Mobilisation of Memory: Intergenerational Representation of the Partisan Struggle in Slovenian Picturebooks

Prototypes of partisan picturebooks: Ptice in grm and Partizanček

Vida Brest joined the partisan struggle at the age of seventeen and published her first literary works in the partisan press. Ptice in grm [Birds and the Bush] is a story of a young partisan who finds herself alone in the middle of a military offensive in the forest. She escapes the fascists who surround her. When her strength is exhausted, and she can no longer flee, she intends to take her own life with her revolver. The birds dissuade her from suicide and advise her to hide in the bush; she does so, and the bush shakes its golden leaves over her, concealing her completely. She endures in this position for two days and two nights. Although the fascists search very close to the bush and eventually camp and sleep nearby, they do not find her. The birds flying over the bush warn the partisan of the danger and encourage her as she despairs and again intends to take her own life with the pistol. The text emphasises the motif of the protagonist’s repeated attempts (three) to take her own life with a pistol. This is an established motif in partisan fiction reflecting the partisans’ or prewar communists’ readiness to die. Finally, the birds signal to the partisan that the danger has passed. The girl is still very frightened but eventually rises from the bush and, with tears in her eyes, exclaims: “Thank you, bird friends, thank you, little bush of young beech! Thank you! Thank you!” (Brest and Vovk 1955: n.p.).

The protagonist’s liminal status is evident both in her position within an in-between space – estranged even from her unit and moving between the human realm and that of animals and vegetation – and in the absence of a personal identity, signalled by the lack of a personal name. The protagonists’ anonymity, or abstraction, corresponds both to the structural conventions of folk tales and to the mobilising appeal of early partisan art. Ptice in grm makes use of numerous motifs and structures of folk tales: the struggle of a weak protagonist against an overwhelming enemy, birds as symbols of hope, the inhumanity of the oppressors, and the threefold repetition of events. The motif of seeking refuge in nature appears very frequently in partisan picturebooks; it is a leading theme or at least an important motif in all the picturebooks in the corpus except for two “urban” picturebooks: Sedem cofov za prvi maj and Podmornica na suhem. In Ptice in grm, the dichotomy between “us” and “them” is articulated within a proto-ecological discourse. In the title illustration, the young partisan symbolically merges with the vegetation and shrubbery; her uniform is transformed into leaves, and it appears that the lower part of her body is merging with the bush. The fascists, on the other hand, are characterised by unnatural, mechanical attributes: weapons, discarded cans. A particularly negative trait assigned to the fascists is the practice of bird-trapping on lime sticks.

In the first Slovenian partisan picturebook, birds play a particularly significant role: they appear as a motif serving as an allegory of suffering and oppression under fascism. As victims of violence, birds also appear in Lastovice [Swallows], where the inhumanity of the enemies is demonstrated by the fact that they destroyed the birds’ nest. In Birds and the Bush, the partisan discourse aimed at children not only imitates but actively transforms the traditional fairy-tale structure: birds no longer function merely as magical beings or divine messengers; instead, they act as active participants in the partisan struggle, reinforcing the narrator’s claim in the story’s incipit that humans, animals, and plants were united against oppression. Nature itself – for instance, represented by snow (in Smolček), a squirrel (in Taščica), and partisan dogs like Belko (in Belko) and Runo (in Runo) – is represented as an active participant in the fight.

Kirn refers to the merging of partisans and nature in reference to the famous piece of partisan graphic art, Scorched Pear Tree (1944) by France Mihelič, and suggests that the isolation of the tree in the landscape also alludes to the “resistance of the plant and the persistence of resistance in the landscape” (Kirn 2024: 67). The cover illustration of the picturebook Partizanček (1955) by France Slana shows the image of a tree, which is reminiscent of Mihelič’s famous print and thus continues the discourse established during the war.

