My father told me that our ancestors came from Moravia, a region between Bohemia and Slovakia, where the language spoken is Czech, somewhat different from Slovak. Yet, until 1945, our name was “Wilcsek”—an unlikely combination of characters since w, common in German and Polish, is not used in Czech, Slovak, or Hungarian, whereas cs is the uniquely Hungarian spelling for ch (as in “cherry”).
The identically pronounced name “Wilczek” or “von Wilczek” belongs to an old aristocratic Austrian family with Polish roots. The mansion Palais Wilczek, one of the family’s residencies, stands in the immediate vicinity of the Imperial Palace in Vienna. Whenever I am in Vienna, I jokingly point out the Palais Wilczek as our ancestral residence.
We are, of course, not related to the von Wilczeks, but the similarity of the names has led to a family theory about the possible origin of our surname. Until the late eighteenth century, very few Jews had last names at all. The situation in the Habsburg monarchy changed under the enlightened rule of Emperor Joseph II (1780–90), who abolished many oppressive anti-Jewish laws. One of the new laws introduced by Joseph II stipulated that every Jew in the then-vast Austrian and Hungarian territories was required to “adopt a German surname and never change it in his or her lifetime.” Some Jews took on the name of their town, some the name of their profession. Still others are said to have adopted the name of their employer. Is it possible that some of my ancestors worked for a branch of the von Wilczek family?
By the mid-nineteenth century, records show numerous Wilcsek families living in the region close to where my father was born. They were all Jewish and, based on information collected by one of my distant cousins who now lives in Sweden, they were all related. As far as I know, as a result of the Holocaust, emigration, and defection, there are no more offspring of the Wilcseks living in Slovakia or Hungary today.
When my father, Július, was born in south-central Slovakia—in the small village of Jedľové Kostol’any—Slovakia was an integral part of Hungary; and Hungary, in turn, was an autonomous kingdom within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ruled by the Habsburgs.
At the time of my father’s birth, in 1896, my paternal grandfather, Vilmos Wilcsek, and his wife, grandmother Júlia, owned a dry-goods store. My grandfather’s profession was common among Jews living in the countryside of what was then the Slovak region of Hungary. Owning a shop, often with an affiliated pub, was the way many Jewish families chose to make a living. Slovakia in those days was rural and quite poor.
The Hungarian government tried hard to suppress the Slovak national identity. Except for elementary schooling, all education was in Hungarian or, less commonly, in German. Slovak was the language predominantly spoken among the peasants, while all official business was transacted in Hungarian or German. Most Jews in Slovakia spoke Hungarian or German at home, which, along with the fact that many were small-business owners, did not endear them to the local Slovak-speaking population. Yiddish was not spoken (or even well understood) among the Jews living in most of Slovakia or Hungary. Only in the easternmost part of Hungary (in a region then known as Ruthenia or Subcarpathian Rus, now part of the Ukraine) and in Galicia (now split between Poland and the Ukraine) was Yiddish the main language of communication among the local Jewish population.
In 1906, when my father was ten, my grandfather decided to pack up and move his family to Budapest, the capital of Hungary. My grandfather opened a business on the outskirts of Budapest, supplying coal and firewood. He owned the shop until his death from a natural cause in the early 1940s. After the end of World War II, with anti-German sentiments on the rise, my father changed the spelling of our family name from Wilcsek to Vilček, in tune with the Slovak orthography.
In Budapest, my father completed the equivalent of high school. He was not yet eighteen at the time World War I broke out in 1914. Within a year he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army. Because he had completed secondary school he enlisted as Einjährig Freiwilliger, a volunteer for one year, a misnomer because he was neither a volunteer nor was he able to leave the army after one year.
He served on the Italian front until the end of the war in 1918—which marked the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—but he rarely talked about the years spent in the army. I still have some photographs of him from those years in which he looks quite dashing in his smart officer’s uniform. One story he told was how at Christmastime there would be armistice declared between the two warring armies, and he and his fellow Austro-Hungarian officers would have a good time with Italian officers behind enemy lines. Unlike others who lived through similar experiences, he never complained about the horrors of war or anything else. He was, like me, a perpetual optimist.
