Jewish and Romani Encounters Under Slovak Persecution

Authors

  • Hana Kubátová Charles University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.23777/sn.0123/swl_hkub01

Keywords:

Jewish and Romani persecution, racial imaginary, fascist Slovak state

Abstract

This article examines the persecution of Jews and Roma in wartime Slovakia, with a particular focus on the historically multicultural eastern region of the former Šariš Zemplín County. It studies the removal of Roma from Slovak towns and villages from 1941, and the 1942 deportation of Jews to occupied Poland. These events occurred concurrently with the regime’s “civilisation mission” in the peripheries. While it was Nazi Germany that fuelled the machinery of death and destruction that marked World War II, the speed and direction of ousting the Jews and Roma from Slovakia was not straightforward and depended on national and local factors and actors. The article shows that the racialisation of Slovakia’s borderlands was driven by both the urban elites in Bratislava who tried to appease Hitler and the national population, as well as the inhabitants of the volatile peripheries themselves. In this sense, the two processes of Jewish and Romani persecution were connected in the racial imaginings of the fascist Slovak state.

 

Author Biography

  • Hana Kubátová, Charles University

    Hana Kubátová is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Political Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University. She has headed the university’s Center for the Transdisciplinary Research of Violence, Trauma and Justice (VITRI). She is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Marie Curie Fellowship for Early Research Training, Charles H. Revson Foundation Fellowship, Felix Posen Fellowship, Gisela Fleischmann Scholarship, and, more recently, the Junior Core Fellowship from the Institute of Advanced Study at the Central European University, Budapest. Her research interests include majority–minority relations in wartime and post-war Slovakia, identity construction, and the microdynamics of (ethnic) violence. She has published in Slovak, Czech, English, German, and Hungarian, and her contributions have appeared in journals including Nations & Nationalism, Contemporary European History, and Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History. She has recently co-edited, with Natalia Aleksiun, Places, Spaces, and Voids in the Holocaust (Wallstein, 2021).

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Published

2023-06-07

Issue

Vol. 10 No. 1 (2023): S:I.M.O.N. – SHOAH: INTERVENTION. METHODS. DOCUMENTATION.

Section

SWL READERS

License

Copyright (c) 2023 Hana Kubátová

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How to Cite

“Jewish and Romani Encounters Under Slovak Persecution”. 2023. S: I.M.O.N. Shoah: Intervention. Methods. Documentation. 10 (1): 95-111. https://doi.org/10.23777/sn.0123/swl_hkub01.