Janics: Czechoslovak Policy and the Hungarian Minority

1945: THE YEAR OF PEACE

The Czechoslovak policy of liquidation conceived in exile against the Hungarian minority was unknown to the Hungarians. It remained hidden in fact from the Slovak public opinion at large as well. Thus, for a while, the Hungarian minorities observed the unpleasant events with relative calm, awaiting the prewar rule of law to return. Not until the proclamation of the Kosice government program in April 1945 did both Slovaks and Hungarians fully realize that a historical initiative was unfolding which would radically alter their mutual relations. In retrospect, the opening of this new era in Hungarian-Slovak relations was fittingly described by the Slovak Marxist theoretician Ladislav Szántó: "I knew already than that we will not be able to avoid the nationalist wave. The new world will not be born the way it is written in the textbooks but, rather from the heap of physical and spiritual ruin left behind by Fascism and the war."¹

Given the emotional antecendents since Munich in 1938, it was not difficult for the new authorities that emerged after liberation in 1945 to channel Slovak nationalist passions in an anti-Hungarian direction. In the first days of liberation, sundry revolutionary demands began to appear, all directed mainly against the Hungarians. The Germans of Slovakia (always much smaller in number than the Hungarian minority) were much less a target, since with few exceptions, they had fled west with the retreating Nazi armies.

A "socialist" demand that emerged fairly early was an utterly un-Marxist proposition that the needs of the Slovak working class should be satisfied from properties of the Hungarian bourgeoisie - and at the expense of the Hungarian working class. Another noteworthy phenomenon was the meaning of the popular term "traitor." It has been understood to mean only minorities. Attacks against Slovaks or other Slavs were carefully avoided. Thus in January 1945, in liberated eastern Slovakia, at a rally at Humenné, the Slav population unanimously accepted a decision which declared "the immediate confiscation of the lands of the Germans, Hungarians, and traitors, and the distribution of these lands to the poor farmers."² Although tied to the word "and," the term "traitor" was meant to be applied to minorities only, as made clear in a similar proclamation issued at a meeting in the Eastern Slovakian town of Presov: "Let the property of the traitor Hungarian and German owners be confiscated."³ Such demands anticipated the official policy which later explicitly declared the Hungarians alone as traitors and enemies of the Slovak people.

During these early days of liberation, the Slovak National Council had been heard from also. On February 4, 1945, the Council issued a so-called "Manifestum." Its tone was mixed. It started with some democratic promises and ended with totalitarian threats. It read in part: "The situation of the Hungarian citizens of this land depends on how they themselves will define theft relationship to the Slovak nation, to the new Czechoslovak Republic, to the democratic and Slav orientation. . . . "This could have been interpreted as a promise of fair play. But then the "Manifestum" concluded with the threatening words: "From our economic life, we will eradicate the influence of Germans and Hungarians, of Slovak traitors who aided them, and of all anti-Slovak elements."⁴

The explanation for the mixed phrasing of the "Manifestum" might have been that, in February 1945, prior to the publication of the Kosice program in April, there were quite a few doubts manifest regarding the success of an all-out radical solution of the Hungarian problem. For that matter, not even the Kosice program mentioned the minorities' expulsion among the objectives of the Government. This might have been a tactical move in order not to create panic. Anyway, as it turned Out the loss of citizenship of the minorities, proclaimed in the Kosice program, was a preliminary stage only in the policy of total liquidation of the minorities.

This preliminary stage of policy regarding the Hungarians is well reflected in the instructions sent by the Slovak National Council to the people of Lovinobaòa on February 5, 1945. It is almost tolerant in tone, proposing collaboration in administrative matters with "democratic" Hungarians: "Let the National Council work together with the democratically inclined Hungarians, in areas inhabited predominantly by Hungarians. "⁵

The practice in Hungarian populated regions of Slovakia to attach to local Slovak committees Hungarians of so-called "democratic persuasion" as "advisors continued throughout the postwar years, even at the time of the worst persecutions. This pattern was not practiced at all in the case of the Germans in the Czech lands. However, resorting to Hungarian advisors had its drawbacks too. Hungarians who accepted such appointments, found themselves as collaborators with the enemies of the Hungarians in carrying out instructions against their fellow Hungarians - compiling, for instance, lists of Hungarian persons to be deported or expelled. No wonder, these Hungarians of "democratic persuasion" aiding the enemies of the Hungarians were less than popular among Hungarians. In fact, the practice elicited only despair and resentment among the entire society of the Hungarian minority.

