Bratislava/Poprad, East Slovakia, March 25 (CTK) – A plaque marking the 75th anniversary of launching mass transports of Jews from Slovakia to concentration camps during WWII was unveiled in Poprad yesterday, with Slovak President Andrej Kiska attending.
One of the Holocaust survivors, Edita Grosmanova, 92, who was in the first train transport from the territory of the fascist Slovak state, also attended the event.
She was in the transport of some 1000 Jewish girls and single women sent from Poprad to the Auschwitz extermination camp on March 25, 1942.
Slovakia, which collaborated with the Nazi Germany during the war, deported some 70,000 Jews to the Nazi concentration and extermination camps.
“Unfortunately, the dark ghosts from the past are being revived in Slovakia again. We have again groups of people, even of politicians, in our country who segregate others on the basis of their religion or skin colour. Extremists, anti-Jewish and anti-Romany moods are being revived,” Kiska said during the ceremony held at the site where Jews had to gather before the wartime transports.
Out of the Slovak parties in parliament, the far-right Kotleba-People’s Party Our Slovakia (LSNS), follows the legacy of the wartime Slovak state.
The party, which also openly stands up against Romanies and Slovakia’s EU and NATO membership, surprisingly won 8 percent of the vote in the 2016 general election and it has 14 seats in the 150-seat Slovak parliament.
Events in memory of the mass transports of Jews from Slovakia will last three days. The programme includes a commemorative meeting, a concert and a documentary film screening.
Prime Minister Robert Fico (Smer-Social Democracy, Smer-SD) visited Poprad on Friday to pay homage to the Holocaust victims.
In his speech, he criticised representatives of the wartime Slovak state. It was a satellite of Adolf Hitler’s Germany and its representatives often decorated soldiers who were murdering people in Slovakia and abroad, Fico said.
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