Alfred Pal

In memoriam

Alfred Pal was a Croatian painter and graphic designer. Pal was born in Vienna on November 30, 1920, into a Jewish family of Stefan and Therese (née Deutsch) Pal. In 1941, with the invasion of Yugoslavia, Pal, his brother and their aunt Judita hid from the German army at their aunt Gisela's estate in Cakovci. In the summer of 1942, Pal and his brother decided to escape the Nazi and Ustaše persecution. Alfred forged a travel pass for himself and managed to reach Crikvenica, which was at the time occupied by the Italians. In order to earn a living, Pal drew caricatures of local villagers, visitors and Italian soldiers in Crikvenica. On November 10, 1942, Pal was arrested and taken to a detention camp in Kraljevica and was later transferred to Rab concentration camp. After the 1943 capitulation of Italy and the liberation of the camp, Pal joined the Yugoslav Partisans as the member of the Jewish Rab battalion. After the war, Pal returned to Vukovar to find out that all members of his family had perished in the Holocaust, except his cousin Heda Sinberger who survived Auschwitz. In 1949, Pal was one of the victims of the Informbiro period, an internal schism between Yugoslavia and Soviet Union which led to the Tito–Stalin split. Charged with being a sympathizer of Stalin and an enemy of the state, Pal was arrested and sent to Goli Otok, a prison and labour camp for political prisoners, where he served time from 1949 to 1950, and then again from 1951 to 1954. Upon his release he returned to Zagreb, where he started working at various publishers, translating books from German and editing graphic design. Nevertheless, Pal continued to suffer discrimination, as he was denied travel documents and was kept under surveillance by the Yugoslav secret police UDBA. From 1970 to 1984, Pal worked as an art editor at the Matica hrvatska publishing house, and from 1985 he worked as an independent artist. Pal was also a long time member of the Croatian Association of Artists of Applied Arts (ULUPUH) and one of the initiators and founders of Zgraf, a prestigious exhibition of graphic design established in 1975 and held every three years in Zagreb.

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