The author of the verbal text of this picturebook, also the narrator and central character, Stanko Semič – Daki, was a former Spanish fighter and one of the founding figures of the partisan army. In 1943, he was the first Slovene to be honoured as a national hero. Edvard Kocbek observes in his diary entry from 1942 that Daki was a surprisingly slight and modest man, although his heroism had already become proverbial: “The boys have a special relationship with him; they see in him a kind of luck, a fortune that it is good to be close to, so that the bullet does not catch you. Around him, the early elements of a personal myth are already forming” (Kocbek 2022: 289). The author’s iconic status lent the picturebook Partizanček an aura of authority and credibility. On the first two pages of Partizanček, Daki describes the formation and composition of the proletarian unit, noting that it consisted of 48 fighters and was well armed, which he describes in detail: “Each fighter had a rifle, some hand grenades, and a submachine gun. The unit also included eight light machine guns – Zbrojovkas” (Semič and Slana 1955: n.p.). The narrative then continues with an account that places Daki in a specific time and place that coincides with his wartime activities at the town of Ig. One day, when he was on guard duty, he saw a child walking along the road from Škrilje towards Ig and the unit. When the child, whom Daki estimated to be about twelve years old, reached the narrator, he demanded to talk to Commander Daki. At first, the child did not want to believe that the person he was speaking to was actually the commander, because of his relaxed, non-hierarchical appearance, and only accepted it when the members of his brigade confirmed the commander’s identity. The child was determined to join the partisans as a fighter. He convinced Daki of his courage by proving that he had taken ammunition from drunken fascists in a tavern. The narrator reports that the boy remained with the proletarian unit and took up arms as a partisan. Daki emphasises twice that the fighters protected the boy, striving to keep him safe. During heavy fighting, they ensured he stayed near the kitchen, and they spared him from particularly hazardous courier duties. In conclusion, the narrator notes that he had forgotten the boy’s name but learnt that he later became an officer in the Tomšič battalion. The story ends with the sentence: “His story shows how even the youngest pioneers took part in the National Liberation War, and became good couriers, fighters, and officers” (Semič and Slana 1955: n.p.).

Mobilisation appeal and representation of children in war

The mobilising intent of the text in the first two analysed picturebooks is evident in declarative sentences that stand apart from the literary fabric, functioning as adaptations of political slogans rendered into language accessible to children. As we can read in Birds and the Bush (Brest and Vovk 1955: n.p.):

The third sentence, “Truly”, presents a discontinuity in the coherence of the address. The text burns with the desire for children to believe that the partisan movement was supported not only by all people but also by all forests, animals, and especially birds and that there is a sacred unity between the partisans and the forest; however, the word “Truly”, emphasised as a standalone sentence, can be interpreted by an informed reader as a fissure in the ideological unity and persuasiveness of the text, since this insistence on its own credibility appears to expose its arbitrariness or even its fabrication.

The picturebook Partizanček also shows a strong desire for the text to be read as a credible account of events and as a model of identity. In contrast to Ptice in grm, which begins as an appeal and turns into a fairy tale, Partizanček reads like an autobiographical narrative that concludes with a mobilising appeal to its young readers. The picturebook confronts the highly sensitive issue of portraying a child engaged in combat. Some children who fought with the partisans, namely Boško Buha, Sava Jovanović Sirogojno, Milka Mika Bosnić, Fana Koćovska, and several others, became celebrated figures often referred to as “pioneer-national heroes” (Erdei 2004). Berislav Majhut and Sanja Lovrić Kralj (2016) observe that Yugoslav socialist children’s literature often portrays children as active heroes fighting alongside adults as their equals in heroic resistance against the enemy.

The communist leaders of Yugoslavia frequently emphasised the role these youngest fighters played during the war. This was partly to underline the necessity of the liberation war, as even “mere children” recognised its importance and risked their lives for the cause (Erdei 2004). Child heroes have played a central role in shaping public opinion, particularly among young audiences. This is exemplified by figures such as Josef Bara during the French Revolution and numerous Soviet-era child heroes later adopted by other communist regimes, including the “heroes of Belitsa” in Bulgaria (Angelova 2023).

In Partizanček, Daki’s narration is firmly aimed at convincing the young reader that the partisans treated the youngest fighters in the war with great honour and protectiveness and did everything to ensure their safety. An informed reader, who can compare this text with information from other sources, may either believe the legendary hero or interpret his representation as an attempt to mitigate and idealise so as to erase the traumatic dimension from the memory of the partisans to facilitate identification with it (Komelj 2009: 34). The narrator notes at the end of the story that he has forgotten the child’s name. Does the child’s anonymity raise ethical concerns, and might the child have deserved to have his identity preserved? Or can Partizanček be read as a tribute, a memorial to the children whose names – unlike the author’s – have not been preserved in Slovenian cultural memory? Or do the national hero and the child soldier mutually legitimise each other’s place in collective memory, with the fluidity between their identities highlighting the egalitarian and liminal nature of partisan representation?

