Bratislava, Czechoslovakia

Pre-war

In 1930, approximately 15,000 Jews lived in Bratislava, which had a total population of 120,000. On the eve of the Holocaust the Jewish community was the largest in Slovakia.

Jews were active in local politics and cultural life. The city was a Jewish religious and political centre and home to the renowned Pressburg Yeshiva, as well as the Zionist Organisation of Slovakia.

^{Paul Loewner and his sister Hanna Tanner, both members of the Boys, were born in Bratislava.}

In March 1938, following the annexation of Austria to Germany, hundreds of Jewish refugees arrived in the city.

Antisemitism was an issue in the inter-war period, as after the city’s inclusion in Czechoslovakia, the local Slovak population identified the Jews with the city’s former German and Hungarian elites. There were serious anti-Jewish riots in 1938 and 1939. As a result many Jews left Bratislava.

Wartime

After the creation of the Slovak state in March 1939, a Nazi ally, persecution of the Jews began immediately. Between March and October 1942, the Hlinka Guard (the paramilitary wing of the Slovak People’s Party), alongside Slovak police and military personnel, concentrated 58,000 Jews in labour camps, mainly in Novaky, Sered and Vyhne. There were no ghettos in the wartime Slovakian state.

By March 1942, when the deportations began, nearly half of the city’s Jews had been evicted, and dispersed in smaller towns across the country.

German forces occupied Bratislava in September 1944 and approximately 2,000 of the remaining Jews were sent to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp in occupied Poland.

The vast majority of Bratislava’s Jews were murdered in the Holocaust.

Liberation

Of the over 15,000 Jews living in Bratislava in 1940 only about 3,500 survived. Jews returning to Bratislava from the war met with indifference and sometimes even hostility.

^{Rachel Levy was one of the Boys who spent time in Bratislava after the liberation.}

Immediately after the war, Bratislava became the centre of Slovak Jewry due to the fact that many Slovak Jewish survivors preferred to settle in the relative safety of Bratislava as opposed to their former hometowns in the country. A number of the Boys spent time in the city.

Restitution issues and high levels of antisemitism led most survivors to believe that there was no future for the Jewish community in Slovakia. There were anti-Jewish riots in 1946 and 1948.

Despite this, Bratislava was a major transit point in the Jewish exodus out of eastern Europe in the years after the Holocaust, as Jews headed for the American occupied zone of Austria.

^{Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld}

From 1945 until February 1949, more than 150,000 Jewish migrants passed through Bratislava, most of them walking across the bridge at nearby Devinska Nova Ves.

Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, who brought the Fifth Group of the Boys to UK spent time in Bratislava after the liberation looking for orphaned Jewish children.

Aftermath

About 2,000 Jews remained in Bratislava in 1949, when the communist government took control of the country. Under communism Jewish religious and cultural life was gradually restricted and the property of Jewish organisations was nationalised.

In the 1960s, restrictions on Jewish life were eased and some Jews allowed to leave for Israel. Many more Jews left the city after the fall of communism.

Present-day

It is estimated that about 800 Jews now live in Bratislava.