Notes 1 Introduction: Rethinking Teschen, Orava, and Spiš, 1918–47 1. The territories of the former counties of Orava (Orawa in Polish) and Spiš (Spisz in Polish), parts of Slovak territory within the bounds of the Kingdom of Hungary before 1918. The upper parts of Orava and Spiš are also referred to as Upper Orava and Upper Spiš. 2. The Duchy of Teschen (Těšínsko in Czech, Śląsk Cieszyński in Polish, Teschen in German), also referred to as Austrian Silesia, was a small territory rich in coal and heavy industry and was an important railway center. Inhabited by a mixture of Polish, Czech, and German populations, it had been claimed by Czecho-Slovakia and Poland. Silesia, lying on the confines of both the Poles and the Czechs, was long disputed between them. Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 84–5; Dagmar Perman, The Shaping of the Czechoslovak State: Diplomatic History of the Boundaries of Czechoslovakia, 1914–1920 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1962), 97. 3. Also referred to as Czechoslovakia. See Chapter 1 for more information on the adopted naming convention. 4. See Chapter 4 for President Wilson’s encounter with the two Polonophile peasants in Paris on 11 April 1919, who misinformed him that the popula- tion in Orava and Spiš was purely Polish. 5. F. Simon-Clément to S. Pichon, Prague, tel. no. 75, 8 September 1919, AD/ MAE, Paris, Z-Europe 1918–29, Tchéco-Slovaquie, vol. 53, 109–11. 6. Irene Matasovsky Matuschak, The Abandoned Ones: The Tragic Story of Slovakia’s Spis and Orava Regions, 1919–1948 (S.l.: Irene Matasovsky Matuschak, 2008), 113. 7. In 1412, Sigismund of Luxemburg, King of Hungary, mortgaged Stará L’ubovňa, Podolínec, Hniezdne and the 13 Spiš towns to Władysław II Jagiełło, King of Poland. Austria reincorporated this territory in 1770. In 1773–95 Austria, Prussia, and Russia partitioned the former Polish– Lithuanian Commonwealth (the Rzeczpospolita). The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria (Galicia) was created in 1773 in Austria. The Slovak–Polish border formed the border between the Kingdom of Hungary and Galicia/ Poland until 1918. The last minor border rectification occurred in 1897 in the Morské oko/Morskie Oko area in the High Tatra Mountains. Jozef Klimko, Vývoj územia Slovenska a utváranie jeho hranice [The Evolution of Slovakia’s Territory and Its Borders] (Bratislava: Obzor, 1980), 111. The Kingdom of Hungary formed until 1918 a part of the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The Kingdom included today’s Slovakia, Hungary, and Croatia and parts of Romania, Ukraine, Serbia, and Austria. According to the 1900 census the Magyars constituted 45.5 percent of Hungarians, followed 134 Notes 135 by the Roumanians (14.6 percent), Germans (11 percent), and the Slovaks (10.5 percent). R. W. Seton-Watson, Racial Problems in Hungary (New York: Howard Fertig, 1972), 3. The Trianon Peace Treaty of 1920 tried to separate the non-Magyar ethnic groups from the Magyars, yet both the Magyars and non-Magyars remained beyond the new borders. 8. According to Davies, there were only three gaps in the frontier between Czecho-Slovakia and Poland – at Spiš, at Orava, and at Tešín. Each of these teacups gave rise to protracted storms. Davies, God’s Playground, vol. 2, 494. 9. The expressions of solidarity in the aftermath of the tragic air accident of the Polish President and his entourage in April 2010 represent one of the latest examples of this sense of belonging. 10. Jaworzyna in Polish. 11. Józef Kuraś “Ogień” (1915–47) – member of the Polish resistance during World War II. After the war Kuraś joined anti-Communist guerillas. He operated along the Slovak–Polish border and the Slovaks in the Spiš region, whom the guerrillas deemed disloyal to Poland, became victims of their activities. The Kuraś controversy falls within Ronald Reagan’s dictum, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” Towarzystwo Słowaków w Polsce, an organization of the Slovaks in Poland, protested against unveiling a memorial dedicated to Kuraś in 2006 by the Polish president. 12. Michal Dočolomanský (1942–2008) – famous Slovak actor, was born in 1942 in Nedzeca (Niedzica in Polish) in Upper Spiš, the territory formerly belong- ing to Slovakia and now part of Poland. 