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X. Introduction

This book[1] has been on my mind for two years. I was inspired to write about the political and social endeavours of Slovak women by a study that my friend Gabriela Dudeková published in 2011.[2]

As a political scientist focussing on the history of political thought in Central Europe and a careful student of Czech, Czechoslovak and Slovak history, I admired Gabriela's study; in an impressive tour de force reaching from the 19th to the 21st centuries, she and her fellow authors analysed the situation of women in the Czech lands, Slovakia in the Hungarian Kingdom, Hungary, Austria and Czechoslovakia, providing copious historical analysis based on archive material in four languages. Most valid is the fine fabric of social history: I had a precise and vivid picture of what it meant being a woman in those days, the range of freedoms and limitations Central European women faced under the various political regimes.

My study cannot compare with Gabriela's seminal volume, which is both the reference book par excellence on family relations in the Central European region and an important contribution to gender studies.[3] My intention is rather modest: I would like to present to the Western reader the history of Slovakia seen through the eyes of seven women who rendered outstanding service to their nation. All seven have three things in common: they have a Slovak cultural and political identity, they were or are in the public eye and they have engaged in education, science, the arts, politics, the humanities and the media, that is, in crucial areas of Slovak society.

The portraits range from the late 19th century to contemporary Slovakia, presenting the activities of these women on behalf of their co-citizens. In their endeavours, all of them attempted or are attempting to make life better – for all Slovak citizens, not just women. In a wider framework, they represent the ethical values of modern Europe – 'Europeanness'. They are committed to values that the young generation of today considers normal, standard, guaranteed. Yet, in their times, these values were far from being standard, let alone constitutionally granted. They were but ideas that had to be fought for, ideas of a better and more just world that had to be put into practice. The women portrayed here campaigned for these values, and those alive today are still fighting for them on a daily basis.

X. 1 Criteria of selection

I selected the seven women on subjective grounds since they represent the spirit and reality of seven distinct historical eras of Slovak and Czechoslovak history. My three criteria for selection are: first, the seven women's visibility in the Slovak, Czechoslovak and European public eye; second, their activities not only for their nation, but also for the promotion of universal ethical values; and third, their physical presence in Slovakia, the fact that they stayed in their country and did not – for example – emigrate in 1945, 1948 or 1968.[4] After WWII, former officers and soldiers went to great lengths to flee with their families: most of them had fought in the Czechoslovak exile army shoulder to shoulder with the British, returned home in 1945 and then decided to flee as soon as the Communists took over in February 1948, in some cases using skills acquired in the war to take spectacular leave by stealing a Dakota and in another even driving a train across the border.[5]

In the years of the Cold War, the irrational refusal of some Western intellectuals to believe what witnesses and refugees reported about the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe can be explained by what the French liberal thinker Raymond Aron (1905–1983) called The Opium of the Intellectuals,[6] an almost esoteric adherence to Marxism-Leninism. Tony Judt (1948–2010), a renowned expert on French political thought, described the atmosphere among French leftist intellectuals in the 1960s:

"There was thus an aura of romance surrounding the Communist adventure that gave to its failings and mistakes a truly heroic quality. This can be sensed even in the memoirs of the victims themselves, who shared with their French sympathizers and apologists a common feeling of tragic destiny."[7]

Artur London (1915–1986), born in Moravia into a Communist family, had fought in the Spanish Civil War, survived the Nazi concentration camp of Mauthausen, the Stalinist show trials of the 1950s and was rehabilitated in 1963. He could never fully distance himself from Marxism-Leninism and the Party.[8] He emigrated to Paris and joined the leftist French radicals, who were supportive of his conviction that his terrible experience had a deeper "metahistorical level of meaning".[9] Marxism-Leninism and the Party never ceased to be his intellectual home. London, a witness to the trial of the former general secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party KSČ Rudolf Slánský (1901–1952), about his loyalty:

"I never lost faith in the strength and purity of the communist ideal … "[10]

By contrast, the wives of convicted Party members had quite different views about the regime. Heda Margolius Kovály (1919–2010)[11] and Josefa Slánská's (1913–1995)[12] memoirs provide lively descriptions of the frightening atmosphere in Prague in the 1950s. Jo Langer's (1912–1990) memoirs of Simone Signoret (1921–1985), the famous French actress and her distant cousin, illustrate the ignorance of Western intellectuals about life under Communism.

In 1934, Jo, born Žofia Bein, a Hungarian Jew from Budapest, had married the economist Oscar Langer, a Slovak Jew and Communist; they lived in Bratislava and she had Czechoslovak citizenship. They emigrated to the USA in 1938 and returned to Bratislava after WWII. Oscar had a high position in the Central Committee, and they enjoyed the economic privileges of the nomenklatura.

