Limits to “Jewish power”: how Slovak Jewish leaders negotiated restitution of property after the Second World War

Guilt, Responsibility and Trauma: Restoring the Moral Self-Image in Postwar Slovakia

“…78 Indeed, it is here that we see the unwillingness to face the past in its complexity, not only in the sense of allying the country with Nazi Germany but in the very communal exclusion of Jews and, hence, also in the Holocaust. 79 While it was already the resistance authorities who deemed all property transfers, according to the racial legislation of the wartime state, null and void, and while the central government in Prague attempted to regulate the restitution claims as early as on 19 May 1945, and although the restitution law was introduced on 16 May 1946, the Slovak postwar bodies were reluctant to authorize these laws, making them virtually ineffective on Slovak territory. Repeatedly, every couple of months, institutions representing Jewish victims approached the Slovak but also the central Prague administration, sometimes including President Edvard Beneš, being vocal about the guilt and responsibility on the part of both the former regime and the majority society.…”