Slovakia: At Best a Senile Anti-Semitism

I have just read Rosanne Klass' letter in Commentary [January 1993] responding to Robert S. Wistrich's article "Once Again, Anti-Semitism Without Jews" [August 1992]. I regret that I have not been able to read Mr Wistrich's article, but Ms Klass makes a number of comments regarding anti-Semitism in the Slovak Republic which I am happy to report are not wholly accurate.

My qualifications to reply are as follows: I lived in Slovakia in 1991 and 1992. I have travelled extensively within the country. I know its language and history. I am married to a Slovak citizen. Until June 1992, I was Economic and Political Adviser to the Prime Minister of the day, Dr Ján þarnogurský. I believe that I have as good an understanding of Slovak politics as any foreigner can expect to gain.

Obviously, I do like the country and its people. Even so, I hope that I shall be regarded as a reasonably dispassionate judge of events there.

I begin with Ms Klass' statement that some Slovak nationalists whom she met "declined to repudiate the 'rehabilitation' last summer of Joseph Tiso, the Slovakian leader (later hanged as a war criminal) who paid the Germans to take Jews to the death camps, nor would they reject his elevation to the ranks of Slovak national heroes".

This is a common reaction among Slovaks, and I wish it would be otherwise. But it does not in itself indicate anti-Semitism. Reactions in Slovakia to the history of their fascist state are too ambiguous for the same straightforward correlation to be made as can be made for Germany.

Certainly, there is a history of anti-Semitism in Slovakia. Certainly, during the War, under the leadership of Dr Jozef Tiso - who was, by the way, a Roman Catholic priest who remained in holy orders while President - the Jews were a persecuted minority. They were largely excluded from the professions, and were loaded with other civil disabilities, many of these based on the Nuremberg Decrees of 1935. After 1942, about 70 thousand Jews, or 80 per cent of the whole community, were deported to German-occupied territory, where most were murdered in the usual ways. The Slovak Government paid a bounty of 500 Marks per Jew exported, to cover transport and other costs.

These are disgusting facts. In justice to the Slovaks, though, they should not be held primarily responsible for the genocide. Slovakia, though nominally independent, was at all times a German protectorate. Its foreign policy was directed wholly from Berlin - as to a large extent was its domestic policy.

Most persecutions short of deportation were initiated by the Slovak Government, if with German approval. The often spiteful enforcement of the persecuting laws was, again, a Slovak initiative. These are causes of purely Slovak shame. But the deportations were made on German instructions.

Of course, this plea, of obedience to superior orders, was rejected by the Nuremberg Tribunal when offered by individual war criminals - and rightly so. The question, of how much duress absolves from criminal responsibility, is one of the hardest in jurisprudence. But, plainly, desire to keep off the Russian Front was no excuse for working in a death camp. Acts of state, however, fall into a different category. An individual pressed to a wrong action may have only his own safety to consider. A government must consider the greatest happiness of those whom it rules. Its duty will often be to commit or allow one outrageous evil for the sake of avoiding something worse.

Pressed by the Germans, the Slovak Government in 1942 was called on to choose between evils. It could arrest and hand over the Slovak Jews - and though Tiso was anti-Semitic, his anti-Semitism was of the traditional, Roman Catholic variety that does not lead straight to the concentration camp - or it could disobey, and provoke direct German intervention in Slovakia. Remembering how bestially the Germans behaved in the neighbouring Czechlands - annexed in March 1939 - this would have brought terror to the whole population rather than to a sizeable minority. It would also - I will add for those who prefer not to accept so coldly utilitarian an argument - have ensured a more efficient genocide than in fact was allowed to happen.

Though based on the Nuremberg Decrees, the Slovak anti-Semitic laws were softer in a few significant respects. Most importantly, they excluded from the category of Jew anyone who had converted to Christianity before 1918.[1] Also, their enforcement was often more lax than in those areas under direct German rule. And, once it was a matter of public scandal that the deported Jews were not being resettled but murdered, I am told that Tiso and several Ministers and officials at least slowed the rate of deportation.[2]

I have said that 80 per cent of the Slovak Jews were finally deported. In itself unspeakably bad, this figure compares well with almost every other country within the German sphere of influence. Only in Hungary, where the Government was strong enough to refuse most German requests until 1944, in Italy, where the Germans ruled directly only very briefly, and in France, where they felt obliged to present a facade of civilised decency, did the Jews survive in greater proportion. Slovakia certainly compares well with the Czechlands, where the Jews were nearly exterminated.

