in the winter of 1944.

We chose the poster for several reasons. We want to draw attention to the importance of material protection of our cultural heritage and emphasize the significance of a specific artifact.

Beránek's posters undoubtedly exude the artist's talent, especially when you

consider that he was basically a technical draftsman who, at the beginning of the war, had already illustrated the newspaper Slovenec and exhibited in the Jakopič Pavilion. During the war, he sought advice from both Marjan Tršar and Božidar Jakac, and in 1944 attended France Gorše's painting school. In the autumn of the same year, he joined the propaganda department of the Slovenian Home Guard, where he illustrated the magazine Slovensko domobranstvo. Beránek is probably best known today for the posters that invited men to join the Home Guard, but otherwise he created very lively, dynamic and realistic depictions that are an extremely good expression of the mood of the time. We are aware that Beránek's works are still less known to the general public, which is a consequence of the author's interwar decisions. The choice of the Home Guard side sealed the author's post-war fate. A handful of documents from the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia testify that Jože Beránek, as an anti-communist and propagandist of the Slovenian Home Guard, attracted the interest of the Liberation Front intelligence service during the war. Nevertheless, he did not retreat to Austria at the end of the war, as he was convinced that as a propagandist his life was not in immediate danger. At the request of the military authorities, he reported to the Ljubljana City Command at the end of May 1945 and was imprisoned in the Šentvid nad Ljubljana camp. He returned home after a week; when he left a second time, he did not return. Although the post-war secret police prison book records that he was released from prison on 2 June 1945, according to some information, he was killed in Crimea. His relatives never learned where he died, and it was only in 1969 that he was officially declared dead and entered in the death register. It was only a decade ago that his works were included in an exhibition on the history of Slovenian posters at the Ljubljana Museum of Architecture and Design.

Since it is a propaganda poster, it is worth mentioning its importance in the context of war propaganda; drawings, illustrations, caricatures and graphics are its indispensable part. The power of illustration seems unsurpassed in this sense, as visual propaganda addresses the public in a more subtle way than, for example, propaganda posters. The poster with the pale, sad and frightened exiled girl is not the only Winter or Social Aid poster, but it is perhaps the most powerful in terms of expression. It seems to depict quite a few stories that go beyond simply helping the poor and those in need of help in wartime conditions. The gloomy background color may be a hint at the historical events that took place before the poster was created. We are thinking of the occupation of Slovenia by the Axis powers, the armed resistance of part of the population, the revolution, collaboration, the division of the nation and the weight of the already total Second World War.

The girl encourages us to donate to the Winter Aid, which was then a form of social or humanitarian aid, established in the Drava Banat in 1939. After the Italian occupation and the establishment of the Ljubljana Province and its annexation to the Kingdom of Italy in May 1941, the Italian occupation authorities established the Provincial Support Institute and their own social insurance system for this purpose, while the Winter Aid campaign, along with other forms of charitable aid outside the support institute, was even banned. After a wider propaganda campaign in the media and with leaflets and stickers, it was renewed in the winter of 1943/1944, i.e. after the German occupation of the Ljubljana Province. At that time, the Winter Aid campaign was organized as an independent office under the Head of the Provincial Administration in Ljubljana, but in April 1944 it was succeeded by the Social Aid, initially under the supervision and eventually as part of the Provincial Support Institute. Winter aid played a major role, especially in providing for refugees from the partisans, whom the Diocesan Charity Office also helped to provide (from July 1942), and those who were provided for by the Charitable Association societies (Vincent and Elizabeth's Conference, Kolodvor Mission) until the end of 1943. It was therefore primarily about helping individuals and families affected by the war on the anti-communist side. By the end of March 1944, when it was abolished, Winter aid had received almost 10,000 applications, which it was initially obliged to check. It succeeded in doing so in just over a third of the applications, and it paid out 1,425 grants.

Despite the political context, the poster carries a universal message: the greatest victims of war are children. During World War II, at least 5,868 minors (0.4% of the population) lost their lives due to war violence in what is now Slovenia, out of a population of almost 1.5 million at the time, and at least 1,635 of them were under the age of ten. As the Donate for Winter Aid poster suggests, these were not the only victims of war; minors are also found among the wounded, disabled, surviving internees, those whose parents returned from exile and forced labor, stolen children, war orphans returning to burned-down homesteads, and those affected in other ways. That is why the pale image of the girl is actually timeless and could be hung in any of the past or current war zones. It seems that we live in rather unstable times, when every fifth child lives in areas of military conflicts, the most of which occurred after World War II. With Beránek's poster, we should therefore draw attention to the way in which wars affect society, especially its most vulnerable part.

The poster was created during wartime and was most likely exposed to light and other environmental influences. It should not be overlooked that it is printed on wood pulp paper. This is poor quality paper with a high lignin content, which, when exposed to light, causes the paper to turn yellow and brown and the molecular bonds of cellulose to split, which results in poorer mechanical properties and, in the final stage, the disintegration of the carrier. It should be emphasized that photochemical reactions take place even after the paper is no longer illuminated. Therefore, its decomposition continues unabated despite storage in archival depots. In the case of Beránek's poster, this is also evident from a comparison of its current state and a photograph of the poster from 2009. According to experts from the Centre for Conservation and Restoration of Archival Materials at the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia, this type of decomposition of the poster cannot be prevented even by conservation and restoration work. With proper storage, it can only be slowed down. The damage caused by light is irreversible and cumulative, so we must reduce the exposure of this type of material to light. Further exposure of the poster to light can further accelerate the rusting and deterioration of the mechanical properties of the paper due to acidic decomposition and lead to loss of information. That is why we also keep a digitized version of the poster, namely before (2009) and after the conservation and restoration intervention (2025). Senior conservator-restorer Mateja Kotar dry-cleaned the poster, supplemented the missing parts with Japanese paper and, due to the fragility of the support, glued the poster with starch and thin Japanese paper. In the last step, she retouched the added parts.

Anja Props

Tadeja Tominšek Čehulić