1939-1944 The change in relations between Jews and Christians

Relations between the local population and the Jews during the interwar period were generally good, and sometimes even more than that. The late 1930s brought with them, among other things, anti-Semitism, influenced by Nazi Germany. However, relations between the Jews and the local population took a significant turn for the worse only after the Hungarian occupation. Of course, during the Hungarian occupation, too, there were people from the local population who maintained good relations with their Jewish neighbors and acquaintances, but we can definitely see a general trend of a sharp change in relations, based on the testimonies of survivors of the region.

One can point to a number of factors in the change in relations with the local population.

• First of all, the evidence shows that the change is most evident in the form of active expressions of hatred, especially among Hungarians, who constituted almost a quarter of the city’s inhabitants between the world wars, and Germans. Many was already said and written regarding the important influence of Hungarian anti-Semitism between the world wars on the behavior of the Hungarian population towards the Jews during the Second World War, and these matters certainly apply to the Carpathians as well.
• For most of the Ruthenian population in the Carpathians, one can discuss the spread of indifference with regard to the fate of their Jewish neighbors. This indifference lies in the impossible situation, in fact, of the Jews in Carpatho-Rus between the world wars: Jews, of course, embraced the democratic rule of Czechoslovakia. However, they aroused the anger of the Hungarian minority, which was insulted due to the loss of Hungarian sovereignty in the region after the First World War.
• In addition, the Ruthenians did not approve of the Jewish tendency toward the democratic Czechoslovak government, which was not so receptive to the territorial and national aspirations of the Ruthenians, in contrast to the Czech commitments in the post-World War I agreements.

Hungarian Jews also had complaints against the Jews of the region about abandoning the Hungarian homeland. These claims were used by Czech anti-Semites as proof of the Jewish hypocrisy and influenced local government officials, the supervision upon which from Prague was limited and scarce. Therefore, the Jews enjoyed a certain protection from Czechoslovakian democracy, but when it disintegrated in late 1938, they remained virtually defenseless among the local population, who took advantage of the easy and convenient way of blaming the Jews in their own national problems, whether in the absence of a significant anti-Semitic tradition or without it.