Janics: Czechoslovak Policy and the Hungarian Minority

1946. THE YEAR OF THE PEACE CONFERENCE

It is enough for us [to wish them good riddance] that these people are Hungarian, they have destroyed our State, and continue to ruin our Republic . . . We must free our land from mice and bed-bugs. , . . Let them go voluntarily to Hungary forever, where they will be turned into "gentlemen", into that prototype of falsehood and Asian gypsy-hood . . . Let's sweep out the Hungarians from everywhere even if they happen to be Communists or democrats.¹

The mass organizations, too, were mobilized. They staged demonstrations to demand the expulsion of "Hungarians and Magyarones" The latter, a pre-World War I term, a highly derogatory one, arousing hatred against the assimilated Hungarians of Slovak origins who betrayed their nation.

By this time, quite a few Hungarian anti-Fascists had acquired a so-called "reliability certificate" which entitled them to citizenship. At the end of January, however, it was announced that no Hungarian would be allowed to vote at the upcoming elections in the spring of 1946. As the Bratislava Pravda explained: "At the meeting of the parties of the National Front in Prague it was decided that the Germans and the Hungarians would not have the right to vote; not even those whose reliability was recognized on the basis of their anti-Fascist activities and were granted Czechoslovak citizenship."² The decision became law on February 21, 1946. It explicitly limited the right to vote to citizens of Slav nationality. Germans and Hungarians, even if they had fought against Fascism, were excluded. Although the law discriminated against anti-Fascists, Slovak historiography still calls it an "anti-Fascist law."³

The Slovak press consistently criticized Hungary, and marshaled its arguments in favor of liquidation of the Hungarian minority. In early January 1946, the Bratislava Democratic Party paper Èas wrote: "In his official statement [Hungarian] Prime Minister Tildy said that democratic Hungary (democratic only in appearance) wishes to establish good neighborly relations with Czechoslovakia, but immediately added that Hungary was not responsible for the failure of such attempts . . . He accused Czechoslovakia of confiscating the belongings of Hungarian citizens, of mass deportation of Hungarian citizens, of sending them to concentration camps merely because they happen to be Hungarian. [He accused] the Czechoslovak government of depriving the Hungarians of their rights, of their participation in cultural life. [He charged] that measures regulating property ownership and other decrees deprives the Hungarians of the very possibility of existence, and that the male population is deported en masse from the Hungarian areas. The Hungarian government, continued Tildy, has asked therefore for Allied intervention, and it is claimed that world public opinion has endorsed this step."

To this somewhat slanted summary of Tildy's speech, the Slovak paper Èas added the following, even more slanted, commentary:

During the Prague negotiations Czechoslovakia extended its hand towards Hungary but the negotiations ended in failure because of the Hungarian delegation's attitude . . . It is claimed that the Czechoslovak government deprived the Hungarians of Slovakia of their political rights, of their cultural life, and limited their economic activities. The truth of course is that, while the Slovak National Council did deprive the Hungarians of citizenship, it exempted those who were able to prove their democratic thinking, their anti-Fascist behavior, and that they had taken part in the fight against the German occupation forces. Whose fault is it that there are so few democrats among the Hungarian minority? Whose fault is it that only a small fraction of the Hungarian minority participated in the fight against the Germans either in the occupied or the unoccupied parts of Slovakia? This fact in itself proves that Czechoslovakia's policy to rid herself of the Hungarian minority is correct. The cultural life of the Hungarians in Slovakia between 1918 and 1938 was down-right ideal. Whose fault is it that they did not like it, and yearned for something else? . . . The Hungarian population has to be resettled so that it would not become a tool for Hungarian aggression and revisionism. Hungarian revisionism is nothing but a wolf in sheep's clothing . . . The Hungarian agricultural population in Slovakia is now being put to work in the framework of labor service in other areas of the Republic, where labor shortage prevails

The "other" referred to by Èas are the Sudetenland of Bohemia, depopulated as a result of the Germans' expulsion then in progress. In late November 1945, some 12,000 Hungarian males were rounded up and taken for "labor service" from the solidly Hungarian southern regions of Slovakia to the depopulated Sudetenland. Within six weeks all Hungarians escaped and returned home. But the affair created a deportation panic among the Hungarian population-not an unfounded one, as later events (the deportations taking place in 1946, described in Chapter 6) have proved it.

