Monsignor Jozef Tiso

...JANICE BROUN...

...Tiso governed the pro-German Slovak Republic from 1939 to 1945 and was executed as a war criminal in Bratislava on April 18,1947, for his collaboration with the Germans...

...Hlinka, founder of the Peasants' party, was, like Tiso, a priest who rose to a position of leadership because the clergy were natural leaders of society in a backward nation...

...All teachers and most government officials were to profess Catholicism, all children to attend catechism classes at school and Sunday Mass...

...In defense of Slovakia, it is said that Tiso's government never won a majority in a free election, holding power essentially at the behest of the Germans, and the anti-Semitic laws though later approved were first promulgated without parliamentary approval...

...The Slovak National party and eight other smaller groupings demand a sovereign and independent Slovakia...

...So was the secular government of Tomas Mazaryk, with its capital in Prague and, to Slovak eyes, its deeply anticlerical spirit...

...Some bishops did concern themselves with Jewish converts to Catholicism...

...The most gruesome aspect of this collaboration was the deportation of fifty-eight thousand Slovakian Jews to Hitler's death camps...

...For Czechs, the Slovak Republic was a Fascist state that collaborated with the Germans...

...And some still rests on this unex-amined period in Slovakian history...

...Two experienced Czech priests, Vaclav Maly and Valdimir Vylhidka, make the point: The Slovak Catholic church emerged from dire persecution under the Communists with a deepened faith, especially among the younger generations...

...For Slovaks, Tiso's "parish republic" represents their short history as a separate state, and Tiso and Andrej Hlinka, his less-compromised predecessor in the Slovak Peasants' party, are still national heroes...

...Jozef Tiso, the president of Slovakia during World War n, in the town of Banovce nad Bebravou provoked a national controversy in Czechoslovakia, including a protest from President Vaclav Havel...

...Its placement was supported not only by the ultranationalist Slovak National party, but also by the Christian Democratic Movement, which Carnogursky founded after breaking with Havel prior to last June's elections...

...The Czechs were a prosperous, literate nation with a strong secularist streak and a history as an independent state going back to the ninth century...

...Against the current political struggle and the Communist distortion of Slovakian history, there is an urgent need, as Tiso's hometown officials point out, for a commission to clarify and evaluate his role and that of his "parish republic...

...Tiso attempted to establish an autocratic theocracy that represented a reaction against Czech secularism...

...Tiso granted exemptions to Jews deemed essential to the government or the economy...

...Though Tiso's memorial plaque has been removed, his ghost has not been laid to rest...

...Czech domination of the new republic was deeply resented in Slovakia...

...Decent Slovaks, horrified by reports from soldiers who witnessed the fate of deported Jews, did what they could to help...

...These divisions and ambiguities appear as well in the nation's political life...

...Library books were to be censored and antichurch statements penalized...

...Though united with the Czechs last December in overthrowing the Communist government of Gustav Husak and in supporting the interim presidency of Havel, the Slovaks retain a deep uneasiness about the Czechoslovak federation...

...Some priests baptized Jews without demanding conversion...

...The Vatican condemned anti-Semitism, as did the Slovakian Lutheran bishops...

...The Catholic church, dazzled by Tiso's charismatic personality and his pledges to restore a truly Catholic Slovakia, gave him considerable support...

...Apart from speaking related languages, the two had little in common...

...Tiso's own history is seen in different lights by the Czechs and the Slovaks, and the recent controversy, resolved by the removal of the plaque honoring Tiso as founder of the first independent Slovak teacher training college, is a reminder of the always uneasy relationship between the two peoples and the two regions of the country...

...Mazaryk enjoys no such reputation in Slovakia...

...Finally in 1943, under pressure from the Vatican, Tiso suspended further deportations and read out in his own church the condemnation finally issued by the Slovakian bishops...

...and it was the first Nazi satellite to deport its Jews, this, according to German sources, without any outside pressure...

...In contrast, the Slovaks were largely impoverished peasants, strongly Catholic, and in 1918 had fewer than a thousand university graduates...