After the end of World War I, my father decided to move back to the land of his birth, Slovakia, which had by then separated from Hungary and become part of the newly formed Czechoslovak Republic. He settled in Bratislava—then the regional capital of Slovakia in the country of Czechoslovakia, and today the capital of an independent Slovak Republic.
Sometime in the 1920s my father joined a company called Handlovské Uhoľné Bane (Handlová Coal Mines). Although his education had gone no further than high school, by the time he married my mother in 1928 he held the position of prokurista, an executive authorized to sign official documents for the company. He was responsible for the sales of coal produced by the mines in the town of Handlová in central Slovakia, though he worked from the company’s headquarters in Bratislava. His income enabled our family to live an upper-middle-class life. His office was within walking distance from our home, but still he was picked up in the morning and delivered back home in the evening by a chauffeured company car. The same chauffeured car would usually bring him home at lunchtime and return to pick him up again after the then-customary midday siesta.
My father was a happy, gregarious person. He would strike up friendly conversations with strangers—waiters, taxi drivers, or any other person who happened to cross his path. His rapid rise in the company was not due to his social standing or connections. He was completely fluent in Hungarian, Slovak, and German; and initially all three languages were of relatively equal importance in the conduct of his business. He was the quintessential self-made man, appreciated and promoted for his natural intelligence, business acumen, and loyalty.
I know more about the history of my mother’s family, mainly because she liked to talk about her relatives more than my father did. My great-grandparents, the Kleins, moved to Budapest from the Burgenland region of Austria, which borders Hungary. Because they came from Austria, the family continued to use German as their main language of communication.
My maternal grandmother, Júlia, married Alexander Fischer, a young employee of an Austrian bank in Budapest. Their only daughter, my mother, Friderika, nicknamed Fricy, was born in 1907. While growing up in Budapest my mother was particularly close to three of her cousins, all boys. In her quest to be considered the smartest child in the extended family, my mother enrolled in an academic high school, called a gymnázium in Central Europe, when she was eleven. Only academically inclined children were admitted to a gymnázium.
Then, sometime shortly after the end of World War I, my grandfather was transferred by his Austrian bank to Bratislava, and my mother, by then a teenager, moved with her parents to a new city and a new country. At the time my mother spoke no Slovak or Czech, the official languages of Czechoslovakia. Fortunately, Bratislava in those days was quite cosmopolitan and much of the local population was more comfortable speaking German or Hungarian than Slovak. (Until 1919, the city was known as Pozsony in Hungarian, Pressburg in German, and Presbourg in French.) My mother enrolled in a Hungarian gymnázium known for its high academic standard.
For the rest of her life, my mother would proudly talk about her studies of Latin and ancient Greek, along with French, English, and world literature. Hungarian always remained her preferred language, the language in which she was most secure and comfortable. She loved Hungarian literature, pointing out that if it weren’t for the unfortunate fact that so few people understood the language, Hungarian novelists and poets would be considered the best in the world. Had she lived longer she would have been pleased to learn that Imre Kertész was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 and that the writings of Sándor Márai have become widely known all over the world.
My grandparents also made sure that their daughter would acquire proper social graces. During summers she was sent to girls’ schools in Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland, in order to perfect her command of languages and to learn manners appropriate for a young upper-middle-class lady of those days. Following high school, my mother enrolled in medical school in Bratislava. To succeed she had to perfect her Czech and Slovak. There were only three girls in her medical school class among over one hundred male students. She completed her degree in 1931, passed her medical license examination a year later, and became an ophthalmologist.
My parents married in 1928 when my mother was twenty-one and still a medical student; my father was nearly thirty-two. I am not sure why my mother was in such a hurry to get married. True, in those days women generally married very young, and even though my mother was an attractive and smart young woman, it is possible she worried that waiting until she became a doctor might impair her marriageability.