It should be recalled that the transfer policy against the Hungarians reached an impasse during the war because of a lack of unanimous approval by the Great Powers. The Hungarian population did not flee either, as expected by those who hatched plans for the liquidation of minorities by a military fait accompi. The expected direction of fronts had changed in the closing stages of the war, and the Hungarians of Slovakia, mostly peasants, stayed anyway, never thinking of leaving the land where they lived since time immemorial. Thus, in the first months of 1945, those Slovaks who hoped for either of the two "solutions" - flight or forcible transfer - it looked as if they had to count with the continued existence of a Hungarian minority in Slovakia. Even in retrospect, the situation as it evolved, makes the Slovak historian Samuel Cambel most unhappy. He deplores both that the Hungarians did not flee and that the Western powers did not endorse the expulsion of the Hungarians. In his book on postwar "land reform," which is often a euphemism for land confiscation in Slovakia's Hungarian inhabited regions, Cambel explains: "The complexities which hampered land reform were connected mainly with the direction of the fronts; but the veto of the Western powers, at the time of the armistice with Hungary, regarding the deportation of the Hungarian minority from Czechoslovakia also played a part."⁶

Doubts among Slovaks at home concerning the success of the transfer policy did not bother the leaders in exile. Both in the West and in the East, they still believed that it would be possible to extend the transfer policy to the Hungarian minority by means of international agreements. The postwar Czechoslovak government program written in London and Moscow, was visibly inspired by such conviction.

The Hungarians of South Slovakia themselves at that time were waving between optimism and ill forebodings. They expected a democratic social revolution to follow the Horthy and Nazi era. The initially mostly half-hearted executed anti-minority measures encouraged Hungarian hopes that the chauvinistic excesses were simply a matter of a temporary flare-up of intolerance. Hungarian optimism, however, received a cold shower when directive 4/1945 of the Slovak National Council in late February confiscated holdings in excess of 50 hectares of land of both Germans and Hungarians. Slovak "traitors" too were affected by the directive, but the number of Slovak landowners declared "traitors" was negligible.

The new Czechoslovak government formed at Kosice in April hailed the local seizures of landholdings of "the enemy and of the traitors" for the benefit of the "poor Slovak peasants," and extended it to the entire territory of the state.⁷ The postwar revolution thus turned its full force against the Hungarian peasant. Even the poor peasant was considered an enemy, if he was Hungarian. Almost all land in fact owned by Hungarians became subject to confiscation. The Presidential decree 12/1945 dated June 21, 1945 exempted from confiscation only the agricultural property of those persons of Hungarian nationality "who took an active part in the struggle for the defense of the Czechoslovak Republic.⁸ "Theoretically, this meant that perhaps 0.1 percent of the Hungarian-owned land would be exempt. In practice, however, no Hungarian land was safe against confiscation.

Another insidious early onslaught against the Hungarian population was the decision of the Slovak National Council, issued on February 13, 1945, ordering all former civil servants to submit applications for re-employment.⁹ The directive mentioned no nationality. Nevertheless, it resulted in the elimination of all government employees, including state-employed teachers of Hungarian nationality. Namely, in April the Slovak National Council ordered the firing of all Hungarian employees,¹⁰ and the order having been completely carried out by May.¹¹

Meanwhile, the liberated Slovak press was giving full support to the anti-Hungarian measures. A typical example was this harangue published by the Slovak Communist Party, entitled "Ohlas":

The Communist Party of Slovakia expects that the southern border regions of Slovakia which, in the past, were Hungarianized by force, will again be systematically Slovakized. The rich productive areas of Southern Slovakia whence the Hungarian feudal lords forced the Slovak farmers into the mountains, should be returned to the Slovak people. We expect that administrative commissars will be appointed to the towns and cities with a Hungarian majority.