While the motif of the child hero is often associated with a direct appeal to bravery or militant commitment, most picturebooks in the selected corpus represent children in war within a discourse that promotes peace and poignantly mourns their suffering. Gregec Kobilica (Jurca and Seljak 1965), published on the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war, commemorates the memory of child fighters who lost their lives in battle. It explores the deeper emotional and ethical motivations that compel children to join the partisans. The reader learns that before Gregec, his father and two older brothers had already joined the partisans, and that it was primarily his mother’s attachment that kept Gregec, who most of all desired to join the partisans, at home. The final decision is influenced by the beauty and vulnerability of two persecuted partisans, whom the boy accidentally discovers while they are hiding in the bushes. Thus, the decision is initially triggered aesthetically, then emotionally and instinctively by a desire to help a fellow human in distress. When Gregec helps the partisans cross the river, he undergoes an irreversible transformation and can no longer return to his former life.

A pronounced pacifist discourse is also evident in the literary depiction of Albin Pibernik’s childhood in Deček in vojna (Radišić and Gošnik 1972). Pibernik was ten years old when he joined his parents in the first partisan proletarian brigade, took part in the partisans’ march over the Igman mountain in freezing weather in 1942, and became a ward of Tito after the death of his parents. Deček in vojna was published in the early 1970s, at the time of extensive purges of liberal groups among communists (Pirjevec 2025: 329–384). It avoids glorification despite Pibernik’s partisan name, Korčagin, which symbolises the ideal of the heroic and totally self-sacrificing Soviet youth. Instead, the book turns to the lyrical representation of the relationship between the child and the war, personifying the ultimate evil. The child protagonist shares important events and hardships with the partisans (the text mentions his stays under horrible circumstances in Užice, Foča, etc.) but is never shown to have actively participated in the fight. Instead, Albin’s friendship with a boy of German origin strengthens his resistance to the war, which is personified as an abstract evil. The red colour and the tank tracks evoke an abstract oppressive force (Radišić and Gošnik Godec 1972: n.p.):

Pikapolonica (1979) by France Bevk and Roža Piščanec also conveys a strong pacifist message. The protagonist represents a group of children who have been severely traumatised by the war: war orphans. The story begins with the friendship between the partisan courier Crow and the little shepherd girl, Tinka, whom the partisan nicknamed Ladybird due to her red dress with black dots. When the partisan learned that she was an orphan, he asked if she would like him to be her father: “It may have just been a joke, but Tinka never forgot it. Silently, in her mind, she now regarded the partisan Crow as her father. The very thought warmed her heart” (Bevk and Piščanec 1979: n.p.). When Crow was hunted down by the Nazis, and wounded, he sought help from the child. She warned him that the Germans were nearby, helped him bandage his wound, and went on a reconnaissance mission for him. She did this not out of ideological loyalty or a deeper understanding of the partisan struggle, but because, as an orphan, she missed her father and saw the partisan as a father figure. The narrator emphasises the contrast between childlike innocence and the violence of war.

The Čebelica series portrays children’s roles in the partisan struggle through three main motifs: the child as a heroic fighter (e.g. Partizanček, Belko), as a civilian supporter (e.g. Spomini partizanske učiteljice, Pikapolonica), and as a witness or victim of war (e.g. Deček in vojna, Podmornica na suhem). It also highlights partisan institutions such as schools and printing presses – symbols of a new, inclusive postwar society – documented in books such as Podmornica na suhem and Spomini partizanske učiteljice.

Forms of forgetting in Kje so stezice and Gregec Kobilica

In 1960 and 1965, on the fifteenth and the twentieth anniversaries of the liberation, two respective picturebooks were published that thematise the intergenerational transmission of war memories to children born in peacetime (for motifs of the intergenerational narration about the partisan movement in Branka Jurca’s literature, see Tucovič Sturman 2025). These inquire about the past, and the ex-partisans provide an emotionally intense and suspenseful recounting of events. Both picturebooks continue the mobilisation of memory by portraying postwar children as highly eager to learn about wartime events and the nature of the partisan struggle, thereby offering a normative model of behaviour. Both also emphasise the commemoration of young people killed in the war and evoke their forgotten forest graves. They continue to depict partisans within the realm of liminality, featuring attributes such as anonymity, egalitarianism, martyrdom, merging with vegetation, and seeking refuge in nature. The two picturebooks also foreground the fact that former partisans sometimes struggled to accept the war as a closed chapter of history. As several works of mainstream Slovenian partisan fiction illustrate, the separation from partisan identity was sometimes traumatic for individuals who struggled to find their place in postwar society and perceived it as corrupted (see Babič 1960). This difficulty can be attributed to the former fighters’ inability, in the aftermath of the war, to leave the transitional state of liminality, remaining suspended between their wartime and peacetime identities – a situation reflected, to some extent, in the protagonist of Kje so stezice (Peroci and Gošnik Godec 1960). In Gregec Kobilica (Jurca and Seljak 1965), this inability to exit the liminal state is intensified through the fantastic mode, as the young courier moves back and forth between life and death in his effort to ensure that postwar generations remember the victims of the war.

