Soudob� d�jiny

Now or Never: Post-war Anti-Jewish Violence and Majority Society in Slovakia

Anti-Jewish violence in post-war Slovakia, in particular the pogrom in Topo��any in September 1945, has by now been quite well researched by scholars. Several have considered the course and the scope of the violence against Jews in liberated Slovakia. More recent works consider the anti-Jewish demonstrations, provocations, and pogroms in Slovakia against Jewish Shoah survivors in Slovakia in the wider context of persistent antisemitism in post-war Europe. Though several scholars have pointed out the link between part of Slovak society and the local wartime regime and its frequent post-war reluctance to return confiscated Jewish property as two important factors, public moods and attitudes towards the Jews in the post-war period have mostly been ignored by historians. Anti-Jewish violence is therefore the author's starting point for her analysis of Slovak society's thinking and attitudes towards the remainder of the Jewish minority. She demonstrates that the perception of the Jews in Slovak public opinion at the time was still that of a 'foreign' element (as it was regarding the Magyars and Magyarizers) whose interests differed from those of the 'Slovak cause'. Among the well-established stereotypes was the belief that the Jews profited from black marketeering and lived beyond their means, taking advantage of the officially provided benefits. They also allegedly shunned work on the reconstruction of Slovakia, as they had also allegedly avoided taking part in the Uprising during the war. By contrast, Slovak official reports and the Slovak press from this period, when they mention the Jews at all, almost never address the Shoah, local antisemitism, or majority-society collaboration with the Tiso regime (1938-45)

Keywords: Slovakia; anti-Jewish violence; major society