5

Hiding Jews Required Some MacGyvering

Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-680-8285A-26/Faupel/CC-BY-SA

Being well within the influence of the Reich, Slovakia had a hand in rounding up Jews within its borders. Many who managed to resist capture hid in the Carpathian Mountains. Luckily, most of the villagers in the area enjoyed the Nazis about as much as a good bout of plague, and were more than willing to harbor some fugitives at the risk of their own lives. Sometimes that required some ingenuity:

The Nazis came in, rounded people up, and we couldn't stop them. If you tried to stop them you got yourself, your family, and your entire village in trouble. But how much we could, we saved. Mostly every town was like that. One village who held Jews and were caught doing so had gotten some of their buildings burnt down, so Jews hiding out in the mountains and the people in the mountains looking after them were growing nervous, as the Germans were suspicious that more were out there.

Stanislav Doronenko

Needing to get out, we took five Jews (two adult women and three girls) and brought them down one by one. When the Germans came to our town, they had taken a large, five-bedroom house nearby, and at this time was occupied by five German soldiers and their dog. No place in town was safe, so we put them in the garden shed next to the German soldiers' house.

We snuck food to them and took their bucket away (which they went in). But sometimes we couldn't get there because the Germans were out there. Sometimes all they did was sit in the back and play with the dog. With them there, they would notice us and find the Jews living there. They would ask, "Why would you bring the food there?"

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4

Nobody Is Who You Expect

Wiki Commons

Being in the Underground was stressful (surprisingly few water slides and ping pong tables in "the Underground"), and betrayal was always a worry. While small towns like Katarina's were relatively safe since everyone knew everyone else, in the bigger cities paranoia was rampant. Katarina went to college at the University in the city of Trencin, less than half an hour away. That meant she got to know some people well outside of her comfort zone. Rich, powerful folks -- who weren't always the '80s-style movie villains you might expect.

Going to school, this girl, Tanya, was there. Her dad was a mayor of a big town, so she was wealthy. We always wondered, though: Why would she come from 100 miles away just for school? She was even friends with this girl who was the girlfriend to a member of the Hlinka Guard. She, despite being rich, would go to the poor areas at night. We always wondered why she went there. It wasn't until after the war we found out why.

youtube.com
The Hlinka Guard was a pro-Nazi Slovak militia that operated during the war.

It turns out that after dark she would hide in an out building. She knew some nights the Germans would shoot dissenters in the isolated area (as there were trenches already dug there), then bulldoze them over. After they left, Tanya would try and find if anyone was alive. When she found someone, she would take them to a monastery with monks who had a signal to get her in. On her knees and elbows, she would drag them to the monastery. I don't know how many she would save, as sometimes she would go back three, four times a night. We did not expect a friend of a Nazi supporter or rich girl like her to do that.

3

Day-to-Day Life Continues, Even in the Midst of a Resistance

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Since Slovakia took the protectorate route, the German military was not nearly as active there as it was in other countries. But the Nazis weren't exactly known for their impeccable respect of personal boundaries. They were probably up in everyone's grill regardless, right? Sometimes, sure, but it wasn't like in the movies, where Nazis were an omnipresent threat -- lurking in the markets, hiding behind park benches, popping up out of the sewers like fascist spring-snakes. There were dramatic, tragic moments here and there, but it's remarkable what you can adapt to in your day-to-day life.

To survive, we had to keep a low profile. You are not alone with the Underground, but you have to keep your cover. It was very hard. I had one cousin who was in real, deep Underground work. I don't know what they were doing, but one time they were trapped with important papers that were not to fall into German hands. So he took a grenade, pulled the pin and blew himself and the papers up.

2

Giving in May Have Actually Saved Some Lives

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According to the movies, the only countries involved in WWII were America, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Russia. That's pretty accurate -- it's only omitting all of the rest of Europe and also everywhere else in the world. The Nazis rolled over basically everyone in Europe but the Swiss (do not mess with the Swiss) and a bit of Russia before Hitler's cunning plan to wage a winter war without coats somehow backfired. Some governments resisted the Nazis openly, while others waited to see how this whole fascism thing played out. But most behaved like Slovakia, which complied openly, then bombed the hell out of everything as soon as the Nazis turned their backs. There's nobility in standing up to a stronger opponent, but you may be able to save some lives by pretending to be his friend, too ...

As a protectorate, Slovakia ended up having way less people die than almost all occupied countries. Out of a population of over 10 million, civilian losses were shockingly low in Czechoslovakia, with a huge majority of those deaths being in occupied Czech Republic. Slovakia ended up helping more of the persecuted populations. Out of 80,000 Roma people in Slovakia, as few as 400 died during our watch. And while Tiso did initially allow the deportation of Jews, he later had a huge change of heart and ordered the exportation of Jews to stop. While feelings about Tiso are still conflicted in Slovakia, he did at the end put a stop to deportations in Slovakia.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-2010-0049/o.Ang./CC-BY-SA
Tiso was tried and executed after the war.

1

It Didn't End at Liberation

D0r0thy/iStock/Getty Images

In 1945, the war ended for most of Europe. One day the Nazis realized (thanks to a very sound logistical argument consisting of millions of bombs and bullets to the face) that listening to the loudest jerk in the room wasn't a sound political strategy, so they fled. The next day, Communist soldiers rolled up to Slovakia -- mostly Romanians sent to "liberate" the country. You know those joyful liberation celebrations you see in the old news reels? Those were for the countries liberated by the Allies. For those liberated by the Soviets, there was significantly less revelry. No noisemakers. No hats. Hardly any confetti at all ...

Communists were bad and even worse than the Germans. Communists just came and took everything away. One person had a farm for 100 years, and the communists took it overnight. They simply said, "It's not yours, it's not mine -- it's ours." They started pushing slowly and crept in, taking town by town under their system and killing anyone who got in their way.

U.S. Army
Slovakia would re-join Czechoslovakia, and remain under Communist rule until the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

The worst thing I saw was what happened to the Communist female soldiers. Female soldiers inevitably got pregnant, and when they had the baby, they would kill it by smothering it with cloth, because duty came first to them. This may have been an isolated incident, but I remember thinking that any government that was fine with Nazi-level violence was no good. There were also more killings and more forced labor. There were some Germans that were killed, and we had buried them. The Communists suspected that Germans had sewn papers in the linings of coats, so they ordered citizens to dig up graves and to look for them.

By then I was married to a famous artist, and we managed to get an artistry visa out to the United States to showcase Slovak art in a cultural exchange. Once in New York, we were not sure if we could move here. Luckily, my brother, a naturalized American citizen, was visiting family in Slovakia when he found out Czechoslovak authorities were looking for us. This convinced the American authorities for us to stay, and we got to immigrate.

via Katarina Urbanek
I never went back.

Sorry about the nebulous sense of sorrow in your heart that you'll carry with you for the rest of the day, and the inevitable crying fit you won't be able to explain to the rest of the office. But hey, learning isn't always fun. To help get your life back on track, here are some penguins utterly failing to jump onto an iceberg. Goodbye, and may god have mercy on your souls.

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