In Gregec Kobilica, the war as memory is the central theme, with the partisans rendered as an unreliable image, an imaginative construct. The story is divided into the frame and the embedded narrative: the former introduces Nejc, a modern boy, whose imagination generates the embedded narrative, inventing an imaginary partisan friend to alleviate loneliness. The boy paints a child partisan who comes to life and tells Nejc: “An enemy bullet hit me right in the heart. They buried me at the edge of the forest under an oak tree. No one knows about my grave. That is why I am glad you brought me back to life” (Jurca and Seljak 1965). While the verbal text foregrounds the duty to remember, it is also riddled with small cracks of forgetting evident in the frequent use of negation, such as: “But no partisan comes”; “You know, I didn’t limp…”; “No one knows about my grave”; “Boy, you’ve completely forgotten the partisan cap!”; and “At home, they were against it. They said children had no place in the partisans. Well, I was a partisan, a hero, even though no school is named after me” (Jurca and Seljak 1965: n.p.). It is also worth noting that both partisans have names with negative prefixes “ne-” – Neven and Neva (and so does Nejc). The child partisan, brought to life in Nejc’s imagination, embodies the accusation that forgetting constitutes a desecration of wartime victims. The text emphasises children’s agency in shaping the post-war narrative of the partisan movement, while simultaneously foregrounding its own fictionality. Although Nejc gives the painted figure a mirror so that Gregec can judge whether his likeness is truthful, Nejc eventually spills a cup of water over the picture, transforming Gregec into a rainbow-coloured stain. This self-reflexivity could also be interpreted as a modernist intrusion into the grand partisan narrative.

In Kje so stezice by Ela Peroci and Ančka Gošnik Godec (1960), the opening sentence appears to introduce the partisan narrative apodictically through the reiteration of its central premise, namely the magnificent act of resistance. But the introductory sentence frames this tenet within an embedded story, told formulaically to children, thereby endowing it with a fairy-tale-like, fictional quality (Peroci and Gošnik Godec 1960: n.p.):

The forest — initially established as a fundamental symbol of the partisan struggle – is reinterpreted during the narrative. The mother recounts her partisan days with such persistence that the family decides to head into the forest to search for the paths that feature in the mother’s stories so prominently. In doing so, they attempt to engage in a kind of ritual enactment; re-experiencing memory through the mechanism of lieux de mémoire. After a long walk, the mother grows disheartened, lamenting that she cannot find the right path despite her continuing efforts. She is saddened by her inability to show the children the cabin and other partisan sites, and even the children start to question whether they are truly at the location of the partisan struggle. Forgetting is thus established as the central conflict of the story, almost functioning as an antagonist. The negative connotation of the erosion of memory and, consequently, of past human bonds is already suggested by the picturebook’s title: Where Are (Those) Paths, also the title of a well-known Slovenian folk song lamenting the disappearance of the paths that once led to the loved one. As in Gregec Kobilica, in Kje so stezice the protagonist’s thoughts signal that forgetting the war implies the betrayal of war victims and the consequent renunciation of one’s own collective belonging. The mother’s partisan identity is bound by ties with her comrades, the memory of her best friend’s forest wedding to the bravest of partisans, and to the ensuing battles in which both newlyweds were killed. Even more than the pain caused by the loss of her friends, the mother is tormented by the fact that her memories are disintegrating. On the narrative level, this is reflected in her wandering through the forest and despairing over the disappearance of old paths, which the grass had overgrown. From her desperate wandering in circles, however, the mother is rescued by her family, who represent forces opposite to dwelling on the past: “[e]ven if we get nowhere, it is worth walking”, the father said. “After all, you have walked through this forest” (Peroci and Gošnik Godec 1960: n.p.). The resolution of the story incorporates several of the modes of productive forgetting identified by Aleida Assmann: constructive forgetting, which allows a break with the past and the formation of a new identity; preservative forgetting, in which the past loses its immediate visibility but is preserved in a latent state for potential future rediscovery, and, particularly, therapeutic forgetting, which involves confronting traumatic events to release the emotional burden of the past. These aspects are clearly reflected in the complex relationship between the mother and the forest, especially in her realisation that the forest has changed: besides being the place of struggle and personal transformation, it has also become the site of memory and, simultaneously, of forgetting. In Kje so stezice, the process that was initiated by the young protagonists in Ptice in grm and Partizanček through their separation from civil society and entrance into the liminal position of the partisan struggle finally concludes with a happy ending: reintegration into peacetime society. The mother finally reconciles with the fact that the forest she traverses is the same forest she once walked as a partisan, although it has changed: “Yes, that forest is here, and I remember everything vividly, only the paths have been covered by time and beech leaves, so that they now disappear and lead nowhere” (Peroci and Gošnik Godec 1960: n.p.). The mother’s acceptance of her new identity is also represented by Gošnik Godec’s image which is two-part, black and green: the black part features a fallen, ruined tree; the green part, a fresh new tree growing from the roots of the old, leaning toward it as in a kind of a dialogue, while birds sit and fly over the branches of the dead tree. The final passages clearly present the forest as a space of renewal and reconstruction: the family gather cyclamens, observe the birds, and catch sunbeams. The story concludes with a symbolic new beginning: “‘It was a beautiful trip’, the father said to his wife, and the children gathered around the mother and repeated: ‘It was lovely, even though we did not find those paths’. At home, they placed the cyclamens they had gathered in the mother’s white vase on the table” (Peroci and Gošnik Godec 1960: n.p.).