Curiously, my parents never talked to me about where and how they met. They also never mentioned their wedding and I have not seen any photographs of a wedding celebration. There should have been a Jewish wedding ceremony, but all I was able to find among my parents’ documents was a marriage certificate issued by a municipal agency in Bratislava confirming that they were married “in front of” a city official. Was it an arranged marriage? Was my mother perhaps under pressure to marry someone affluent to be able to complete her medical studies? I remember her making vague references to financial hardship experienced by her parents during the Great Depression. Whatever the reasons, I am quite sure she was not compelled to marry by an unwanted pregnancy, as I, her only son, was born five years later.
My mother often hinted that her marriage was a mésalliance because she was better educated and because my father’s family was inferior in social standing and sophistication to hers. They seemed to get along fine in the early 1930s, a period during which they traveled widely in Europe together. I found letters my father had written to my mother in which he addresses her Drága Mukikém (“My dear Muki”), a tender Hungarian nickname I never heard him use during my lifetime.
Apart from their frequent arguments and mutual criticism, my parents lived a comfortable life. My father continued to work for Handlovské Uhoľné Bane. In the mid-1930s, after finishing her training in ophthalmology at the university clinic in Bratislava (with stints at universities in Vienna and London), my mother opened a small private practice in our apartment. Having the practice at home was convenient, especially after I was born in 1933. We lived at the time on the centrally located Grösslingova Street, in a nice, spacious, but not overly luxurious rental apartment, where my mother used one room as her professional doctor’s office. I don’t think the practice ever became lucrative; my father earned enough money to support the family, so it was more a matter of my mother’s pride that she continued to practice ophthalmology even though she didn’t really have to work.
As I got older, I became aware of the fact that over the many years they lived together, my mother had some boyfriends and my father had girlfriends. Extramarital affairs were quite common in their social circle, and not considered as grave a betrayal as in more recent times. Divorces in those days were extremely rare, and, to make an unsuccessful marriage tolerable, couples of my parents’ social class sometimes would make “arrangements.” There was, in fact, a well-established institution of “house friends,” men who more or less openly “entertained” wives of unloved or unloving husbands. Not unlike the story of the Marschallin and Octavian in Richard Strauss’s Rosenkavalier, this kind of arrangement had probably been in existence for centuries.
My mother’s house friend in the late 1930s was a professional colleague and friend of my father named Otto. He was very kind to me. As a child I was unable to properly pronounce his first name and used to call him Onkel Motto. It was common in those days that children addressed friends of their parents as “uncle” or “aunt” even if there was no family relationship. At the time I didn’t fully understand the relationship he had with my mother. It wasn’t until after the war that I realized neither of my parents was faithful.
Onkel Motto died in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. I remember that my mother was heartbroken when she learned the tragic news. For many years she had kept a framed photograph of Onkel Motto at her bedside—in full view of my father.
The relationship between my mother and father visibly improved in the last two decades of their lives, when they became more dependent on each other’s support. In 1979, after over fifty years of marriage, my parents died within months of each other: my father first, of stomach cancer, which he had had for several years; then, only a few months later, my mother, who had otherwise been in good health, broke her hip and died suddenly of a pulmonary embolism.
My parents had a complicated attitude toward their Jewishness. In their day, religious affiliations were always recorded in official documents, including birth certificates, identification cards, and marriage certificates. My parents’ documents listed their religions as izr., a Slovak abbreviation for “Israelite.” Throughout their lives, most personal friends of my parents were Jewish. Both my father and my mother had always been proud of their Jewish heritage, often pointing out to me the disproportionately large number of Jewish Nobel Prize winners, famous artists, and other outstanding individuals. They would refer to fellow Jews as “our people” (they either used the term našinec in Slovak, or Unsereiner in German). After the German annexation (Anschluss) of Austria in March 1938, my parents volunteered to help Austrian Jews who sought refuge in Bratislava, then still part of a democratic, free Czechoslovakia. Yet my parents—especially my mother—were generally reluctant to wear Jewishness on their sleeves, particularly in front of gentiles, not only during the Second World War when being identified as a Jew often equaled a death sentence, but also before that and long thereafter. For them Jewishness was something acknowledged among family members and Jewish friends, but it was generally not to be discussed with others.
