Vanished History: The Holocaust in Czech and Slovak Historical Culture by Tomas Sniegon (review)

At the 2000 Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, Czech president Václav Havel noted, “awareness . . . that the Holocaust . . . still affects society today was the starting point for the project Holocaust Phenomenon under my patronage. The objective of this undertaking is to fill the considerable gaps in our knowledge about the tragic moments in our own past, especially about the Holocaust of Jews and of the Roma [Genocide]; to establish a discussion across society concerning these events; and, to help the younger generation to understand the Holocaust as a part of our history.”¹ Tomas Sniegon’s study explores whether Havel, other Czech opinion-shapers, and their Slovak counterparts have succeeded in these goals.

At a 2014 Holocaust Memorial Day event Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico apologized for his country’s anti-Jewish persecutions under the wartime government of Jozef Tiso, proclaiming, “the Holocaust that victimized so many people in the name of the mad ideals of fascism brings an everlasting shame on those who participated.”² The Holocaust remains at the heart of public discourse in Europe; high-ranking officials often refer to it as a watershed event. Fico’s apology, however, bordered on obfuscation: the identity of the Holocaust’s victims and that of their persecutors alike are blurred, and the role of the Slovak people as bystanders to the deportation of their Jewish neighbors goes unaddressed.

The title’s “vanished history” implies “faded away.” However “to vanish” may also suggest an intentional effort to make something disappear: word choice is significant. Clearly, history does not vanish: human beings select their “relationship with the past[,] . . . a presentation of how selected, mutually dependent events follow upon one another” (p. 10). Sniegon’s book presents examples of how various Czech and Slovak policy makers and historians have failed to grapple with their respective national histories vis-à-vis the Holocaust; the author extends this analysis to explore the European Union’s “aspiration to utilize the Holocaust as the core of a primary narrative about the new Europe” (p. 17). The author spotlights the lack of discourse at the grassroots, concluding “that the initiative to steer the memory of the Holocaust in a desired ‘European’ direction usually came from . . . politicians and . . . not . . . ‘ordinary citizens’” (p. 208). Sniegon contends that “neither the Czechs nor the Slovaks found a need to radically change their historical consciousness [to] make new sense of the Holocaust within their respective historical cultures” (p. 215).

The volume highlights “the Jew-free” Czech victim and the “Jew-free Slovak heroization” narratives (pp. 202–207). The author points out that “the number of Czechoslovak citizens who lost their lives during the Second World War is estimated at 360,000. Even though the . . . numbers . . . have been re-examined and partly modified since 1989, all kinds of evidence show that. About 270,000 Czechoslovak Jews were murdered, which means that as many as three out of four Czechoslovak victims of the Second World War . . . were killed in the Holocaust” (p. 4). A historical consciousness relating to World War II that is “Jew-free” risks Holocaust distortion.

Sniegon does not reprise the history of the Jews in this region or that of the Holocaust per se. However, he does review the gist of prewar antisemitism in both of the countries discussed. Notably, Sniegon observes that

Although the Jews never comprised a homogeneous group, a significant number . . . identified with what was perceived as a higher culture which in Bohemia and Moravia meant German culture—or . . . in the Slovak case . . . Hungarian culture. The Jews had difficulties being accepted as real Germans among Germans in Bohemia and Moravia, but were, even so, perceived by the Czech nationalists as belonging to the other side. Consequently, Czech antisemitism was coupled with anti-German sentiments.

In essence, “Jews became double strangers” (p. 34). Sniegon writes:

The fact that Czechoslovakia was given to Hitler in Munich in front of the...