To add insult to injury the Communist "Ohlas" declaration also expected the Commissars to be aided by "the democratic and actively anti-Fascist elements among the local Hungarian citizens" in advisory capacity.¹²

The historical argument of "Ohlas" that the southern borderlands of Slovakia were forcefully Hungarianized has no foundation whatsoever in fact. Nineteenth century Hungarianization (also known in English as "Magyarization") affected only the urban areas, while, if anything, in most cases Slovakization had taken place in the rural areas. This is a fact confirmed even by Czechoslovak scholarly sources: it is certain that

During the 150 years preceding 1921, the Slovak-Hungarian language frontier changed rather in favor of the Slovaks, despite all the political pressures [of Magyarization] . Of the 319 communes in the language frontier areas, 73 changed their nationality; of these 49 changed in favor of the Slovaks.¹³

The government program proclaimed in liberated Kosice on April 5, 1945, the so-called "Kosice program" sanctioned the nationalist revolution in progress. For all practical purposes, the Kosice program declared the entire Hungarian minority guilty of treason. The composition of the new government, formed at the same time, corresponded to the results of the negotiations in Moscow. It was appointed in Kosice, on April 4, 1945 by a Presidential decree, as the Government of the National Front of the Czechs and Slovaks." The crypto-communist Czech Social Democrat Zdìnek Fierlinger became Premier of the new government.

Chapter Eight of the Kosice program dealing with the national minorities, deprived the Germans and Hungarians of their citizenship. The "exemption" promised to "anti-Fascists" was an illusory mitigation of the government program not unlike a similar clause of the earlier land confiscation measures. The pertinent passage of the Kosice government program reads as follows:

The terrible experiences of the Czechs and the Slovaks with the German and Hungarian minorities, the overwhelming majority of whom became the tools of invaders from the outside aiming To destroy the Republic . . . compel the new Czechoslovakia to intervene profoundly and for good . . . The citizens of the Czechoslovak Republic of German and Hungarian nationalities who had Czechoslovak citizenship before the Munich decision of 1938, and who are anti-Fascists, will have their Czechoslovak citizenship confirmed and their return home shall be facilitated; the same applies to those who carried out an active struggle already in the period before Munich against Henlein or the Hungarian irredentist parties, for the defense of Czechoslovakia, and who, after Munich and March 15 suffered persecution at the hands of the German and Hungarian authorities because of their fidelity to the Czechoslovak Republic, to those who were imprisoned or sent to concentration camps, or were forced to flee abroad from German and Hungarian terror, and actively participated there in the anti-Fascist struggle for Czechoslovakia. The Czechoslovak citizenship of the remaining Czechoslovak citizens of German or Hungarian nationality will be invalidated. These citizens have the option to request Czechoslovak citizenship, and the agencies of the republic reserve the right to adjudicate each and every request on an individual basis. ¹⁴

The mercy accorded to perhaps three percent of the minority population does not mitigate the mercilessness meted out to the remaining 97 percent. The government program also ordered complete purification of the administration from non-Slavic elements: "In those counties where the population is unreliable and not of Slavic nationality, the administrators shall be appointed from the outside."¹⁵

The classification of people according to "Slav" and "non-Slav," reminiscent of the Nazi differentiation between "Aryan" and "non-Aryan," thus became a permanent feature of government policy in Czechoslovakia, without arousing the slightest concern or reflection abroad on the question: What had the Second World War actually been fought for? The government program also explicitly declared the confiscation of the Hungarian landholdings,¹⁶ and ordered the closing of German schools.¹⁷ Most of the Hungarian schools were closed already anyway.