I remember that I once talked about our Jewish heritage with my non-Jewish friends in the presence of my mother. When my friends left she admonished me and strongly advised me not to talk about my origin in public. My father was more open-minded; even though he did not speak Yiddish, he occasionally used expressions like nebbish or shlemiel. I never knew my parents to be members of any Jewish congregation, nor was I aware of them ever visiting a synagogue. Jewish holidays were not celebrated and in fact not even acknowledged in our house.
In contrast, we had a tree at home at Christmastime and I would eagerly await my presents on Christmas Eve. In this respect my parents were not unique; most of their Jewish friends were not observant. In fact, even before the rise of Nazism, many Jews in Austria, Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—especially upper-class, educated Jews—were quite lax or not observant at all. Being Jewish, and especially being an openly observant Jew, was not helpful for professional advancement. My mother would sometimes make mildly critical comments about Jewish customs she did not appreciate. When I attempted to move food from my plate onto hers or from hers onto mine she would admonish me, “Don’t behave like guests at a Jewish wedding.”
And so I was brought up with no religious faith or affiliation, until 1939, when right before my sixth birthday my parents decided to have me christened and my mother converted to Catholicism. By then, of course, the persecution of Jews was in full swing in Germany and Austria, Czechoslovakia had been crushed and dismantled as a result of the occupation of the Czech lands by Hitler’s army, and Slovakia had become a satellite state of Nazi Germany, governed by a nationalist Fascist government. With the support of some members of the Catholic clergy, Slovakia was about to introduce the equivalent of the Nuremberg Laws severely restricting Jewish rights and freedoms. My father converted to Christianity more reluctantly three years later, in the spring of 1942.
By converting to Catholicism my parents hoped to avoid the otherwise inevitable consequences of the impending persecution of the Jewish population. Although they were not able to escape persecution, in retrospect it is clear that their formal acceptance of the mantle of Christianity almost certainly saved all three of our lives.
My favorite companion in early childhood was our dog Kalos, meaning “beautiful” in ancient Greek, a white miniature poodle about one year older than me. He was given his name by my mother, who, I suspect, wanted to show off her command of ancient Greek. Apparently, Kalos did not resent the attention I stole from him when I was born. I loved him dearly, and he requited my love. We appear together in dozens of photographs, my favorite being one in which I am pushing a brightly smiling Kalos in my own baby carriage. (If you have doubts whether dogs are capable of smiling, look at the photo.)
In the first three years of my life, my mother kept combined diary-photo albums, one for each year. My mother’s comments are written in German, in a neat but not easily legible cursive handwriting. It is amazing that the diaries survived the demise of the first Czechoslovak Republic, the upheavals around the outbreak of the Second World War, the Holocaust, reestablishment of free Czechoslovakia after the war, the Communist takeover, and the years of Communist rule, not to mention the umpteen voluntary and forced moves my parents made during all those years.
My main caretaker until I was about a year and a half was a professionally trained nanny, Hildegard—a German-speaking Austrian woman. She was officially addressed as Schwester (sister), a contraction of the German term Kinderschwester or nanny. In photographs I’ve seen, Hilde is a big, intimidating woman, dressed in a uniform that makes her look like a Protestant nun. This must have been the dress code for nannies in those days.
My next nanny was a Slovak woman whose name, I think, was Terka, a contraction of Tereza. Until that moment in time the only language spoken to me was German, but Terka was not a German speaker, and she communicated with me in Slovak, a language I picked up easily, as children often do.
The third language I was exposed to early on was Hungarian. I don’t think anyone in the family spoke to me in Hungarian, but Hungarian was the principal language of communication between my parents (especially when they did not want me to understand what they were saying), and also among the friends of my parents who paid frequent visits to our house. My mother and I, along with the nanny who took care of me at the time, spent the whole summers following my first and second birthdays at Balatonlelle, a popular resort town on the southern shore of Lake Balaton in Hungary. I was too young to retain any memories of these summer holidays, but while there I must have played with children who spoke Hungarian, and most of the adults around would likely have spoken Hungarian too.
