“Oťec Fever”: The Untold Story of Móric Wohlstein and the Slovak Jewish Resistance During the Holocaust

The country formerly known as Czechoslovakia existed from the end of World War I, when it declared independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1938, when, under the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland was ceded to Nazi Germany, and following which a strip of southern Slovakia was absorbed by Hungary and Cieszyn Silesia (the Czech part of the Trans-Olza region of Upper Silesia) was annexed by Poland. Each of those territorial acquisitions was determined by the predominant ethnicity of its extant population (German, Hungarian and Polish, respectively).

In March 1939, the remainder of the Czechoslovakia was further dismembered and became split into the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and the Slovak Republic, while the rest of Carpathian Ruthenia was occupied and annexed by Hungary.

Poland had resumed control of the minor but richer part of eastern Upper Silesia in 1921, when Cieszyn Silesia (the larger Trans-Olza region of eastern Upper Silesia) became part of Czechoslovakia. Poland’s annexation of Cieszyn—which only lasted 11 months—was widely viewed as grave tactical error, with some scholars of the opinion that it may have contributed to British and French reluctance to attack the Germans with greater forces when it began WWII by occupying Poland in September 1939. Winston Churchill compared Germany and Poland to “vultures landing on the dying carcass of Czechoslovakia” and lamented that:

…over a question so minor as Cieszyn, [the Poles] sundered themselves from all those friends in France, Britain and the United States who had lifted them once again to a national, coherent life, and whom they were soon to need so sorely. … It is a mystery and tragedy of European history that a people capable of every heroic virtue … as individuals, should repeatedly show such inveterate faults in almost every aspect of their governmental life.

Winston S. Churchill The Gathering Storm: The Second World War (Volume 1). London: Houghton Miffin, 1948