Charles Sabatos
Yeditepe University
Compared to the Czech experience of wartime occupation, which inspired a number of novels and films that gained international acclaim, the Slovak experience remains relatively little known. Among the most notable works by Slovak-Jewish survivors of World War II, both recently published in English translation, are Leopold Lahola’s short story collection The Last Thing (1968) and Agneša Kalinová’s memoir My Seven Lives (2012), published in the form of a conversation with the novelist Jana Juráňová.
Lahola (1918-68) participated in the Slovak National Uprising, the partisan movement against the wartime Slovak State, but emigrated in 1949 to Israel and later West Germany. He returned to Czechoslovakia during the “Prague Spring” period and his collected stories were published in 1968. In particular, his autobiographical story “In the First Person” (written in 1951) shows the complex psychological effects of returning to everyday life after wartime trauma. His sudden death that year and the Warsaw Pact invasion caused his work to fall into obscurity, only to be rediscovered in the postsocialist period.
A teenager at the outbreak of the war, Kalinová (1924-2014) escaped with family friends over the Hungarian border and hid in a convent for two and a half years. Following the war, Kalinová became a Slovak journalist, editor, and film critic, but after further oppression after 1968, she emigrated to Munich with her family, where she was an active contributor to Radio Free Europe.
Both of these narratives are testimonies to persecution under Nazi occupation, including the experience of witnessing a liberation that most of their relatives and many of their friends did not live to see. This paper will examine their depiction of the Slovak wartime experience, with the aim of bringing greater attention to these writers whose emigration caused their works to be marginalized and banned during the socialist period.
Charles Sabatos is a professor in English and comparative literature at Yeditepe University in Istanbul, specializing in Central European literary history. He is the author of Frontier Orientalism and the Turkish Image in Central European Literature