By age four or five I was able to communicate in three languages with almost equal ease. Curiously, although my German and especially my Hungarian are by no means flawless, I have retained to this day the ability to converse in those three languages. I spent a great deal more effort later in life to study Russian, French, and English.
Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of the German Reich in January 1933—about five months before my birth. Almost immediately, the Nazi government started to restrict professional activities of its Jewish citizens. By 1935, German authorities adopted the Nuremberg Race Laws, which defined Jews by their ancestral lineage rather than their religious affiliation. These actions were followed by severe restrictions of economic activities, including “Aryanization” (meaning expropriation of Jewish-owned businesses and their transfer to non-Jewish owners), essentially preventing most Jews in Germany from making a living.
Like people in other countries surrounding Germany, my parents watched these developments with anxiety. However, many, including a significant proportion of German Jews, thought that these were temporary excesses that would soon come to an end. My parents often repeated the modified lyrics of a then-trendy pop song—Es geht alles vorüber, es geht alles vorbei, erst geht der Führer und dann die Partei (It will all pass, it will all go, first goes the führer, and then his party)—a spoof of the lyrics of a pro-militaristic song originally recorded by German singer Lale Andersen, who had also popularized “Lili Marleen” before Marlene Dietrich’s version made it a hit among Allied soldiers during the Second World War.
Czechoslovakia at the time was still a free democratic state, and my family continued, at first, to live a normal, comfortable life. Most Czechoslovak Jews, including my parents, while distressed about the situation in Germany, believed that Hitler’s rule would soon end and that, in any case, Czechoslovakia, with her strong army and her European allies would be able to defend herself against any foolish attempt by Nazi Germany to interfere with her democratic system.
This generally optimistic, even careless attitude toward the upheavals in Nazi Germany ended abruptly in 1938 as a result of two events. One was the Austrian Anschluss, completed in March by the transfer of sovereign Austrian power to Germany and the triumphal march of Hitler alongside his Wehrmacht troops into Vienna. My mother happened to be in Vienna at the time, and she witnessed the huge crowds of Austrians beside themselves with joy welcoming the führer and cheering the Anschluss. “Until that day, Austria felt like my second home,” I remember my mother saying. “I will never forget the insanity of these people.”
Immediately following the Anschluss, a hounding of Jews got underway in Austria that was even more brutal in nature than the persecutions in Germany. With only forty miles between Vienna and Bratislava, the events in Austria suddenly became a grave concern for my family and their friends. What began as restrictions on the life and liberties of Austrian Jews rapidly progressed toward the extermination of Jews unable or unwilling to emigrate within a relatively narrow time frame. It is estimated that in 1938, Austria had a Jewish population of nearly 200,000, largely centered in Vienna. Some 120,000 were forced to emigrate, most often leaving behind all of their possessions. The number of Austrian Jews killed in the Holocaust is estimated to be 65,000.
The second set of events that cast a long shadow over the security of Jews in Czechoslovakia were the developments that culminated in the signing of the Munich Agreement by Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Italy on September 30, 1938. Forced upon the Czechoslovak government by Neville Chamberlain of Great Britain and Édouard Daladier of France, the agreement authorized Germany’s annexation of Sudetenland, Czech territories along the country’s northern, western, and southern borders, inhabited by some three million German speakers. It is referred to as the Munich betrayal by the Czechs and Slovaks, and today it is widely regarded as a failed attempt at appeasing Nazi Germany.
Sudetenland was of immense strategic importance to Czechoslovakia, as most of her border defenses and heavy industries were situated there. Without the annexed territories, Czechoslovakia no longer had a viable chance to defend herself against a German invasion. It was now clear that the population of Czechoslovakia, including her Jewish citizens, could no longer count on the Czechoslovak army and its Western European allies to protect the democratic system in the country.