The Kosice government program was not published in Hungarian. But rumors of its contents Spread rapidly among the Hungarian population. Those who heard the rumors refused to believe them. This amused the Slovak historian J. Purgat who noted mockingly: "How great was their surprise when it was no longer a matter of rumors, but even the government program proclaimed that only a Slovak person may receive land, that there will be only Slovak schools, etc.!"¹⁸

Thus did liberation turn into tragedy for the Hungarian minority of Czechoslovakia. Those who had expected from the defeat of fascism a return to democracy were understandably astounded.

The unexpected was most unexpected for the Leftist Hungarians. It is worth quoting briefly from the confessions of Rezsõ' Szalatnai, a prominent progressive Hungarian Writer. Rumors about the anti-Hungarian measures in the liberated parts of Slovakia reached him before he himself was liberated:

We sit here in the shelter, a few feet underground . . . My [Slovak] neighbor smiles, he knows a lot, he is not worried, he is sure of his thing . . . But you will be in trouble, he keeps telling us. He has good information. The future, he says, belongs to our race, those who are not part of us will be deported. The Hungarian question is a matter of railway wagons. We look at him in astonishment: is he stupid or is he trying to create panic. The matter is settled, he whispers, courageous behavior counts for nothing. I am very sorry for you, we all know how bravely you behaved. But the matter is settled is . . . "¹⁹ [The frightening rumors are spreading fast:] "B.

is coming, like every evening, and I let him know what I heard in the shelter. He says not a word, only drops his eyes. It turns out that in the morning he had met our mutual [Slovak] friend, a poet, who told him exactly the same thing.²⁰

Despite the fast spreading rumors about the Kosice program later that year, the Hungarian population did not fully believe in the impending danger. The ruthless tone attacking the Hungarians, the demand for their expulsion was everywhere, on the radio, in the press, on the posters. Yet the execution of these threats was still not believed to be possible. Rumors had spread that the Great Powers did not agree with the anti-Hungarian measures. Help was expected from the newly installed provisional revolutionary government across the border in Hungary.

The war was still on. Early in May, general mobilization was ordered in Czechoslovakia which did not apply to the Hungarians. Naively, the peasant population took this as an indication that the new Czechoslovakia did not want soldiers of Hungarian nationality, because the Hungarians will belong to Hungary.

The war was still on when the reorganization of the administration began along the lines of the Kosice program. The Slovaks set up their National Committees everywhere where the Slav population was at least one-third of the total. In the Hungarian communes of southern Slovakia, so-called commissars or national representatives, and committees of administration were substituted for the National Committees. On April 7 the Central Slovak National Council issued a directive which excluded the non-Slavs from the exercise of democratic rights in the new administration: :Only a Czechoslovak citizen who belongs to some Slav nation" was declared eligible for membership in the National Committees.²¹ The same directive regulated the appointment of commissars in the communes inhabited by Hungarians.²² Unlike some earlier measures, this directive no longer made mention of including in an "advisory capacity" Hungarian anti-Fascists in the new administration.

May 1945 was no longer the time of confused ambiguities. The execution of the Czechoslovak nationalist program became crystal clear. On May 9, 1945, President Benes made his memorable declaration: "The overwhelming majority of the Germans and Hungarians will have to leave our land. This is our final decision . . . Our people can no longer live in the same country with Germans and Hungan.ans."²³ Soon thereafter, head of the Czech Communist Party, Klement Gottwald declared in a broadcast: "The Germans and the Hungarians, who had sinned so gravely against our nations and our republic, will be deprived of their citizenship and will be severely punished. Let the National Committees set on the tasks immediately."²⁴

Then the Presidential decrees, so called because President Benes issued them, started coming to implement the government program of Kosice. The first such Presidential decree in May excluded the non-Slav population from the economic life.²⁵ Class considerations played no part. Not unlike the large enterprises, the small industrialists and small merchants as well as landholders of any kind, came under Slav control by virtue of a system) called "national caretakers." The same Presidential decree declared the Germans and Hungarians politically unreliable. It defined the persons who were to be considered German or Hungarian as follows: "Those persons who have declared themselves Germans or Hungarians in any census since 1929, or have become members of a national group, organization, or party which consisted of Germans or Hungarians."²⁶ The decree -exempted from discrimination only those who were able to prove that they had remained "faithful to the Czechoslovak Republic" or had become "victims of political or racial persecution."