Conclusion

Partisan picturebooks mirror mainstream partisan fiction, which depicted the partisan movement as a symbol of the Slovenian nation’s transformation from a passive to an active, assertive identity, emphasising its liminal nature with the attributes of impermanence, the renunciation of social hierarchies, along with all the comforts of civilised life, and an identification of its participants with the flora and fauna of the forest. In this context, the partisan picturebook draws on the themes and motifs from oral tradition, particularly the alliance between animals, plants, and humans in the struggle against oppression. In partisan picturebooks, animal and plant helpers feature not as instruments of divine intervention, but as active, earthly participants in the struggle and occasionally as emblems of resistance. The child, involved in the war, embodies sacrificial yet simultaneously combative attributes of the liminal state, with depictions ranging from exemplary fighter-heroes in earlier picturebooks to more pacifistically rendered representations in later texts. With the passage of time from the end of the war, the theme of forgetting emerges in picturebooks both as a threat to the pietas toward the victims and as a form of constructive forgetting. Although the partisan struggle remains a prominent theme in Slovenian discourses, partisan picturebooks have not been reprinted, included in readers, or incorporated into curricula since 1991. Consequently, they were removed from the canon, which Aleida Assmann (2014) defines as a set of cultural messages meant for continual repetition and reactualisation, and relegated to the archive as decontextualised relicts.

References

Mobilizacija sjećanja

Međugeneracijski prikaz partizanske borbe u slovenskim slikovnicama

U radu se analiziraju slovenske slikovnice koje prikazuju partizanski pokret, a namijenjene su djeci do deset godina. Analiza je usmjerena na konstrukciju kulturnoga sjećanja i identiteta. Rane partizanske slikovnice crpile su iz folklornih tekstova, upotrebljavajući anonimne protagoniste, motive borbe protiv nadmoćnih neprijatelja, kao i simboličke interakcije i asimilaciju sa životinjama i biljkama. Njihova borba simbolički smješta partizane u granični prostor između odvajanja od fašistički potlačenoga društva i reintegracije u novi, pravedniji društveni poredak. Mogu se identificirati dva isprepletena diskursa: predanost antifašističkomu otporu i pacifizam. Djeca su ponekad prikazana kao djeca-vojnici koji legitimiziraju partizanski cilj, ali češće kao svjedoci ratnih patnji. Tijekom 1960-ih pojavila se tema zaborava, koja odražava i slabljenje prepoznavanja žrtava rata i konstruktivni zaborav koji olakšava reintegraciju u mirnodopsko društvo.

Ključne riječi: Branka Jurca, dječja književnost, Ela Peroci, kulturno pamćenje, mobilizacija sjećanja, reprezentacija rata, Vida Brest