MARK KUIUANSKY
203
Without a moment's hesitation the woman answered, "It is not true
about the Second World War. It's not true about the Holocaust. Why are
you so afraid?"
This, of course, is exactly why Zuzana Stern is afraid.
Slovak nationalists have a public relations problem.
If
people started
to look at the history of the last Slovak state, they would be afraid to start
a new one. So a little revisionism is needed to assuage public fear. But the
revisionism instead reinforces that fear. The cry for Slovak independence
was born out of post-Communist liberty.
In
the old days, just
talk
of such
a thing could have brought Soviet tank columns in from the Ukraine. But
now a democratically elected Czechoslovakian legislature has agreed to
dissolve the nation and let independent Slovakia go its own way. The
agreement came last spring, although it took three tries to get the break–
up bill passed, not because of Czech opposition but because of Slovak
hesitation. But this winter a new nation was born, as Czechoslovakia shed
its poorest region.
The inevitable question when arriving in Bratislava is, can this town
really be a capital city'
In
the days when there was a Habsburg Empire,
Bratislava was a village on the Danube called Pressburg. Today it could be
studied in an urban-planning curriculum as a model of what not to do.
Tattered nineteenth-century grandeur, baroque spires and decorated
domes surprise you around corners. But much of the town is gray, block–
shaped buildings. Highways, like scars that didn't heal right, slash through
the center of town.
If
this once quaint burg on the Danube is no longer
very quaint , it is still just a burg. Only the leading bank could cash my
American Express travelers cheques , and then only when I met with an
executive in his third-floor office and explained what they were. This is a
banking system that will soon be issuing currency and regulating an econ–
omy.
In
the 1960s, urban renewal meant tearing down the dilapidated
historical architecture and building massive rectangles. With an ironic
smile, Silvia Kraus, a nineteen-year-old medical student whose father had
once lived in the Jewish quarter, called the process that had turned her
world into concrete "a Communist concept." The Jewish quarter, one of
Europe's oldest, vanished twenty years ago when the government decided
to build a modern bridge across the Danube, connected by a major high–
way. By then, few Jews were living in the section, and the synagogue
which was also leveled for the highway had been abandoned for decades.
Only ten thousand out of ninety thousand Slovakian Jews survived the
first Slovak republic. Many of the survivors emigrated between 1945 and
1968.
Silvia Kraus was still in high school in 1989. "November was the
revolution," she said. "In January came the religion." Suddenly students
