There are grounds for optimism in Slovakia – but we cannot turn a blind eye to surviving antisemitism

In 1917, his golden jubilee as rabbi reportedly was marked with notable civic honour.

Yet Rabbi Dov Ber Duschinsky’s and his rebbetzin’s lives were to be brutally affected just a year later. In the chaos of defeat in the First World War, a pogrom drove them and other Jews out of their homes. Soon afterwards, Jews in what suddenly had become the former Austro-Hungarian ‘dual monarchy’ of Emperor Franz Joseph were to be the target of the antisemitic White Terror which brought Admiral Miklos Horthy to power as ‘Regent’ in Hungary while Nameszto had in the meantime become part of a new sovereign state named Czechoslovakia. Under its new spelling, Namestovo was to be part of an independent ‘Slovakia’ in 1939-45, a reunified Czechoslovakia again from 1945-93 and since then part of an independent Slovakia once more

Mercifully neither my great grandparents, nor my grandfather, a rabbi near Budapest, nor one of my great uncles lived long enough to witness the Holocaust. Rabbi Dov Ber’s other son, a doctor, survived until January 1945 when Hungarian Arrow Cross Nazis murdered him and others working at the Maros Utca Jewish hospital in Buda just days before Soviet troops fully occupied the Hungarian capital.

A period of less than thirty years after Rabbi Dov Ber’s happy jubilee of 1917 produced such violence, saw such extreme political changes that Jewish Nameszto was no more. By 1945, Jewish Slovakia barely existed. Nor did the Communist takeover during the late 1940s benefit the surviving remnant in a handful of Slovak places such as Bratislava and Kosice.

Six years earlier, following Britain’s and France’s unwise betrayal of Czechoslovakia in the Munich Agreement of 1938, and after Hitler’s not unexpected further aggression against the rump Czechoslovak state in 1939, the eastern part of the state, with Nazi backing, broke away to form an independent Slovakia. It then functioned as a clerico-fascist enterprise led by mostly extreme, anti-Semitic Catholic priests under the presidency of Father Jozef Tiso. Slovakia had the dubious distinction of being one of only two Nazi client states [Croatia was the other] which paid Hitler to deport Jewish families. During 1942 and again in 1944, Hitler murdered most of them.

After Germany’s eventual defeat, Czechoslovakia again became a single state. One of its courts tried Tiso and hanged him for treason. At times the Slovak President had partly relaxed his calculated cruelty. Slovakia was heavily dependent on Jewish doctors, lawyers and business owners. These essential workers were given special exemptions from the murder transports of 1942.

The Pope and his representatives in Slovakia had made strong representations against Tiso’s persecution of the approximately 135,000 strong Slovak-Jewish community. Hundreds of individual Slovaks secretly aided Jews. This is seen in the lists of Slovak ‘Righteous Gentiles’ commemorated at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

As we approach the 80th anniversary of Hitler’s defeat and death, the situation of Jews both in Slovakia and the rest of central and eastern Europe is both better and seemingly as bad as in western Europe. Compared with nearby Vienna, I was told by an authoritative figure in Bratislava, Slovakia is a safe haven. There are few Jews and few Muslims. However, as another equally qualified personality pointed out, this does not mean that below-the-surface anti-Semitism has disappeared.

A first cause of uncertainty is the continuing defence by some traditionalist Slovak Catholic clerics and others of the reputation of Father Jozef Tiso, Slovakia’s most senior perpetrator during the Second World War. Tiso was responsible for extreme anti-Jewish laws, for the Aryanisation of Jewish property, for widespread Jewish impoverishment followed by expulsion of most of the country’s Jews to Nazi death camps. Yet there has emerged a whole literature of excuses for him.

One notable act of his rehabilitation was the discovery of the secret grave where Tiso had been buried in Bratislava following his trial and execution in 1947. A DNA test showed that the cadaver in the grave was his. He was then reburied in a place of greater honour and in keeping with Canon Law in the Cathedral in the town of Nitra,

The man who arguably is Slovakia’s most prominent Holocaust historian, Professor Ivan Kamenec, has found himself having to defend his work from the criticism that, as a Jew, his historical judgement of Tiso has been warped.

Second, and because I met enough people to be able to protect individuals from being damaged as likely sources, I heard another figure criticise on condition of anonymity school texts on the Holocaust. Coverage of the era is compulsory in Slovak schools but a secondary school history significantly diverts blame from the ‘moderate’ President, Father Tiso.

Third I heard references to examples of a ‘slightly beneath the surface’ acceptance of traditional anti-Jewish propositions. Though the liberal billionaire philanthropist George Soros is of Hungarian not Slovak origin, it was suggested to me that his name crops up in Slovakian political discourse as the age-old prototype of the powerful, monied Jew.

Fourth, it is worth consulting some of the comparative international ratings of aspects of internal politics and civil rights produced annually by agencies such as the New York based Freedom House as well as survey analysis by the Bratislava-based DEKK Institute and CulturePulse. In broad terms, Slovakia receives relatively high ratings. For example, the 2024 reports of Freedom House places Slovakia only slightly behind the Czech Republic and far ahead of its other neighbours Hungary, Poland and Ukraine. Controversies in Hungary and Poland about ‘memory politics’ of the Holocaust have been more serious than those in Slovakia.

However, several recent events have raised concern within Slovakia too. They include the attempted assassination of Prime Minister Fico in May 2024, the 2018 murder of Ján Kuciak, an investigative reporter who was working on corruption and tax fraud cases, and the election as a regional governor in 2013 of a politician with reportedly extreme neo-Nazi, anti-gypsy views. In addition, and despite the country’s increasing economic prosperity, its membership of the EU and its hosting of NATO facilities, there are signs in a recent survey of widespread nostalgia for the greater certainties of the Communist rule which Slovakia sacrificed in the late 1980s. A considerably higher minority within Slovakia than even in Hungary rates itself basically as belonging to Putin’s east of Europe. Defiant anti-Western (indeed, anti-British) rhetoric has seeped into parts of Slovakian political life

More common, however, is a leftover from both Nazi and Communist periods of mistrust in public institutions in general, particularly in the Governments, Parliaments and political parties.

These worrying attitudes are accompanied, I was told, by unfavourable perceptions of Jews.

Maybe. But I was far more struck, probably because of the people I met, by a surprising and highly gratifying degree of philo-Semitism.

A heartening number of groups in Slovakia have a strong sense of responsibility to preserve and celebrate the memory of the country’s lost Jewish life. This gives us good reason to reciprocate. It is not open to any of us to bring back the tens of thousands of brutally murdered Jews. Nor is it realistic to turn a blind eye to surviving antisemitism in the lands now almost stripped of their former treasured Jewish communities. In association with younger generations of Slovaks and of other Central and Eastern Europeans, we must build our friendships with our sympathisers among them.