Domande frequenti

After the First World War the lands of the former Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg) Empire were divided into a number of new states based largely on ethnicity. One such country was Czechoslovakia, which united the closely related Slovaks and Czechs of Bohemia and Moravia.

The country contained a large number of ethnic minorities, most notably the Germans of the Sudetenland (the mountainous areas of Bohemia and Moravia along the German-Austrian border). This became a focus of revanchist claims following the rise to power the Nazis under Adolf Hitler in Germany on 1933. In 1938 Austria was annexed to Germany, followed later in the same year by the Sudetenland (as per the Munich Agreement). In 1939 Hitler resolved to annex the remainder of Bohemia and Moravia, agreeing with right-wing Slovak leader Jozef Tiso to set up an independent Slovak state (in reality a German puppet state). A raft of anti-Jewish laws were then passed mirroring those in Nazi Germany, including the expropriation of Jewish property (dubbed 'Aryanisation'). The film is set in1942, at the time when the Tiso regime began assisting the Germans in their removal of all Jews to concentration camps for extermination. This process was ramped up significantly following a Slovak uprising in 1944 and the subsequent occupation of the country by Nazi forces.

The Tiso regime fell in 1945 as Soviet forces invaded from the east, ultimately resulting in the defeat of Nazi Germany later that year. A new Czechoslovak state was established under Soviet influence, and Tiso was captured and later executed for treason in 1947. However by this point the vast majority of Slovakia's Jews had already been killed in the concentration camps, with most of the survivors choosing to emigrate.