It should be pointed out that in many instances, persons to fill the posts of "national caretakers" in Hungarian inhabited areas corrupted the entire system. Caretakers collaborated with the Hungarian entrepreneur; they became part of the enterprise by mutual understanding; often they were members of the family who made use of their political -contacts in the interest of the joint enterprise. Thus, fortunately, this particular system caused no substantial harm to Hungarian minority society.

The story was different regarding the Presidential decree regulating so-called "internal resettlement." This decree issued in July 1945, was meant to place all land into Slav hands: "We mean by internal resettlement the totality of those regulations which will make it possible, by means of special prescriptions, to return all land in Czechoslovakia into the hands of the original Slav element."²⁷ (It should be noted that the reference to "original Slav ownership was not a fact but a figment of nationalist imagination.) A Settlement Bureau with offices in Prague and Bratislava was to be Set up. The head of the Bureau in Prague, with the rank of a Counselor in the central government was to be appointed by the President of the Republic on the recommendation of the Cabinet.

Most of the sufferings of the Hungarian minority from July 1945 on were closely tied to this Bureau in Prague and in its branch office in Bratislava. The Bureau ruthlessly exploited its authority; it was clearly the initiator of certain barbaric actions such as the winter deportations of 1946-1947.

In May 1945, when the mass firing of Hungarian civil servants took place pursuant to directive 44/1945 of the Slovak National Council, the overwhelming majority of the fired Hungarians remained without earnings overnight. Yet they did not dispair. They had faith in the coming peace treaty. The situation, however, changed by the fall. In September, all Hungarian schools remained closed and the mass expulsion of Hungarian teachers to Hungary began. Those who escaped expulsion found work mostly in construction. Concurrently with this fatal blow against Hungarian cultural life, all retirement payments to Hungarians were halted. The purge was not limited to government employees. Directive 69/1945 of the Slovak National Council ordered all unreliable" Hungarians to be fired from private employment as well.²⁸

A person of Hungarian nationality could be considered "reliable" if he was issued a so-called National Reliability Certificate. No particular legal procedure regulated the issuance of these certificates; it was simply a revolutionary practice. The certificates were issued at the discretion of the local Slovak National Committees. The custom was to grant certificates for three months at a time.²⁹ It is estimated that about three percent of the Hungarians succeeded in getting such certificates. In the summer of 1946, when the so-called "re-Slovakization" process was under way, a condition for issuing reliability certificates was the acceptance of "exchange" under the provisions of the Czechoslovak-Hungarian agreement on population exchange. In other words, a Hungarian who declared himself willing to leave the country was rewarded with a certificate of reliability, a rather cynical procedure.

By the summer of 1945, the Hungarian population recognized the seriousness of the situation. Many of the Hungarian anti-Fascist intellectuals became sharply critical of the anti-Hungarian measures. Some of them took the advice to leave for Hungary. But many left-wing intellectuals were deported against their will.³⁰ Had they remained, the cultural destruction of the Hungarian minority might not have been as extensive as it actually had become. The reason why so many anti-Fascist Hungarians had left was readily admitted by the Slovaks themselves; in the words of J. Purgat: 'They became convinced that it was not only a matter of punishing the guilty, but the Hungarians in general."³¹

In its misery, the Hungarian minority expected anti-Fascist help from the postwar democratic government of Hungary. Verbal help did come from both the government and the press. However, the only means of international help Hungary could muster in this matter was through the Allied Control Commission in Budapest. Between April 1945 and July 1946, the Hungarian government sent 184 notes to Marshal Voroshilov, President of the Allied Control Commission in Budapest, protesting discriminations contrary to Czechoslovakia's international obligations against the Hungarian minority.³² The Hungarian government protests had no -effect whatsoever. On the other hand, the Hungarian press campaign had some impact. The reports on the persecutions may have occasionally resorted to exaggerations. But what mattered most was they that succeeded in arousing world public opinion to the plight of the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia.

