druhá svetová vojna

The Slovak National Uprising was one of the most important events in the 20th-century history of Slovakia. Although historians have seriously examined this topic, they have predominantly concentrated on its political and military aspects. Much less attention has been paid to the everyday life of common people living in the territory taken by the insurgents. The author has produced this paper with an ambition to bring more detailed pieces of information about everyday life during the Slovak National Uprising.

During World War II Polish poets fought with weapon and pen against the occupants both on the domestic front and the battlefields abroad. They fought in all Polish armies, regular and conspiratorial formations, in General Anders's army as well as in General Berling's army. Their poetry encouraged the Polish people to fight and nourished patriotic feelings in a society distressed by the war in an occupied country, ghettos, detention camps, prisons and concentration camps.

The most numerous section of the Slovak society in the interwar period of 1918-1938 was formed by farmer families. Although agriculture was the most important branch of the national economy, it lagged behind the developed European countries. At the end of the 1930s, modern technologies found way also to the Slovak farmer families. This new phenomenon was clearly visible in the most fertile regions in the south and west of Slovakia. However, the Vienna Arbitration deprived the Slovak agriculture of its best land.

Family exists at every stage of human development and in every system. Family is the basic social unit consisting of the spouses, their children and other relatives, tied by blood and social bonds. The most important task of the family is the organisation and maintenance of their household, taking care of basic needs and emotional life of its members as well. One of the external features enabling to recognise members of a particular family is a common surname or a name traditionally shared by the family.

The Second World War had a damaging impact upon many Polish families. As a result of the decision carried out by the Allies, the Poles settled in the territory of the Second Polish Republic (Rzeczpospolita II) were forced to leave their homes. The tragic circumstances related to their expulsion, the difficult journey to other lands and conditions under which they were rebuilding their existence in a new, unknown land, were described in diaries and memoirs. In this paper the writer subjects these texts to a detailed analysis.

The Second World War affected the Jewish population in a specific way. In a critical state appeared especially the traditional Jewish family and, in fact, it ceased to exist. It is possible to speak about torsos of families – children without parents, spouses without their partners and other family members. The return to a society exhibiting complicated social relations, harsh socio-economic conditions and a post-war psychosis was tremendously difficult for the Jews. In this context, they had three possible options: to preserve their identity, to get assimilated, or to emigrate.

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".