Vollard's former secretary and protégé, Erich Šlomović, a young Serb with Jewish origins (b. 1915), had connections with Vollard, Fabiani, and Lucien Vollard from about 1938. He had often stated his wish to create a museum of French art collected by him in Yugoslavia. Šlomović had amassed a collection of about 600 works, most of them prints or drawings, with a few important oil paintings, by a combination of exchange, gift, purchase, and donation. Vollard had put him in direct contact with the most prominent artists of the day and often asked him to act as agent for art selling or purchasing purposes. Beginning of 1940, Šlomović put about 200 works in storage in a bank vault, at a branch of the Société Générale in Paris. Returning home with about 450 works, he exhibited them in Zagreb, Croatia, in 1940. With the advance of German armies in Serbia, he went into hiding, along with his brother Egon, and his father and mother Roza. They placed the paintings in crates behind the wall of a farmhouse in the Southern Serbian village of Bacina. Šlomović, his brother and father were soon arrested, and, like many other Jews in occupied Serbia, killed by the Nazi Germans in 1942 in Belgrade. After the war the paintings were appropriated by the Yugoslav authorities. They have been shown officially only once, in 1989 in Belgrade and Zagreb under the name "Slomovic Collection." A legal battle is currently (2014) underway to determine the ownership of the Belgrade collection, including the Šlomović heirs, the Vollard beneficiaries, and the Serbian government.