Continuing its commentary, Èas explained the November 1945 events this way:

This is not meant to be the forced dispersion of the Hungarian population, but a measure dictated by the necessity of reconstructing Czechoslovakia economically . . . We must also mention the speech of László Rajk, a Communist member of the Hungarian Parliament. While declaring that chauvinism must be repressed in Hungary, Rajk also stressed that the Hungarian minorities [in the neighboring countries] have to be protected wherever they may be, if they are treated unjustly. Rajk stated that as far as treatment of minorities is concerned, the Hungarians are raising objections only against Czechoslovakia's policy, because Hungary cannot reconcile itself to rendering 600,000 Hungarians destitute. Rajk demanded rapid and effective measures for the protection of the Hungarians of Slovakia.

In conclusion, Èas outlined the actions Czechoslovakia should take in this matter: "It is up to us to convince the Great Powers that Hungary is a fire hazard whence fire may start anew and destroy the friendly balance among the peoples of the Carpathian Basin."⁴

The Hungarian Communist László Rajk soon found himself isolated on the Hungarian revolutionary left. The Hungarian Communists who returned from exile in the Soviet Union had been under the influence of the Russian Beria and the Czech Slánsky. They sided with Czechoslovakia against Hungary in the matter of Hungarian minorities. They attempted to pave the way for Hungary's acceptance of the Czechoslovak transfer demands.

Thus in the 1945 Christmas issue of the Hungarian Communist Party paper Szabad Nép, József Révai, former exile in Prague and Moscow, argued that a change in Hungarian foreign policy is necessary: "We Hungarians still believe that the world revolves around us . . We must seek friendship with the neighboring states, first of all with the Slav countries . . . It is not enough to stake out the goals of our struggle against reaction in domestic affairs here at home. We must do the same in foreign affairs as well. The two are inseparable."

The Slovak Èas liked what Révai wrote, commented on it with satisfaction: "We Slovaks would like to see once and for all a complete break with Hungary's catastrophe policy and to see instead a concern for friend-hip with the neighbors to emerge." Yet Èas commented scornfully on Hungarian democracy: "Even though we recognize the beneficial activity of certain government leaders who wish to consolidate [Hungarian] democracy, this does not alter the fact that Hungary continues to be reactionary and Fascist, that the broad spectrum of the Hungarian population has to be reeducated in a democratic spirit."⁵

Clearly the self-appointed Slovak educators in democracy thought they can force Hungary to agree to compulsory population "exchange" and resettlement of the "remaining" Hungarians from Slovakia. They equated "democracy" with compliance with Slovak nationalistic demands. Hungary refused to oblige.

The Czechoslovak-Hungarian tug of war over "population exchange" elicited foreign comments too. Not surprisingly, in 'view of Czechoslovakia's wartime popularity in the Allied world, the Czechoslovak effort to change the multinational Czechoslovak state into a pure Slav nation-state found quite a few Western supporters. One of them was Ernest Davies, Labor member of the British Parliament. Reporting on his visit to Czechoslovakia, he was quoted by Èas as having said:

I was surprised to see how well the Germans and Hungarians live in Slovakia, as I was able to find out at first hand. I spoke to people incarcerated in camps and I became convinced that they were incomparably better treated than if the situation were reversed. Their food is good, their lodgings are as well heated as my own apartment in London . . . The rights of the Hungarian national minority were not curtailed beyond the closing of their schools. I had a chance to observe it myself when I attended a service in Hungarian at Szenc.⁶ The members of the Hungarian minority live in their own homes, freely and without any restrictions. It is true that the Hungarians are worried about the uncertainty of their fate, what to expect after transfer to Hungary. But that is a matter for the Hungarian Government to worry about]. I hope the United Nations organization will exert its influence to convince Hungary to agree to sign the population exchange agreement. Before I came to Slovakia, under the influence of propaganda of dubious value, I too had nebulous notions about the problems of the Hungarian minority. But now I was able to verify that the only solution to the minority question would be to exchange this [Hungarian minority for the Slovaks of Hungary, because this minority has proven disloyal during the years of crisis, even though it enjoyed rights it could not have had in Hungary itself.?

