1 - Shifting Borders and Shifting Populations

Summary

On November 2, 1938, inhabitants of Czechoslovakia and Hungary alike waited for news of the decision of the arbiters in Vienna. Ede Heltai, a soldier in the Maria Theresa Bicycle Squadron stationed in Pest County, reacted with enthusiasm. “Hungarian justice has won!” he noted in his diary. “Kassa will not be Košice any longer.” Hundreds of kilometers away, in Košice itself, an anonymous solider in the Czechoslovak army was also paying close attention. “Who could forget the evening of November 2, 1938,” he wrote, waiting for word on the future of the city. As the radio announcer listed the names of areas to be handed over to Hungary, he paused, momentarily, before saying Košice. “No one slept that night,” the soldier recalled. “It was a terrible night.” Czechs and Slovaks who had made their homes and built their lives in Košice began evacuating the city.

German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano announced at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna that Hungary would receive a narrow strip of territory along its northern border of approximately 12,000 square kilometers, which roughly followed the ethno-linguistic boundaries of the region. It included most of the urban areas in southern Slovakia: Rozsynó, Kassa, Komárom, Galánta, Érsekújvár, Léva, Losonc, and Rimaszombat. In addition, Hungary also received Beregszász, Munkács, and Ungvár, the largest cities in Carpathian Ruthenia. Only two of the cities the Hungarian delegation had demanded during negotiations, Bratislava and Nitra, remained in Czecho-Slovakia. The awarded territory accounted for over a third of Slovakia’s arable land.

In Slovakia, most official reactions emphasized that the Slovak nation had been dealt a major injustice in Vienna, orchestrated by its enemies: Jews, Hungarians, and Czechs. Jozef Tiso, prime minister of the autonomous region of Slovakia, addressed the Slovak people over the radio and complained that the Vienna arbitration was “decided about us like about a defeated enemy.” It was a diktat, as Tiso described it, but Slovakia was not in a position to fight the German-Italian decision. Slovakia’s future foreign minister, Ferdinand Ďurčanský, urged Tiso to publicly blame the Jews for Slovakia’s disaster. The prime minister did not go so far, but the Slovak nationalist press quickly stepped in, with one newspaper alleging that Jews had become “the most audacious supporters of the partition of Slovakia.”