Janics: Czechoslovak Policy and the Hungarian Minority

INTRODUCTION

The flow of human history is determined by much larger units of people than fragments of a nation. We are not used to reading monographs on the history of such fragments in the larger context of human events. But there are exceptional cases, when a historical drama with relatively narrow geographical limits produces explosive decisions which, in turn, give rise to human problems whose impact is felt far beyond the limits of time and space and their occurrence.

At the conclusion of the Second World War, the dramatic events that shook the Hungarian national minority in Czechoslovakia, if properly understood, are of such historical significance. That minority's right to very existence was being questioned. Over a half a million people fell victims to a historical conjuncture in which international law itself condemned national minorities to extinction in the alleged interest of domestic peace and international order. A small group of people of a small land f no particular importance in Central Europe - the Hungarian minority of Slovakia - was condemned to the same fate as the large German minority of Bohemia. The Czechoslovak policy of expelling the Hungarian minority has ultimately failed. Yet the struggle for their liquidation lasted for four years, leaving human ruins behind, the traumatic memories of four lawless, homeless years.

This four-year crisis and its vicissitudes were explained in many ways. But the basic question: the attempt to eradicate an ethnic group, is mentioned only superficially. In postwar historiography in general, the fate of the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia is barely touched, if at all. Moreover, although the scene of events since the Second World War is within the Soviet orbit of power, an analysis according to the Marxist interpretation of class struggle is entirely missing. What is available are largely subjective and extremely nationalistic explanations pieced together from distorted fragments of documentation. Surely, after three decades, the time has come to rectify the most crying mistakes, and to reject or correct the most exaggerated accusations leveled against the Hungarian minority of Czechoslovakia.

Some of the archival material is still inaccessible. But the contemporary press, the published documents and some historical works, and - last but not least - the eye-witness reports of survivors may offer a fairly faithful account of what has actually happened. Also, some of the missing links in this case can easily be filled in from the broader context of known facts.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Hungarian minority in Slovakia was shocked to learn that in order to ensure the future security of the Czechoslovak state, the Slav ethnic boundaries would have to be extended to the political boundaries of the state - in other words, that the non-Slav Hungarian population, living mostly along Slovakia's southern borders, would have to be expelled from Czechoslovakia.

Two favorable circumstances accounted for the Czechoslovak policy to liquidate the Hungarian minority. One was the unprecedented triumph of the Slav nations in World War II. The other, the wartime plans supported by spurious moral theories of the exiles, making the new migration of nations through expulsion of national minorities into a politically and morally acceptable principle of postwar international law. This new raison d`état conceived by Edvard Benes, President-in-exile of Czechoslovakia, originally designed during the war against the large German minority of Czechoslovakia, has been extended after the war against the small Hungarian minority as well. The Hungarian extension did not work automatically on the international level. Nevertheless, after the war, Czechoslovak policy declared the Hungarian minority collectively guilty against the state and launched a massive campaign for its liquidation. The policy failed to win the hoped for approval. It was not endorsed by all the Great Powers, neither during the Nuremberg Trial of war criminals, nor by the Paris Peace Conference of 1946. Yet the anti-Hungarian campaign was effective enough to create inside Czechoslovakia an atmosphere of unprecedented hostility against the Hungarians-not only for the four years of lawlessness from 1945 through 1948, but for decades thereafter, in the form of rigid anti-Hungarian nationalist ideology, still pressing for uncritical recognition.

To counter these deplorable effects of Czechoslovak policy against the Hungarian minority, new ways must be found for a reexamination of the totalitarian theory of collective national guilt. First of all, it is necessary to prove that the anti-Hungarian atmosphere in Slovakia after the Second World War was not, as claimed, a revolutionary mass movement-not even a part of the postwar national revolution-but, rather, a nationalistic doctrine imposed from above on a national and democratic revolutionary situation. This way, it was made into a mass movement, turned into a seemingly organic part of "anti-Fascism," the all-powerful, sweeping nationalist program of the postwar era.

It should be noted that the press of the victorious Great Powers, too, both during and after the Second World War, readily aroused world public opinion against the national minorities. Reiterating as it did relentlessly the thesis, authored by President Benes, that the war had been caused by the national minorities, the world press popularized the idea that the minorities must either be promptly liquidated by expulsion or left to their destiny and assimilated by the majority, with no protection of their minority rights as nationalities.

Slav nations, victors of the Second World War-who themselves had been national minorities before the First World War, who themselves fought for their liberty, in some cases for centuries, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Croatians have unleashed a furious campaign against all national minorities. Most of them, Slavs and others, ganged up against the Hungarians. Thus, while peacemaking after the First World War had endorsed the idea that the national minorities should be liberated, the new order after the Second World War has been installed in an atmosphere of utmost hostility against the national minorities.

At the beginning, the postwar measures aimed at the liquidation of the Hungarians of Slovakia appeared to he realistic. The general anti-minority international atmosphere seemed to support the Czechoslovak policy against the Hungarian minority as well. Such a policy contradicted in a frightening manner the earlier Central European traditions of peaceful coexistence among the Danubian nationalities. But this was not the reason why it failed. Why the Czechoslovak policy for the total liquidation of the Hungarian minority had finally ended in failure was due to the fact that it could not enlist the unanimous support of the Great Powers-and, to no small extent, also due to pure chance.

During the four-year crisis, the Hungarian minority itself, accused of gruesome crimes with no foundation in reality, was a passive helpless mass, shorn of all rights of protest, deprived of all means of self-defense. The collective voice of the people was silenced - not even the voice of individuals was allowed to be heard. Zoltán Fábry, a respected Hungarian Communist writer in Czechoslovakia, wrote an appeal in defense of the Hungarian minority, entitled "The Accused Speaks Out." The Czechoslovak Writers' Union to which he addressed his appeal did not bother

even to acknowledge its receipt. Such was the state of nothingness into which the once lively political body known as the Hungarian national minority had been reduced to in Czechoslovakia.

Now that the accused looks back from a distance of three decades, he wishes to say everything that may help to extricate the truth from the fossilized mass of false accusations. in his search for truth, he invites friend and foe to face the facts - fully aware that myths may still block the road to truth which is full of obstacles under any circumstances.

Janics: Czechoslovak Policy and the Hungarian Minority