Only a few weeks after the signing of the Munich Agreement, another territorial concession was forced upon Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, allowing Hungary to annex territories in Southern Slovakia and part of the easternmost region of Subcarpathian Rus, populated predominantly by ethnic Hungarians. The territory annexed by Hungary included Košice, the second-largest city in Slovakia. In June of 1938, midway between the time of the Anschluss and the signing of the Munich Agreement, my mother took me on a trip to Amsterdam. In order to avoid crossing Nazi Germany into Holland, we were traveling from Prague to Amsterdam on a commercial flight, at the time still a novel and unusual form of transportation. It was the first time that I traveled on an airplane; it was likely my mother’s first flight as well, because my parents’ earlier European travels were all by train. They didn’t own or drive a car.
Exciting as flying to a new destination was, this was not strictly a pleasure trip. After the Austrian Anschluss, the distance from our home in the center of Bratislava to the border with Nazi Germany was only a few miles. And even though the Munich Agreement had not yet been signed, Hitler’s threatening rhetoric had made it very clear that he was ready to move aggressively against Czechoslovakia.
With this sword of Damocles dangling over their heads, my parents started to consider emigration to a country where they would be safely out of Nazi Germany’s reach. At the time, Holland seemed a good choice. Hitler was outspoken about his aspirations to liberate “oppressed” German minorities in Czechoslovakia and Poland, but there was no indication that he would consider moving against countries beyond the western borders of Germany. And if he were to try, France and England would certainly stop him. There was also a personal reason for considering Holland as a potential safe haven. Some years earlier, while vacationing at a seaside Adriatic resort in Italy, my parents befriended a Dutch Jewish couple, Joost and Juliette Egger. They too had only one child, Selma, a few months my senior. Jo was a successful importer and film producer.
I was about to turn five and, naturally, knew nothing about the main purpose of our trip. I was told that we were going to visit our friends, Uncle Jo and his wife Juliette, and that I would get to know Selma. Indeed, we stayed in their townhouse in central Amsterdam, at Den Texstraat 5, which today comprises a small hotel. I remember our visit to the Amsterdam zoo, especially an alley lined with cages of parakeets that greeted everyone with a loud goedendag, “good day” in Dutch. Our Dutch hosts also took us to a seaside resort, Scheveningen. It was there that I celebrated my fifth birthday.
Unbeknownst to me at the time, my mother was carrying with her some of the most valuable pieces of our family jewelry. Before our departure from Amsterdam she left the jewelry in safekeeping with the Eggers. This, together with whatever cash my parents would be able to carry when fleeing Czechoslovakia, was going to tide us over for the first weeks or months after emigration. There was another plan my mother revealed to me only when I was an adult. She was considering leaving me in the house of her Dutch friends because, she believed, I would be much safer in Holland than in Czechoslovakia, where a Nazi takeover seemed imminent. The plan was that my parents would join me soon thereafter. Fortunately, given how history developed, I did return to Bratislava with my mother; and my parents’ plan to emigrate to Holland never amounted to more than a pipe dream.
Less than two years after our visit to Amsterdam, Nazi Germany invaded Holland; a few days later the Dutch forces surrendered. In May 1945, my mother tried to get in touch with our friends, but her letters and inquiries went unanswered. In the fall of 1945, my father decided to take the long trip through war-ravaged Europe to Amsterdam in order to find out what had happened. He found the Eggers’ house in Amsterdam, only to learn from the neighbors that Jo, Juliette, and Selma were rounded up when the deportations of Jews in the Netherlands got underway in 1942. They all perished. Miraculously, one of their Christian neighbors returned to my father a golden cigarette case with a ruby set into its clasp. The neighbors told my father that, before they had been rounded up, our friends entrusted this piece to them, explaining that it belonged to a family in Czechoslovakia. None of the many other pieces of jewelry my mother took to Holland have ever resurfaced.
Most of the silver owned by our family was lost too. Shortly after the establishment of the Fascist Slovak State my father was arrested and kept in jail for several days without ever being told why. Being Jewish was probably enough of a reason. When my mother went to negotiate for his release, the police official agreed to let him go—in exchange for the family silver.