Understandably, many Slovaks regard this part of their history with confusion. On the one hand, they had their first experience of independence after a thousand years of subjection and a hundred years of nationalist longings. On the other hand, though not truly free to refuse, they participated in a terrible crime.

The þarnogurský family provides a typical example. Pavol, who died last December, was a leading official in the Tiso Government and a Deputy in the Slovak Parliament. He was a strong nationalist, and he opposed the deportations. When the bill enabling them was debated in 1942, he boycotted the proceedings unsure of what else he could do: he could vote for the bill and participate in evil, or he could vote against and invite an evil still worse.

His son Ján, the former Prime Minister, is similarly ambiguous. Throughout his term in office, he refused to condemn the Slovak State as per se illegal or immoral. Yet, in November 1987, he earned the strongest condemnation of his country's Communist government when he signed a declaration of sorrow and responsibility for the deportations which was published in the Israeli newspaper Davar. As Prime Minister and since in opposition, he has repeatedly deplored and apologised for the part played by some Slovaks in the Holocaust.

In May 1992, I was fortunate enough to sit in during an interview between Dr þarnogurský and Alan Levy, Editor of the English language Prague Post. The issues of the Slovak State and anti-Semitism were discussed at some length. In his subsequent article, Mr Levy called the Prime Minister a convinced "anti-anti-Semite".[3]

He is not alone in deserving this title. On the 18th June of this year, the current President of Slovakia, Michal Kováþ, attended the constituent meeting in Bratislava of the Society of Christians and Jews in Slovakia. I quote from the Slovak Radio news report:

There are Slovaks who take an unmixedly approving view of Tiso, but these are generally to be found on the extremist fringe of Slovak politics.[5] I mention Stanislav Panis, elected a member of the Federal Assembly in 1990 on the Slovak National Party list. He soon found that party too moderate and left to start his own Movement for a Liberated Slovakia (HZOS). On March 14th 1992 - this being the anniversary of the Slovak State's founding - he held a rally in central Bratislava, where he played recordings of Tiso speeches and chanted nationalist slogans over a huge public address system. The rally was reported on the BBC World Service, but attracted almost no public support. The few score skinheads and old men were greatly outnumbered by shoppers and foreign tourists and journalists. I know this to be true, because I was there. I attended most opposition rallies in Bratislava in early 1992, measuring attendance and taking notes of what was said.

Mr Panis was roundly denounced in all the main Slovak newspapers. In the June 1992 elections, he lost his seat. His party gained a vote of less than 0.5 per cent.

I turn to the "rehabilitation" of Tiso. This was not an official act. No mainstream Slovak politician took part in the ceremony or could be found afterwards to approve it. Though it also received widespread coverage in the foreign media, it was the work of a small political party bitterly hostile to the governing coalition.

I quote Ms Klass again: "[T]he leader of the opposition to Slovak separatism was Jewish, and... he had been forced to flee Slovakia for his safety".

Unless I misunderstand her, this is not true. I think she is referring to Ivan Mikloþ, Minister of Privatisation in the þarnogurský Government. He may be an ethnic Jew: I never asked him. But his problems with the current Government have nothing to do with his possibly being Jewish, or his defence of the Czechoslovak federation, and everything to do with his having run his ministry in the interests of the Slovak people and not of the ex- Communist mafia which was - and is - trying to keep privatisation in its own hands.

Nor has he fled the country. He is currently leading the new Conservative Party, which contains most of the free marketeers whose parties suffered such an unfortunate defeat in the last elections.[6]

Again, according to Ms Klass, "a new edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was published [in Slovakia] in April 1991. When [a complaint was filed] with Slovakian authorities, [they replied] that nothing could be done because of freedom of the press".

This is true. But pleading a doctrine so honourable as press freedom is hardly sign of a new anti-Semitism. Nor - at least two summers' ago - was it just a convenient excuse for allowing attacks on the Jewish community. A few months later, the small literary journal Kulturný þivot - to which several prominent Jews are contributors - published a burlesque account of the Last Supper, in which Christ and his disciples take part in an orgy. This caused an uproar. The priests denounced the journal and demanded punishment. The Government's strongest act was to remove the journal's subsidy - in effect to cancel the State's subscription. Shortly after, it published an article by me, writing in my official capacity, and no one in the Government objected. Even today, under a less studiously liberal Government, the journal is still published without hindrance.

