The population of the Hungarian-Slovak borderland lived transnational lives and were increasingly subjected to state-sponsored violence because of the nomadic border. As a result of state boundaries expanding and contracting, in the ten-year period this book investigates, residents went from living in Czechoslovakia to Hungary and back to Czechoslovakia once again. But the story of the territory during the mid-century changes in sovereignty rarely enters the history books, let alone public discourse. In his recent book on the “Hungarian times” in the borderland (meaning 1938 to 1945), Attila Simon makes the observation that neither scholars nor the general public have discussed with any frequency what life was like for the inhabitants of the area during the period of Hungarian rule. Equally puzzling is the lack of scholarship on the postwar migrations in and out of the borderland. Sometimes, a brief discussion of the Hungarians of southern Slovakia forcibly moved to Bohemia and Hungary makes it into broader narratives about national victimhood. Yet there is no substantive social history or recognition of collective identities generated by the movement of hundreds of thousands of individuals in both directions after World War II. Individual accounts suggest that leaving their homelands had a lasting effect on these people and they considered it a trauma that affected them for years to come. There were no communal organizations either in Czechoslovakia or Hungary to promote a collective memory of these events, as was the case in West Germany for the expelled Volksdeutsche.

The silence that surrounds this tumultuous decade may be attributed to what Tony Judt described as a “collective amnesia” of the Second World War and its aftermath broadly among Europeans, since “it suited almost everyone to forget what they or their parents did, to forget what was done to them, to forget what they saw and to forget what they knew.” The loss of life and livelihood, disruption of social and family networks, and interpersonal conflicts exacerbated by the border changes were probably easier to suppress than to rehash.

Due in large part to its multiple changes in sovereignty, the borderland displays many of the characteristics Christian Gerlach describes in his analysis of “extremely violent societies.” Each border change set off “large and sudden redistributive processes” that involved a substantial number of individuals “acting to protect or improve their livelihood.”