Mr. Davies' source of information was not hard to guess. He had evidently been kept by his miss-informers under the impression that there were 600,000 Slovaks in Hungary. Otherwise, he could not have found the idea of "exchange" with 600,000 Hungarians in Slovakia so attractive. Actually, the number of Hungarians in Slovakia was well over 600,000 while the number of Slovaks in Hungary was not much over 100,000.

Hungary's delaying tactics concerning negotiations with Czechoslovakia caused irritation in Czechoslovak government circles. The Czechoslovak strategy called for bilateral agreement on the population exchange before the peace conference, so as to be able to propose there the transfer of the "remaining" 200,000 Hungarians. The Slovak government deputy, Kvetko, in charge of agricultural affairs, declared uncompromisingly on January 20th: "We definitely state that our attitude regarding the Hungarians and Hungary will not change: We know that whoever is in charge there, be it Mr. Tildy or Mr. Rákosi, they will never shed their revisionism or their old Saint Stephen's ideology. Their objective will always be the restitution of greater Hungary with the Slavs as their slaves."⁸

In the atmosphere of these weeks in Czechoslovakia, whoever expressed doubts about the advisability of the policy of expulsion was denounced as a Fascist enemy of democracy. And vice versa, whoever approved of the expulsion of the Hungarian minority was a true democrat.

Under growing Great Power pressure, euphemistically called "Great Power advice,"⁹ the Hungarian Government had no choice but to resume negotiations. The less than even-handed formula to be agreed upon was that as many Hungarians would be resettled from Slovakia by force as Slovaks from Hungary will sign up voluntarily for resettlement to Czechoslovakia. However, even before the actual signing of the Czechoslovak-Hungarian agreement, a Slovak official spokesman, J. Lichner, declared: "his is not the final solution of the question of the Hungarians in Slovakia, it is merely a first step . . . Within the framework of the population exchange we count on the return of 150,000 Slovaks from Hungary and, on this occasion I express my satisfaction that the Hungarian Government has allowed us to freely propagate resettlement among the Slovaks on Hungarian territory."¹⁰ (Actually, no more than about a half of the expected 150,000 signed up for resettlement.)

The agreement on population exchange was signed in Budapest on February 27, 1946. The agreement provoked astonishment in Hungary and panic among the Hungarians of Slovakia. On the other hand, in Czechoslovakia the agreement was hailed as a great political victory. Already a day before signing, on February 26, the Slovak National Council issued a victory proclamation beamed to the Slovaks of Hungary:

The Slovak National Council solemnly stresses the fact that [by 'virtue of this agreement] a fragment of the Slovak nation living in Hungary is to return home, into the democratic Czechoslovak Re-public, to territories which the Hungarians must leave. We hail this historical moment. Deeply moved, in the name of the entire nation we salute those Slovaks who until now had been torn apart from us."¹¹ [Later, the President of the Council, in his speech on this historic occasion, bluntly stated the aim of Slovak nationalism:] "Sooner or later the Trianon borders must become ethnic borders as well . . . "¹²

During the negotiations, the Hungarian Government insisted on the principle of parity, namely, that only as many Hungarians would be forced to leave for Hungary as Slovaks would volunteer to return to Slovakia. This was written into the population exchange agreement. This was a Hungarian success. However, the Hungarian Government failed to achieve another of its goals: restoration of citizenship to those Hungarians who would remain in Czechoslovakia. The Czechoslovak Government reserved its right to request at the forthcoming peace conference the expulsion of another 200,000 Hungarians who would remain" in Slovakia after the population exchange. Clearly, the Czechoslovaks did not give up yet their objective to liquidating the entire Hungarian minority of Slovakia.