I might also say that the Protocols are freely available in the United States and in Great Britain. The main library at the university where I now teach has two copies. No one can claim from this that England and America are getting ready for a pogrom.

Ms Klass mentions having seen anti-Semitic graffiti in Bratislava. Again, this is true. But it is wrong to infer from any event a cause larger than is required for its production. A possible dozen vandals with cans of spray paint do not necessarily represent the views of an entire nation.

I will conclude by saying that the grossest anti-Semitism I have seen in the country comes from American Slovaks. As with most emigrés, these often have only a crude understanding of the home country's history and politics, and have a tendency to make fools of themselves. In their particular case, many react to a guilt that they have never needed before to confront with a combination of denial and defensive pride. Some simply convert their jealousy of the greater success enjoyed by American Jews to a snarling anti-Semitism that would not have been unusual in Central Europe 60 years ago.

But such anti-Semitism is unusual today among native Slovaks, and I greatly regret that Ms Klass has been misled by a few untoward appearances and other superficial observations to conclusions that are mostly or entirely mistaken.

Slovakia has many problems. It has achieved independence without first securing anything approaching national solvency. It has no significant export markets, nor a domestic tax base sufficient to support its inherited weight of government. Unemployment is rising. The living standards of those still in work are falling - except, that is, for those who have found jobs in the Western companies now being established in the country. I believe that the Slovak people made a terrible mistake last year, when they turned out the þarnogurský Government, and then stood unprotesting by when the new Government helped destroy the federation with the Czechs.

But these are problems inherent to democracy, which for good or ill the Slovaks chose in 1989. They may have yet to acquire what I regard as political wisdom, but most emphatically, they are no longer possessed by that brand of racialist hysteria known as anti-Semitism.

1. Having no access to sources at present, I am unable to illustrate this point as well as I ought. But I understand that many Jews converted in Habsburg times for social or professional reasons. Their descendants still fell into the category of Jew under the German race laws, but not under the Slovak.

Most Slovak anti-Semitism was, like Tiso's, more Catholic than National Socialist. The main justification here for hating the Jews was that they had killed Christ. At least theoretically, any Jew who offered himself for baptism was washed clean of all sin and became an equal Brother in Christ.

The Slovak race laws were an uneasy compromise between the two anti-Semitisms, and though quite otherwise in absolute terms, were relatively liberal.

2. I make this last claim with diffidence, not having been able to check its truth. Nevertheless, it does accord with much else that I have read about Tiso and his régime. I am also told that after 1943, as the Holocaust intensified elsewhere in Europe, Slovakia experienced a small Jewish immigration. Though not a safe haven, the country was a place where only brutal treatment could be expected, rather than murderous.

3. This interview was carried in The Prague Post, May 27 - June 2, 1992.

4. Slovak Radio, Bratislava 1000 gmt 18th Jun 1993, reported by BBC Monitoring Service, Summary of World Broadcasts (242).

5. I say "generally", for he does have some admirers in Slovakia who by virtue of their calling cannot be relegated to the extremist fringe. Take, for example, Alois Tkáþ, Roman Catholic bishop of Koþice:

"The Czech President signed the execution of Dr Jozef Tiso and the Czechs, our brethren, should apologize to us for this injustice" (reported in The Prague Post, August 25-31, 1993).

6. While on the question of Ivan Mikloþ and who is and who is not Jewish in Slovakia, I ought to mention a phenomenon that I at first found disturbing. Many Slovaks do take a strong interest in ethnic origins, and whoever is Jewish is usually known by everyone to be so: and many who are probably not are often called Jewish on the grounds of being rich or clever or otherwise successful.

Thus, Vacláv Havel, now Czech and before that Czechoslovak President, is generally believed in Slovakia to be a Jew - despite his coming from a rich family that only lost its property to the Communists after 1948. His close friend and adviser, Karel Schwarzenburg, is also called Jewish - never mind his being a Prince of the Holy Roman Empire with ancestral castles all over Bohemia.

As said, I found this disturbing. But, since it is so plainly silly and unconnected with any actual or proposed harm to the persons concerned, I will not call it anti-Semitism. It is rather the senility of an old anti-Semitism.