Although in Slovakia, Bohemia and Moravia (parts of Czechoslovakia), more than a quarter million lives were claimed during the Holocaust, these deaths have been mostly concealed in post-World War II Czech and Slovak history. A Czech native himself, author Tomas Sniegon shines a light on this cover up in Vanished History: The Holocaust in Czech and Slovak Historical Culture, to be published this month. Following, Sniegon uses the example of Oskar Schindler — famous as the protagonist of the 1993 film Schindler’s List — to explain just how much was hidden from citizens of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
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Film hero Oskar Schindler, played by Liam Neeson, entered the 1990s in the Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List as a new symbol of a so-called “Good citizen of the Third Reich,” which provoked both positive and negative reactions worldwide. However, very few at the same time knew that the real Oskar Schindler — far more complicated than the film character — had never lived in Germany until the World War II and thus actually had never been a “genuine-German German.”
Continue reading “Revealing the ‘Vanished History’ of the Holocaust”