...Almost no books appeared on the Jewish tragedy and the roles of Tiso, his government, and the Slovakian bishops...

...In 1945, in the second largest national uprising against fascism in Europe, Tiso's "parish republic" collapsed like a pack of cards...

...The deep irony of the situation is exemplified by the fact that Bishop Korec attended the ceremony dedicating the plaque honoring Tiso...

...None of this grim history was ever dealt with in postwar Czechoslovakia...

...They fear that these positive gains may be jeopardized by a resurgence of old-style Catholic triumphalism and authoritarianism that will find expression in resurgent Slovakian nationalism...

...The Slovak Catholic church failed at first to condemn the laws and the deportations which were carried out from March through October 1942...

...and when the Vatican denounced the government roundup of Jewish women and girls to serve as prostitutes for the German army, there were protests...

...And his promotion of the Slovak language and cultural institutions in worship services and service books were at the expense of other ethnic minorities...

...Among these, the Hungarians and Germans were strong enough to resist, but the Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, and Gypsies all felt themselves under threat...

...People Against Violence, the Slovakian counterpart to Havel's Civic Forum, remains the major political force in Slovakia and it defends the current federal system while pressing for greater autonomy for both the Czech and Slovak republics...

...From the first, the Vatican was disturbed at Tiso serving as head of state and at the implications of a "Catholic" government promulgating anti-Semitic laws...

...In Slovakia, anti-Semitism remained latent, an unspoken subject, until 1987 when twenty-four Slovaks, mostly young and half of them Christians, raised the issue and begged for forgiveness in a samizdat magazine...

...In 1918 the alliance in one republic of the Czechs and the Slovaks was forged from the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire...

...But there is a deeper danger here as well, perhaps best understood and expressed by those who share the Slovaks' Catholic faith but not their history or political tendencies...

...Carnogursky's Christian Democrats are the second largest party and they call for a confederation allowing Slovakia to enter Europe "as a sovereign and equal entity...

...But by that time, fifty-eight thousand Jews had been deported to the camps and to their deaths along with one-hundred-and-eighty thousand Jews from the rest of "Czechoslovakia," which was under direct Nazi rule...

...Signatories included Jan Carnogursky-a dissident, ally of Vaclav Havel, and now leader of the Slovak Christian Democrats-and Jan Korec-the spiritual leader of the underground renewal among young Slovak Catholics, and now bishop of Nitra...

...It has also been argued that Slovakian "independence" kept the nation free of the worst of Nazi influence and that intensive Catholic religious education shielded children from Nazi propaganda...

...Some of this rests on still divergent attitudes between the two peoples toward religion and politics, church and state...

...Tiso and his government, made up of priests and Catholic laymen, shared many of the Nazis' views, and their own anti-Semitism made for ready cooperation with Hitler's policy of deportation: Slovakia's ninety thousand Jews represented 4 percent of the population...

...When the Czech lands, Bohemia and Moravia, fell to the German army after the Sudeten crisis in 1939, Hitler endorsed the establishment of an independent Slovak republic with Tiso as its president...

...Though the high standing of many Protestants in cultural, economic, and military life prevented Tiso from persecuting the mainline Protestant churches, he outlawed smaller churches...

...Steps were to be taken to abolish dancing, mixed bathing, and coeducation, and to exclude women from university training on the grounds their only role was to be good Catholic mothers...

...In an interview, a young Slovak doctor recalled that she knew many older people who had hidden Jews...

...Even so, most of Tiso's "theocratic" measures encountered so much opposition that they were quickly abandoned...

...its Jewish code of 1941 surpassed even the Nuremburg laws in severity...

...The Czechs see Mazaryk as a national hero and deeply respect his philosophical views, which many, including Havel, believe helped to hold them together and even resist the Communist regime...

...In the end, his domestic and foreign policies served to foster hypocrisy, arouse derision, and discredit the church, all of this paving the way for the Communist reaction in 1947 and support for their efforts to eradicate the church...

...A millennium of Hungarian rule had kept Slovakia a rural backwater with virtually no independent history...