Particularly insidious was the Czechoslovak policy against the Hungarian schools. The schools were not closed by any particular law. In 1945, the whole system of Hungarian minority education simply ceased to exist because of the dismissal and expulsion of the teachers.

The dismal story goes back to the time of the Slovak uprising. On September 6, 1944, the Slovak National Council ordered all Hungarian schools closed which were n0t in operation prior to October 6, 1938.³³ Then a memorandum sent by the London Czechoslovak government to the allied Great Powers on November 23, 1944 stated that no Hungarian public schools would be tolerated in liberated Czechoslovakia. Despite this threat, instruction in Hungarian schools continued in liberated Slovakia till the end of the war.

The Kosice government program in April 1945, declared the closing of German schools only. In May, however, with the mass firing of Hungarian teachers without any legal grounds, the Hungarian school system automatically collapsed. What did kill the Hungarian schools was in fact the vituperous anti- Hungarian propaganda. Reportedly, the government representative in charge of education in Slovakia, Ladislav Novomesky did make attempts to ensure continuing instruction of Hungarian children in their mother tongue, but his proposals were turned down.³⁴

The end result of Czechoslovak policy against Hungarian education was that from 1945 to 1949, Hungarian children were excluded from public schooling for four years. And even in 1950, when Hungarian schools re-opened, half of the school-age Hungarian children did not attend schools.³⁵

After liberation, the most disillusioned members of the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia were the Hungarian anti- Fascists. Ferenc Molnár, a functionary of the Hungarian Communist Party at Nagyabony, returning from a district conference of the Slovak Communist Party in Bratislava, declared: "The conference smacked of Fascism."³⁶

When the Hungarian anti-Fascists became aware of the situation, whether Communists of not, they had three choices: (1) Move to Hungary, (2) To retreat into passivity, (3) To change their nationality from Hungarian to Slovak. The government encouraged the change of nationality on a large scale by launching a so-called "re-Slovakization" campaign. The pretext of this campaign was that many Hungarians were Slav ancestry. Actually, it was a part of the strategy to "solve" the Hungarian problem. Through "re-Slovakization" the number of Hungarians was to be reduced by200,000. Another 200,000 would be transferred to Hungary, by the peace treaty - and the Hungarian question would be solved.

How did "re-Slovakization" work? In November 1949, I asked István Major, a longtime Hungarian member of the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia, whether he was allowed to vote in the first prewar elections. He answered: "Yes, but first I had to declare in writing that I am a Slovak."

Slovak Communists in general believe that there was nothing wrong with depriving the Hungarians of their rights. They thought, rather, that there was something wrong with their Hungarian comrades: "The Hungarian comrades did not show sufficient alertness and consistency in the observance of the party line, when it came to nationalities policy." ³⁷ First Secretary K. Bacílek condemned the attitude of the Hungarian Communists, branding it as divisive:

Many Hungarian comrades, unfortunately old Communists among them, including some who had spent years in concentration camps, cannot understand the meaning of our nationalities policy, now that the nationalities question has to be subordinated to the general requirements of progress. They often take a stand as alleged defenders of the policies of Stalin, and demand minority rights, schools, and a press on behalf of the Hungarians. These comrades have gone so far of late that their activity resembles divisive activity . . . They even organize mass meetings with the participation of five or six thousand people, where they speak Hungarian, and demand the publication of an anti-Fascist Hungarian newspaper.³⁸

By the end of 1945, the year of liberation by the Red Army, Slovak-Hungarian relations within the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia deteriorated to a point that the Slovak party chairman, Viliam soroky declared: "It is no longer possible to collaborate with Hungarian comrades." And he added: "After all, if we solve the Hungarian question . . . it becomes natural to ask our Hungarian comrades to leave voluntarily for Hungary."³⁹

Janics: Czechoslovak Policy and the Hungarian Minority