The exchange agreement gave the Czechoslovak Government the right to transfer an additional 1500 Hungarians who were declared as war criminals. Also the agreement entitled Czechoslovakia to send Hungary a Committee for Resettlement for a period of six weeks to propagate resettlement among Hungary's Slovaks. The members of the Committee could circulate freely, obtain information, and communicate with anyone they wished. Those Slovaks who volunteered to resettle had to file an application within three months, by May 27, 1946, with the Czechoslovak Resettlement Committee. The Hungarian Government had the right to attach a liaison unit to the Committee. As for the Hungarians of Slovakia, the Czechoslovak Government had six months, until August 27, 1946, the right to select the Hungarians to be resettled. Those selected would receive a so-called "white card," which also served as a guarantee against continuing discrimination. Finally, a joint commission of two Hungarians and two Czechoslovaks was to be entrusted with carrying out the population exchange procedures.

The Czechoslovak Resettlement Committee began its activities in Hungary under propitious economic and political conditions. Defeated, war-ravaged Hungary was in a much worse state than victorious, prosperous Czechoslovakia. The number of Slovak applicants for resettlement was correspondingly high. More than 90,000 Slovaks applied. Yet, later on only 59,774 actually decided to leave Hungary.¹³

The Czechoslovak Resettlement Committee took advantage of its guaranteed freedom of movement in Hungary for other purposes than carrying Out the population exchange. It carried out a "census" of Slovaks living in Hungary and came up with an astonishingly high total of 481,946. The supposedly applied criterion for Slovak nationality was 'mother tongue" or "ethnic background."¹⁴ The obvious objective, however, was to prove for propaganda purposes that there are more or less as many Slovaks in Hungary as there are Hungarians in Slovakia. In no time, the slogan, "half a million Slovaks in Hungary" came to be propagandized abroad, and treated as a Scientific fact by scholars at home.

The Hungarian press took notice of the strange statistical item, A reporter of Új Otthon asked the secretary of the Czechoslovak Resettlement Committee did he really believe that the number of Slovaks living in Hungary was 481,946? He replied: "From the statistical point of view this is not a serious figure . . . I do not want to engage in a debate,"¹⁵

Considering the conditions of exchange agreed upon (the principle of -parity, that is) the number of Hungarians the Czechoslovaks have slated for exchange was entirely unrealistic, They compiled a list of 181,512 Hungarians designated for exchange, also a list of 106,398 Hungarian "major war criminals."'¹⁶ None of these figures fitted the principle of parity, or the addition of "war criminals," limited to 1500 Hungarians, according to the exchange agreement,

In the agreement on population exchange with Hungary, the Czechoslovak Government stipulated to stop indiscriminate confiscation of Hungarian property in Slovakia. Pertinent directives were issued to this effect, but the public knew nothing about them. The press in Slovakia simply did not publish them. Moreover, the directives were ignored by the authorities themselves. Local national committees continued to issue confiscation orders. Not until November 16, 1946, did the Slovak Deputy for Internal Affairs issue a circular under number 37 873/9.IV4-1946 in which he scolded the national committees and ordered compliance with the directives,

Thus confiscation's under way had to be halted and new procedures could be launched only against those persons of Hungarian nationality who committed offenses listed in earlier ordinances.