With Oscar's arrest in 1951, Jo and her two young daughters were catapulted into economic hardship and social apartheid. In 1953, the authorities sent her to the countryside in the so-called Akcia B (Action B), a kind of Communist 'kin liability', extended to the families of Party members accused in the show trials. One rationale of Akcia B was to isolate the wives and children of the convicted Party members; they were politically unreliable, infested with the virus of treason. In the countryside, they would learn how to work with the peasants and workers. The second and more important reason for Akcia B was the transformation of the capital's social structure: the Party's intention was to give the apartments of doctors, lawyers, university professors and entrepreneurs, that is, the urban intellectual elite, to workers; yet, mostly Party members, policemen and personnel of the ŠtB, the domestic State Security Service, moved into the approximately 1500 apartments and houses of 672 evicted and deported families.[13]

In 1955, Jo returned illegally to Bratislava and supported her daughters by doing translations. In the more liberal atmosphere of 1967, the months preceding the Prague Spring, she managed to arrange a meeting with Simone Signoret in London. Simone's appeal to the Czechoslovak authorities would certainly help to free Oscar, or so Jo must have thought. Her intention was to ask Simone for support, explaining to her famous cousin that her husband had been arrested in 1951 and accused of conspiracy against the state. The false testimony the authorities had made him give by way of torture and appeals to party discipline was used to legitimate the trial and execution of Rudolf Slánský and former Foreign Minister Vladimír Clementis (1902–1952) in 1952. Oscar's role was that of a witness to Slánský and Clementis' 'crimes'. Jo on the meeting with Simone:

"I was anxious to explain, why I had appeared so eager ten years earlier, and I was also longing to take this unique opportunity of talking with a representative of that (to me) incomprehensible species, the French intellectual left, and seeing for myself if they really did not know, or just preferred to ignore, the truth about the régimes still so staunchly supported by l'Humanité. … I had hardly started when she cut me short by saying 'But if you had stayed in New York your husband, as a communist, would have met with very much the same fate.' I fell silent. When she asked me to go on with my story I said it was useless. I excused myself … and left."[14]

I find it hard to understand such an attitude, but Simone had the decency to admit to her mistakes later. Pained by a bad conscience, she would translate Jo's memoirs into French in co-operation with the historian Eric Vigne, displaying gracious honesty:

"In 1957, in my hotel room in Prague, I committed a sin out of ignorance. When I received a phone call announcing my cousin, I told myself: 'Oh là là, what a drag. The family on my back while touring, what a drag!' I did not know that I had a cousin there and completely ignored that phone call, which actually was a cry for help, an SOS ... Montand and I were on the fourth stop of this tour in 1957. In the USSR, Poland and East Germany, we had seen quite a few questionable things, but we were absolutely certain that three and a half years after Stalin's death there were no more prisoners … It is crazy that we lived eight days in the city of Prague and ignored this. I was guilty a second time in London in 1967. She wanted to talk to me, I did not let her. I had other worries."[15]

In 1970, Signoret and her husband Yves Montand (1921–1991) would star as Lise and Artur London in the movie L'aveu (The Confession), which was based on London's memoirs. The movie shows how the Czechoslovak authorities, instructed by Soviet NKVD officers, prepared the victims for the show trials by depriving them of sleep, subjecting them to beatings and long and exhausting discussions about the principles of Marxism-Leninism and the duties of a party member.[16]

This study does not deal with emigrants; that is the reason why I did not dedicate a chapter to Jo Langer in spite of the fact that her testimony is an excellent illustration of daily life under early Communism. I focus instead on how seven women committed themselves to enlightenment, education, critical thinking, knowledge, medicine, military resistance, human rights, the arts and politics in their native Slovakia. Each woman can be seen as a symbol of her times representing the spirit and reality of the historical era in which she lives and acts. They share the ethical values of liberty, equality and fraternity: liberty as political freedom from any rule that is not legitimate in terms of the popular vote; equality before the law, predicated on upholding the rule-of-law state; and the idea that caring for others in the sense of res publica, that which is common to all, is the social glue that keeps state, nation and government together.

My selection is not representative – and I don't claim that it is. Furthermore, it is far from my intention to belittle or ignore the efforts millions of Slovak women made in the Kingdom of Hungary, during the two world wars and under Communism to bring up their families. On top of scarce resources, they had to deal with an immense bureaucracy and a patronizing state apparatus that treated the citizens as children, depriving them of minimal civil rights. It is also far from my intention to make a moral judgement about those who emigrated; nobody who has not experienced daily life in a non-democratic regime has the right to condemn those who flee in the hope of finding a better life for themselves and their families. My focus is on the seven women, all of whom can teach us a lot about courage and commitment; they voice, through their activities, what millions of unknown Slovak women were and are concerned with, sharing with them the often brutal experience of Slovak and Czechoslovak politics.

Before I present the portraits, a brief note: I plan a second volume on seven Czech women, applying the same criteria of selection and method. I shall present women of different historical epochs to reflect the different political history of the Czech lands. To avoid unnecessary repetition, the periods of Slovak history cho