When Jewish persecution started in Slovakia after the breakup of Czechoslovakia, Jews were ordered to deposit all their gold jewelry and other precious objects with the authorities. Not expecting to ever see the deposited valuables again, my parents surrendered only some items, hiding the rest with acquaintances. Like the jewelry left in Holland, most of the valuables hidden in Slovakia were never returned. Yet, after the end of the war, my parents did recover every single item of jewelry that had been surrendered to the Slovak Fascist government authorities.
| 1918 | October 28 | Czechoslovakia established after the defeat of AustroHungarian Empire in World War I |
| 1933 | January 30 | Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany |
| 1938 | March 12 | Anschluss: Austria annexed by Germany |
| September 30 | Signing of Munich Agreement, forcing Czechoslovakia to yield the Sudetenland border region to Germany | |
| October 5 | Edvard Beneš resigns as president of Czechoslovakia | |
| October 10 | Sudetenland annexed by Germany | |
| November 2 | Southern Slovakia and a segment of Subcarpathian Rus (also known as Ruthenia, now part of the Ukraine) annexedbyHungary | |
| November 19 | In response to demands by Slovak nationalists, Czechoslovakia’s name is changed to Czecho-Slovakia and Slovakia is granted autonomy | |
| 1939 | March 14 | Under German pressure Slovakia secedes from Czechoslovakia; establishment of Slovak State governed by Fascist government allied with Nazi Germany |
| March 15 | Germany occupies the rest of Czechoslovakia; Hitler announces creation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia | |
| April 18 | Slovak lawmakers pass first anti-Jewish laws | |
| September 1 | Germany invades Poland; two days later Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand declare war on Germany | |
| October 26 | Jozef Tiso elected president and Vojtech Tuka prime minister of the Slovak State | |
| 1940 | April 25 | Slovak lawmakers pass the first Aryanization law |
| 1941 | September 9 | Slovak government introduces Jewish Codex (which is a more drastic version of the German Nuremberg Laws) |
| October 23 | Germany pledges help to Slovak representatives with the solution of the “Jewish problem”; SS leader Himmler announces creation of dedicated areas for European Jews in Poland | |
| December 2 | Prime Minister Tuka negotiates with German Ambassador Hanns Ludin details of forced Jewish deportations; Tuka agrees to pay Germany 500 marks for each deported person as a “resettlement fee” | |
| December 11 | United States enters war against Germany | |
| 1942 | March–October | First wave of Jewish deportations from Slovakia: fifty-eight thousand (approximately two-thirds of the entire Jewish population of Slovakia) are transported to concentration and extermination camps |
| 1943 | February 2 | Germany loses the battle of Stalingrad |
| 1944 | August 29 | German troops occupy Slovakia; start of the Slovak National Uprising |
| October 27 | Slovak National Uprising crushed (though guerrilla attacks continue until the end of the war) | |
| 1945 | March 31 | Last transport of Jews from Slovakia to concentration camps |
| May 9 | End of World War II in Europe | |
| 1948 | February 25 | Communist coup ends democratic system of government in postwar Czechoslovakia |
| 1953 | March 5 | Death of Stalin |
| 1956 | February 25 | Khrushchev delivers secret speech criticizing Stalin’s |
| brutal rule at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist | ||
| Party of the Soviet Union | ||
| 1962 | October | Cuban Missile Crisis |
| 1968 | January– | “Prague Spring” or “socialism with a human face” |
| August | introduced in Czechoslovakia by the reform-minded Communist leader Alexander Dubcˇ ek | |
| August 21 | Five Warsaw Pact armies under Soviet command invade | |
| Czechoslovakia to crush the democratization process. | ||
| Soon the process of “normalization” begins in | ||
| Czechoslovakia under the new Communist Party leader | ||
| and later president Gustav Husák | ||
| 1989 | November 17 | “Velvet Revolution” against Communist system begins |
| in Czechoslovakia | ||
| December 29 | Václav Havel is democratically elected president of | |
| Czechoslovakia | ||
| 1993 | January 1 | Czechoslovakia is peacefully dissolved into the Czech |
| and Slovak Republics (“Velvet Divorce”) | ||
| 1999 | March 12 | Czech Republic joins NATO |
| 2004 | March 29 | Slovak Republic joins NATO |
| May 1 | Czech and Slovak Republics become members of the | |
| European Union |