Zidovska komunita na Slovensku medzi ceskoslovenskou parlamentnou demokraciou a slovenskym statom v stredoeuropskom kontexte (review)

In the must-see Bratislava theatrical production, "Tančiareň," a dance portrayal of the twentieth-century history of Slovakia, the longest applause goes to the woman, identified by the yellow star on the back of her jacket, who performs an increasingly desperate dance to describe the experience of Jews in Slovakia during World War II. The applause honors the memory of the 58,000 Jews of Slovakia who were transported to death camps in 1942, and the additional 10,000 who died or were killed before the end of the war.

This homage to the people who comprised a significant part of the population of Slovakia's towns and cities before the war signifies a remarkable turnaround from the silence, disparagement, and discrimination that met any mention of Jews or Jewish history in Slovakia from 1945 through 1989. Historian Ivan Kamenec was a rare exception. In the 1960s he began to study the history of the Jews in Slovakia and in 1968 published an article that investigated the period of Slovak autonomy (1938–39). Over the next twenty years he wrote mostly "for the drawer" on the topic as he negotiated the fine line between the possible and the unpublishable in the circumstances of communist Czechoslovakia.

Abroad, Yeshayahu Jelinek, a 1968 Jewish émigré from Slovakia, addressed Jewish aspects of Slovakia's history under the Slovak state, 1939–45. Livia Rothkirchen was one of several historians in Israel who wrote as best she could without direct access to Slovak archives; she authored The Destruction of Slovak Jewry: A Documentary History (1961). While Czechoslovakia was under communist rule, Western historians were not welcome to do research on Jewish history there, although occasionally historians working on other topics might stumble across a relevant document. Abroad, defenders of the Slovak state tended to ignore the state's treatment of Jews, or painted it in rosy colors. Jozef Mikuš, for instance, referred to Slovak treatment of Jews as relatively good.

Since the fall of communism, publication on the history of Jews in Slovakia has expanded enormously. Kamenec has not only emptied his drawer of academic publications (most importantly Po stopách tragédie), but he has also written widely about the topic in newspapers and intellectual publications. Ladislav Lipscher published his own overview of the Jewish experience in the Slovak State, Židia v slovenskom štáte 1939–1945. The other individual most involved in this writing is Eduard Nižňanský, who, in this book, examines Slovakia's treatment of Jews during the period of autonomy within Czechoslovakia (October 1938 to March 1939). Essentially, this is the period from the Munich Agreement among the Great Powers, which sliced off the Sudetenland for Germany, to the declaration of Slovak independence under German pressure, one day prior to the Nazi occupation of Prague and the creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

This book contains two short monographs and several essays. After a brief introduction and an overview of the Jewish community in Slovakia at the end of the interwar period, Nižňanský analyzes in detail the attempted deportation of 7,500 Jews to Hungary after that country was awarded a large swath of southern and eastern Slovakia by the first Vienna award of November 1938.

Rather than provide an integrated history of the deportations, Nižňanský presents his information topically. This is both the strength and weakness of this section. The author discusses the deportations from the perspective of previous research, and then on the basis of the memoirs of Slovak politicians. He describes the preparations for the deportations (which included a visit by Adolf Eichmann to Bratislava, where he met with, among others, Jozef Kirschbaum, then a radical leader of the academic wing of the Hlinka Guard). He also examines the army's role in the process, and the development of two Jewish camps with more than 600 inmates total...