No order has ever been issued, however, to stop anti-Hungarian propaganda. Here is a sample of what the Slovaks in the year of the peace conference were told about their Hungarian neighbors:

The Mongol tribes, the Huns, Avars, Tatars, Magyars elicited only repulsion and terror in Europe. Culturally none of these peoples ever created anything original . . . The Hungarians base their history on stories, decorated with pretty lies . . . They defended European culture [against the Turks] they say, though in reality they invited their relatives, the Turks . . . To ensure lasting peace in Central Europe, the Hungarians would have to be sent back to their ancestral home between the Urals and the Black Sea, or even farther . . . They never created anything serious in culture . . . those among them who did were considered renegades.¹⁷

Continued anti-Hungarian propaganda notwithstanding, in the spring of 1946 the population exchange agreement did bring some relaxation in hostile tensions between Hungary and Czechoslovakia. A new major crisis developed in the summer of 1946 when the Czechoslovak demand for further transfer of 200,000 Hungarians was rejected at the Paris peace conference. Already in May the Czechoslovak plan suffered a rebuff when the four-power foreign ministers conference in Paris discussed the conditions of the treaties to be concluded at the peace conference. Czechoslovakia had hoped that the plan for the expulsion of 200,000 Hungarians would be included among the proposals. It was not.

In the meantime, knowing full well that they would not be able to expel as many Hungarians as expected, neither prior to nor after the peace conference, the Czechoslovaks resorted to still another stratagem in their effort to reduce the number of Hungarians: they launched "re-Slovakization."

"Re-Slovakization" stood for a return to Slovak nationality of those who had been Slovaks at one time but, in the ethnic stirrings of the Carpathian Basin, either their ancestors or themselves had become Hungarian.

Re-Slovakization was supposed to have been voluntary, and even a matter of privilege. However, considering the methods employed it would be more accurate to describe it as forced assimilation. The Hungarian Citizen was confronted with the choice: "Sign, or your life!" Signing meant civil rights, security, retention of belongings. Not signing meant homelessness, danger of persecution, economic bankruptcy.

This strange invention of instant assimilation was supported by a no less strange historical argument. Before Hungary fell victim of Ottoman-Turkish conquest in the 16th century, medieval "Southern Slovakia" had supposedly been completely Slovak; Hungarians fleeing from the Turks changed the ethnic composition of the area; oppressive Hungarian policies in the 19th century achieved further Magyarization. In other words, "re-Slovakization" was to compensate for Slovak losses and restore the ethnic status quo of the Middle Ages.

There is no historical evidence whatsoever to support this argument. Even Slovak historiography treats gingerly this theory. Avoiding to face the argument head on, they may say, as historian Samuel Cambel did, that a large portion of the Hungarian population strived "to become Slovak again"18 by the means of re-Slovakization.

The re-Slovakization campaign began at the time of the spring census in 1946. All people who knew some Slovak were asked to indicate their "intention regarding their future nationality." By indicating their intention "to become again Slovaks," they could avoid all the consequences which threatened people of Hungarian nationality. By July, this "buying of souls" became a nation-wide propaganda campaign.

In the villages, both with mixed and purely Hungarian populations, the Slovenská Liga (a mass organization to promote Slovak nationalism) posted Hungarian language posters promising life of peace and material security as well as citizenship to those who were willing to "re-Slovakize." The posters said: "Think it over! Tomorrow you want to sleep in peace, or not?"

Despite the hourly drummings in the villages to call attention to the posters, the campaign at the beginning had only limited success, Yet, frightened and humiliated, more and more people started going to the town houses "to sign." At the end, panic prevailed and only a few stubborn villagers refused to sign up for re-Slovakization. Conflicts over signing created crises often within families. There was no one to advise the simple folk. The intelligentsia was as confused and terrorized a the people at large. Where the "educated" signed up, the entire village did too. Where nobody took the initiative, more often than not, the entire village remained Hungarian.

Since few towns since 1918, when Czechoslovakia came into existence, remained immune to Slovakization, the pressure to re-Slovakize was even greater in the cities than in the villages where Hungarian ethnic homogeneity survived in most places. Re-Slovakization thus proceeded smoothly in urban areas. Also in mixed villages, or isolated Hungarian villages in predominantly Slovak regions, the campaign to re-Slovakize was a success. But in compact Hungarian rural areas there was resistance. For instance, the county of Duna-Szerdahely (Dunajská Streda in Slovak) in the predominantly Hungarian Csallóköz region (_itny Ostrov in Slovak) rejected re-Slovakization almost completely.

