World War I

The family history of the writer Tereza Vansová (1857-1942) was affected by two world wars. She lived through the Great War and World War II as an adult person – as the wife, later widow of an Evangelical pastor, socially engaged member of the Slovak intelligentsia aware of their national identity. There is no doubt that her distinguished position in society and her religion as well as her social status determined the character of her personal and family experience; furthermore, they influenced her conditions during and after the wars in terms of the applied "strategies of survival".

This article explores the phenomenon of the ‘Green Cadres' at the end of the First World War in Austria-Hungary, with a focus on events in western Slovakia 1918-1920. The Green Cadres were bands of army deserters and radicalized peasants who hid in the forests and mountains of the monarchy during the last year of the war and then violently attempted to topple the social-political order in many localities as the state collapsed.

In the last days of the First World War soldiers returning home, along with civilians, attacked representatives of the Hungarian state and wealthy individuals, especially Jews. They expelled them from their homes and looted them, or they simply destroyed their property. In some places regular Hungarian troops executed the leaders of these rioters. This study seeks to offer an alternative to the prevailing interpretation of the looting, which emphasize the social or ethnic motivations of the economically and nationally oppressed Slovak rioters.