Slovak politicians warned of the dangers of ideological extremism over the weekend as their country marked Holocaust Victims and Racial Hatred Day in memory of the more than 60,000 of the country’s Jews murdered during the Holocaust.
Likely referring to the growing popularity of the Neo-Nazi Kotleba-People’s Party-Our Slovakia (LSNS), which became the country’s fifth most popular party after an election breakthrough last year, Deputy Parliament Speaker Béla Bugár said on Saturday that extremist opinions held by some MPs pose a danger to the country, the Slovak Spectator reported.
“The Slovak nation has a historical memory and does not forget about its 57,628 Jewish fellow citizens – the victims of persecutions and war crimes, deported to labour and death camps,” said Parliament speaker Andrej Danko.
Danko denied collective guilt could be to Slovakians, whose government was a member of the axis that deported Jews, pointing out efforts by Slovaks to save Jews.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, after news was passed on to the Slovakian collaborationist government "that the German authorities were murdering the Slovak Jews in German-occupied Poland, the Slovak President hesitated, and then refused, to deport the remaining 24,000 Jews in Slovakia in the autumn of 1942.”
According to the Slovakian Spectator, Pavol Mešťan, the head of the Museum of Jewish Culture in Slovakia, thanked Prime Minister Robert Fico for laying a wreath at Holocaust Victims Memorial at Rybné Square in Bratislava and stated that “the catastrophe of the Jews was a dreadful experience – the biggest mass murder in history. We must show that it was the experience of humankind, not just a Jewish experience. They were only the ones who paid dear for it. We have to show – and keep showing – that Nazism was born somewhere, came from somewhere, and it did not appear out of thin air."
