BRATISLAVA, August 27, (WEBNOVINY)- Prime Minister Iveta Radicova invited the citizens on Friday to commemorate the over 10,000 people who died in the anti-fascist Slovak National Uprising (SNP), which Slovakia will commemorate on Sunday, August 29. “Thank them for having the courage to take the side of freedom and justice and sacrificing the most precious they had,“ said Radicova in a statement marking the 66th anniversary of the event.
Radicova thinks that the historic assessment of this era of Slovak history will not be unified for long. As she said in her statement regarding the wartime Slovak State and the Slovak National Uprising, there still appears to be more voices urging historians to unambiguously assess both events. However, she is persuaded that it will take a long time to turn this wishful thought into reality because people from that era are still alive and historians were brought up in concrete families in which they are influenced by their family environments. Just like everybody, they tend to judge all of history according to the part they know through directly gained or inherited personal experience, she said.
Criteria and values through which we view history are of great importance towards how history is evaluated, believes Radicova. “He who judges the era of the Slovak State according to the material welfare of that time yet ignores the horrors and suffering of innocent people will be very tolerant to the wartime state. If the statehood, its creation, and maintenance are promoted to the highest value then the wartime Slovak State and the Slovak National Uprising will be assessed in other ways than when democracy, freedom, and tolerance are regarded as the highest values,” stated Radicova. According to her value criteria, the good is unanimously on the side of those who bravely and courageously stood up against the aggressor and the totalitarian regime which had desired for a new global order under which one race and one nation would enslave the others.
Radicova said that we have to protect the historic memory and hand over stories of courage, bravery, humanity, and a mutual help in dangerous times. She finds it important that even now when we live in democracy with plurality and freedom, when Slovakia is a part of the joint European house, an abuse of power and injustice cannot repeat in any form.
Since the end of World War II, Slovakia has been celebrating the SNP anniversary on August 29 as a national holiday. In the face of Nazi German troops who were entering Slovakia on August 29, 1944, because of the increasing anti-Fascist pressure on the puppet regime that governed the country, the Central Command of the Slovak Army ordered the troops to begin an armed resistance, thus starting the SNP. Most Slovak historians consider the uprising the fight for the basic values of a democratic society by the allied forces that defeated Nazi Germany.
SITA