The often heard objective of re-Slovakization had been that there should be "no more than 200,000 Hungarians left" in Slovakia by the time of the peace conference. The expulsion of these "remaining" Hungarians was to be achieved at the peace conference. The official ordinance regarding re-Slovakization (No. 20,OOO-1-IV, 1946) was dated June 17, 1946. But the impact of re-Slovakization had been already felt before-and long thereafter. As a matter of fact, the 1946 re-Slovakization campaign affected every census ever since. The dreaded Resettlement Bureau was entrusted with the execution of re-Slovakization, re-Slovakization in fact was described as "one of the significant activities of the Resettlement Bureau in Slovakia."¹⁹

According to the re-Slovakization ordinance, people registering for re-Slovakization had to be classified into two groups. To the first group belonged those who had already declared themselves Slovaks at the time of the last prewar Czechoslovak census in 1930, but were "re-Hungarianzed under pressure" following the boundary changes of the Vienna Award of 1938. Such fluctuations in nationality were widespread among city dwellers, in Bratislava (Pozsony in Hungarian), Kosice (Kassa), Levica (Léva), Luèenec (Losonc), Komárno (Komárom), Rimavská Sobota (Rimaszombat), and Ro_nava (Rozsnyó). Roughly half of the Hungarian population in most of these cities belonged to the first group. However, in Kosice the ratio was as high as two-thirds, while in Komárno only a low one-fifth. The second group, mostly village population, consisted of those who had remained Hungarian in the census of 1930, but after decades or centuries, their Slovak "national consciousness" had now been supposedly "re-awakened."

It is claimed that 135,317 Hungarian families totaling 410,820 persons applied for re-Slovakization. In the fall of 1946, after "thorough scrutiny," -326,579 applicants were granted "the privilege" of declaring themselves Slovak.²⁰ The Hungarians who re-Slovakized were entitled to vote in the 1948 parliamentary elections, the rest of the Hungarians were not.

The statistical losses of the Hungarian population under forcible re-Slovakization were substantial. In the 1950 census, the Hungarian population of Czechoslovakia fell by almost 50 percent, to an all-time low of 369,505.21. The true number of Hungarians, of course, has not changed, as attested by later census when re-Slovakization pressure had become less of a factor in Statistics.²²

Hungarian public opinion looked forward to the Paris peace conference, hopeful of an international solution of the question of the Hungarian minority of Slovakia. However, the Paris peace conference was a defeat for Hungary and for the one-in-four of all Hungarians living as national minorities in the neighboring states. Even the prewar system of protection of the rights of minorities was ditched by the Paris peace conference (lasting from July 29th to October 15th.) The only Hungarian success was the defeat of the Czechoslovak effort to get the approval of the transfer of the so-called "remaining" 200,000 Hungarians from Slovakia.

The speech on August 2nd by Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk set the anti-minority tone of the conference: "It would be very difficult to persuade the Czechoslovak people to accept a return of the notion of minority protection, such as the treaties that were in effect between 1919 and 1938. Any Czechoslovak government which would attempt to enforce such treaties would probably be swept away by the ire of the people."²³ Foreign Minister Masaryk then went on denouncing -the minorities as having been responsible for the Czechoslovak crisis that led to World War.

The question of the Hungarian minority in Czechoslovakia was raised on August 14^th, when Hungarian Foreign Minister János Gyöngyösi, head of the Hungarian delegation, presented defeated Hungary's case before the assembly of victors. He began his speech on a note of hope in a fair solution: "The fact that we are allowed to have our say here, encourages us to hope that the peace negotiations this time are different from those that took place here more than 25 years ago."²⁴ The Hungarian foreign minister's hope in a different peacemaking than the one that produced the Treaty of Trianon had no foundation in reality whatsoever. Not unlike after World War I, in 1946 too, the peace settlement had been decided in advance. Not unlike in 1920, Hungary was expected to sign another dictated peace.

Janics: Czechoslovak Policy and the Hungarian Minority