World War II

The aim of this paper, the heuristic base of which is formed mainly by archival documents and personal testimonies of witnesses, is to provide a closer view on the events in 1944 - 1945 and their impact on the family living within the borders of the-then Slovak state. It deals with families belonging to the majority population, but a special focus is on (especially) the family of the persecuted Jewish minority.

The paper focuses on the war career of the Nová žena journal, more precisely, on war-time strategies applied by a journal exhibiting specific features. The first one is that the Nová žena was not only for women, but entirely women´s – written and run by women only. The next typical feature was the lasting political and ideological orientation towards neutral Vatican, which was a source of permanent contradictions with the official propaganda contents preferred by the war-time Slovak state.

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".