‘Forgotten’ Holocaust heroes help Slovakia come to terms with its Nazi history

In April 1944, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler were the first Jews to escape from Auschwitz.

Not only did the two Slovaks manage to flee the short distance across Poland to return to their homeland, their 32-page account of the barbarism they witnessed in the Nazi death camp, the so-called “Vrba-Wetzler Report” made the world realize the true horror of the holocaust.

That report was very detailed, where the two young men were able to draw maps of the camp, detailed diagrams showing where the barracks were, where the gas chambers and crematoria were. Vrba even focused on memory details of train arrivals, where they came from, and how many people were on board: crucial details that later helped the Allies understand the true magnitude of the Nazi genocide.

The lives of up to 200,000 Jews in Budapest were saved when their deportations were halted after the Vrba-Wetzler report came out, argued Jonathan Freedland, author of one of the most acclaimed non-fiction books last year’s “The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World,” retold the story of Vrba and Wetzler for English speakers.

Their names deserve “to stand alongside Anne Frank, Oskar Schindler and Primo Levi, in the front row of stories that define the Shoah,” Freedland said, though he added, “That day may never come.”

When Wetzler died in Bratislava in 1988, he was “bitter, drunk and forgotten,” Israeli author Ruth Linn wrote in a book about the couple. Vrba, who emigrated early from post-socialist Czechoslovakia, died in Canada in 2006.

The Slovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs notes on its website that their story “recently resurfaced” because well-known actor and producer Peter Bebjak directed a 2021 Slovak-language film “The Auschwitz Report” (locally titled Zpráva) about the escape of the couple.

Many Slovaks on the streets of Bratislava will know their story about Vrba and Wetzler: “They are both well known in Slovakia, they are both part of the Slovak history lesson,” says Tomáš, a sales manager. “I remember their story from school,” Martin, another Bratislava resident, told Euronews.

However, neither Vrba nor Wetzler made the shortlist of the television program “100 Greatest Slovaks”, hosted a few years ago by the public broadcaster RTVS, a spin-off of the popular TV series “Great Britons” ten years earlier.

But RTVS was criticized for showing Josef Tiso, Slovakia’s wartime fascist leader, on trailers for the show, suggesting he was a contender. There was even a suggestion that the Slovak National Criminal Service could investigate the channel for inciting extremism.

The broadcaster eventually decided to exclude Tiso, a willing partner of Adolf Hitler. There were concerns that viewers would have ranked him quite highly.

A 2013 survey asked Slovaks how much they knew about what happened during the Holocaust. When asked how many people, mostly Jews, were deported from the Slovak lands during World War II, about half answered “I don’t know”.

Estimates vary, but it is believed that about 58,000 Slovak Jews were deported to Nazi death camps.

Only a few hundred survived. The Slovak state, which broke away from Czechoslovakia in 1939, even paid the Nazis to help deport Jews, most of them to camps in neighboring Poland. Slovaks were allowed to keep the property left behind.

“For many years, the topic of the Holocaust and the deportations of Jews from Slovakia during World War II were taboo,” wrote Luciána Hoptová of Prešov University in a 2020 academic essay on Holocaust education in Slovak schools.

Deborah L. Michaels, another academic who reviewed Holocaust education in Slovakia in 2015, argued that this was an overflow of sentiment in the 1990s.

After the fall of communism in 1989, she wrote, “the ideology of democratic liberalism stimulated a historical discourse that articulated minority rights.” Some historians began to tell the story of Slovakia’s role in the Holocaust, something that was kept under wraps during the communist era.

In fact, in 1997, the European Union came under flak after sponsoring the publication of a nationalist Slovak history book, approved by the country’s education ministry, which contained remarkably few chapters on the Holocaust and Slovakia’s role in it.

This was around the time US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called Slovakia “a black hole on the map of Europe.”

Things have improved significantly since then, experts think. Now the Holocaust “plays a very important role in history education,” Hoptová concluded in her 2020 essay.

Slovakia’s first Holocaust museum opened in 2016 in the southwestern city of Sereď. Study of the Holocaust is part of the national curriculum — compulsory from ninth grade in public schools.

According to the Unity of the Slovak State Curriculum, the goal is for teachers to “specify gradual restrictions on the human rights and freedom of Jewish citizens”. The Ministry of Education advises students to take trips to concentration camps and memorials, as Auschwitz is not far across the Polish border.

“But the quality of that education depends on teachers,” Matej Beranek of the Holocaust Museum in Sereď told Euronews.

And it also depends on what children learn at home.

According to a 2019 Pew Research survey, Slovaks are among the least tolerant minorities in Europe. About 77% said they had a negative view of Muslims, the highest of the European states surveyed; while 76% viewed the Roma negatively — only Italy registered higher percentages.

More strikingly, nearly a third of Slovaks had an unfavorable view of the Jew; only Greeks were more intolerant.

The treatment of minorities came into sharp focus last October two men were shot outside a gay nightclub in Bratislava. The perpetrator, who committed suicide, left a note online describing the COVID-19 pandemic as a “Jewish plot to train the white race to be obedient.”

Zuzana Čaputová, the popular and liberal Slovak president, said afterwards that hatred against minorities had been fueled by “stupid and irresponsible statements by politicians”.

Various political parties continue to praise the Nazi-affiliated Slovak state. Perhaps the most infamous is Marian Kotleba, the figurehead behind a political party now known as the Kotlebists-People’s Party Our Slovakia.

Many analysts and newspapers view Kotleba as openly “neo-Nazi”. The symbols and outfits resemble the Hlinka Guard of the wartime Nazi puppet state, Tiso’s shock troops. Kotleba’s party mainly rails against ‘gypsy criminals’, but anti-Semitism also occurs.

“We are Slovaks, not Jews, and therefore we are not interested in the Jewish question,” Kotleba said in 2009, when asked by a local journalist about Slovakia’s wartime cooperation with the Nazis.

The party now controls 17 of the parliament’s 150 seats and won around 8% of the vote in the last general election. Kotleba was governor of Banská Bystrica, the country’s largest region, and he finished fourth in the last presidential election, with about a tenth of the vote.

But his political fortunes are dwindling. Several other far-right or far-right parties are stealing supporters; his party is dwindling in the latest opinion polls.

Last April, the Supreme Court gave him a six-month suspended prison sentence for showing sympathy for a movement aimed at the suppression of fundamental rights and freedoms after he donated money to the organizers of an event celebrating the formation of the Slovak state allied to the Nazis.

“On the one hand, we have parties like that in the Slovak parliament,” says Beranek of the Holocaust Museum. “On the other hand, we have memorial days.”

In September 2021, Eduard Heger, the Prime Minister, formally apologized for the so-called Jewish Code, a law enacted in 1941 by the Slovak state that imposed oppressive restrictions on Slovak Jews.

Slovakia has its own memorial day on September 9, the day in 1941 that the “Jewish Code” was proclaimed.

In March 2022, on the 80th anniversary of the first transport of Slovak Jews to Auschwitz, the Slovak Parliament passed a resolution condemnation of the mass deportations. Kotleba’s party abstained from voting.