Slovakia

Scholar activities within the Slovak national-scientific society before 1918 are often characterized as amateurish and rather enthusiastic. This evaluation is quite right while one of main reasons is to be seen in an absence of any institutional background, inevitable for professionalization as well as specialization of individual scientific activities of the Slovak intellectual elite.

This study deals with changes and reversals in Hussite Wars´ interpretations which have been presented by the Slovak historiography since the 1960s until now. The Hussite Wars and their influence have been one of the most important topics of both Czech and Slovak national histories, either based on a nationalistic or class viewpoint. These wars were incorporated in both socialistic and nationalistic narrative.

The annual public urban festival called the grape harvest festival, which was created in the 1930s as a marketing event aimed at supporting the sale of Small-Carpathian wines, was restored in 1958 after a period of recession during World War II. Following the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the ruling regime suppressed the original aim of the restored festival. After some formal and conceptual adjustments, the common and popular form of urban festivity became a means for the promotion of collectivised agriculture and the presentation of the successes of the socialist regime.

The period after 1945 was concentrated on ensuring adequate nutrition for the population, which was only possible through a comprehensive modernization of agriculture and it was the equipment in particular that should play a significant role. However, agriculture suffered an urgent shortage of tractors and draft animals. Too often the land was cultivated manually, which brought very poor yields. Slovak agriculture was at the very tail within the European countries in terms of the use of electricity as a symbol of modernization and development.

After the coup d'etat of February 1948 the ruling Communist party of Czechoslovakia began to implement its ideas of agricultural policy using all accessible means. The process of collectivisation, which took place during 1949 – 1960, was meant to contribute to the reconstruction and modernisation of agriculture, but in the end it destroyed the social and cultural background of village society and disrupted all its traditional systems of values. It was forced on the peasants from above, without their consent.

Josef Marek was an architect of Czech origin who arrived in Slovakia in 1919 along with his colleagues – young architects who had studied in Prague. He began his professional activity in Bratislava in the newly established democratic state – the Czechoslovak Republic. At that time, architectural designs as well as the construction industry in Slovakia were not at the same level as in Bohemia. There was no independent school of architecture that could establish a national tradition.

The period from the Austro-Hungarian Compromise to the outbreak of World War II can be considered as decisive for the modernization of cities in the territory of Slovakia. It is because processes, the impact of which is still today determining the appearance of the urban landscape, took place during these seven decades. Intensive modern urbanization took place in that period in the Kingdom of Hungary and Hungarian cities reached the standards of Western Europe. Particularly between 1867 and 1918, development took place in the same temporal, functional and structural context.

The forced resettlement of the Ukrainians (the so-called Lemkos and Boikos) from south-eastern Poland to the Soviet Ukraine in 1945-1946, often carried out in a violent way, was part of the plan to attain homogeneity of Poland as a one-nation state without ethnic minorities. In autumn 1945, as a result of political pressure exerted on them by the Polish government and its subordinate bodies and under the impact of a growing number of brutal acts of the Polish troops and militia engaged in the transfer of the Lemko and the Boiko people into the U.S.S.R.

The Second World War affected the Jewish population in a specific way. In a critical state appeared especially the traditional Jewish family and, in fact, it ceased to exist. It is possible to speak about torsos of families – children without parents, spouses without their partners and other family members. The return to a society exhibiting complicated social relations, harsh socio-economic conditions and a post-war psychosis was tremendously difficult for the Jews. In this context, they had three possible options: to preserve their identity, to get assimilated, or to emigrate.

The aim of this paper, the heuristic base of which is formed mainly by archival documents and personal testimonies of witnesses, is to provide a closer view on the events in 1944 - 1945 and their impact on the family living within the borders of the-then Slovak state. It deals with families belonging to the majority population, but a special focus is on (especially) the family of the persecuted Jewish minority.