Vanished History The Holocaust in Czech and Slovak Historical Culture [Paperback]

Bohemia and Moravia, today part of the Czech Republic, was the first territory with a majority of non-German speakers occupied by Hitlers Third Reich on the eve of the World War II. Tens of thousands of Jewish inhabitants in the so called Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia soon felt the tragic consequences of Nazi racial politics. Not all Czechs, however,remained passive bystanders during the genocide. After the destruction of Czechoslovakia in 1938-39, Slovakia became a formally independent but fully subordinate satellite of Germany. Despite the fact it was not occupied until 1944, Slovakia paid Germany to deport its own Jewish citizens to extermination camps.

About 270,000 out of the 360,000 Czech and Slovak casualties of World War II were victims of the Holocaust. Despite these statistics, the Holocaust vanished almost entirely from post-war Czechoslovak, and later Czech and Slovak, historical cultures. The communist dictatorship carried the main responsibility for this disappearance, yet the situation has not changed much since the fall of the communist regime. The main questions of this study are how and why the Holocaust was excluded from the Czech and Slovak history.

Overall, this is an informative book [that]& may be especially useful for readers interested in the ongoing development of historical narratives in Europe generally, and in the Czech and Slovak Republics in particular.? Holocaust and Genocide

Vanished Historyrepresents a major contribution to the field of collective memory and Holocaust studies in the Czech and Slovak republics [and] offers a thoughtful analysis of the Holocausts position in Czech and Slovak historical culture during the long 1990s.? Judaica Bohemiae

The end result is a fascinating journey into the Czech and Slovak historical narratives of the 1990s&[an]important and original contribution to the growing field of l¨