Jewish and Romani Encounters under Slovak Persecution
Jewish and Romani Encounters under Slovak Persecution

Summary/Abstract: This article examines the persecution of Jews and Roma in wartime Slovakia, with a particular focus on the historically multicultural eastern region of the former Šariš Zemplín County. It studies the removal of Roma from Slovak towns and villages from 1941, and the 1942 deportation of Jews to occupied Poland. These events occurred concurrently with the regime’s “civilisation mission” in the peripheries. While it was Nazi Germany that fuelled the machinery of death and destruction that marked World War II, the speed and direction of ousting the Jews and Roma from Slovakia was not straightforward and depended on national and local factors and actors. The article shows that the racialisation of Slovakia’s borderlands was driven by both the urban elites in Bratislava who tried to appease Hitler and the national population, as well as the inhabitants of the volatile peripheries themselves. In this sense, the two processes of Jewish and Romani persecution were connected in the racial imaginings of the fascist Slovak state.

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