13. On the eve of the 2010 World Cup soccer qualifying match between Slovakia and Poland in Bratislava (16 October 2008) unknown vandals defaced the wall in the small Slovak town Ždiar with graffiti depicting the Polish flag, [the year of] 1938 and the description in the Polish language „Jaworzyna jest nasza“ ([the village of] Javorina is ours). Tatranská Javorina, formerly known as Javorina, is one of several Slovak villages claimed by Poland in border delimitations after World War I. (Slovak Press Agency) SITA, “Ždiarčanov pobúril poľský nápis” [“The Ždiarans Upset by the Polish Graffiti”], Sme 16 October 2008 (available at http://www.sme.sk/c/4127570/zdiarcanov- poburil-polsky-napis.html#ixzz1KjxytHZu), accessed 27 April 2011. 14. The Kysuce region is referred to as Czadecki in the Polish sources. 15. Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924) – US politician, US President (1913–21). 16. Derek Heater, National Self-Determination: Woodrow Wilson and His legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 24, 32, 35–6. 17. Richard Holbrook, foreword to Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, by Margaret O. MacMillan (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2003), viii–ix; MacMillan in ibid., xxix, 290; Thaddeus V. Gromada, “Woodrow Wilson and Self-Determination for Spisz and Orawa,” in Wilsonian East Central Europe: Current Perspectives, ed. John S. Micgiel (New York: The Piłsudski Institute, 1995), 37. 18. Juraj Žudel, “Stanovenie čs. – poľskej hranice na Orave,” in Jozef Klimko, Politické a právne dejiny hraníc predmníchovskej republiky (1918–1938) [Political and Legal History of the Pre-Munich Republic’s Boundaries (1918–1938)] (Bratislava: Veda, Vydavateľstvo SAV, 1986), 128. 136 Notes 19. The Czecho-Slovak Peace Conference Mémoire no. 4, 1; quoted in Z. J. Gąsiorowski, “Polish–Czechoslovak Relations, 1918–1922,” Slavonic and East European Review 35 (1956–57), 180. 20. Jozef A. Mikuš wrote that Eduard Beneš, the Czecho-Slovak Minister for Foreign Affairs, deemed Těšín’s coal basin indispensable to Czecho-Slovakia’s economy and he wanted to recover it at all costs. Mikuš, Slovakia, A Political History: 1918–1950 (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1963), 208. 21. Jaroslav Krejcˇí, “The Balance Sheet of Ethnic Changes,” in Czechoslovakia, 1918–92: A Laboratory for Social Change, ed. Jaroslav Krejčí and Pavel Machonin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 36. The Conference of Ambassadors adopted its decision on 28 July 1920, not in May 1920. 22. Anna M. Cienciala and Titus Komarnicki, From Versailles to Locarno: Keys to Polish Foreign Policy, 1919–25 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1984), 4; Declaration of I. Paderewski upon the signing of the Decision of the Conference of Ambassadors Regarding Tešín Silesia, Spiš, and Orava, 30 July 1920, Paris, Archiwum polityczne Ignacego Paderewskiego, vol. 2 (1919–1921) (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 1974), 440–3. In the 1921 convention Poland and Czecho-Slovakia undertook to respect each other’s territorial integrity, Czecho-Slovakia proclaimed her désintéresse- ment in Eastern Galicia, and Poland hers in Slovakia. Gąsiorowski, “Polish– Czechoslovak Relations, 1918–1922,” 192. 23. The Slovak Prime Minister, Vladimír Mečiar, alluded in May 1993 to the Slovak territorial losses in Orava and Spiš after World War I and a compen- sation thereof by the Czech Republic as a part of Slovak–Czech settlement in the aftermath of the dissolution of Czecho-Slovakia. Mečiar’s comments sparked debate on the origins of the border delimitation in Orava and Spiš, an issue until then rather unknown by the general public and neglected by the press. The Slovak regional journal Spiš, Liptov, Orava gave space on its pages to the polemical debate. See “Český pohľad na nastolenú tému” [“The Czech View of the Issue”], Spiš, Liptov, Orava, no. 3, vol. III (1993): 7; “Revízia hraníc a pobúrenie v Poľsku” [“Border Revision and Indignation in Poland”], Spiš, Liptov, Orava, no. 3, vol. III (1993): 6; JUDr. Matej Andráš, “Všetko je na niečo dobré” [“There Is Always Something Good in Everything”], Spiš, Liptov, Orava, no. 3, vol. III (1993): 6–7; JUDr. Matej Andráš, “Znovu inak alebo každý inak” [“Again Differently or Everyone Differently”], Spiš, Liptov, Orava, no. 2, vol. III (1993): 8–9; Andrej Bán, “Chtějí nás prodat Čechům” [“Do They Want to Sell Us to the Czechs?”], Spiš, Liptov, Orava, no. 4, vol. III (1993): 8–9; and the articles by Dr. Janusz Kamocki and JUDr. Matej Andráš, “Znovu inak” [“Again Differently”], Spiš, Liptov, Orava, no. 5, vol. III (1993): 12–13. The Czech authors Mečislav Borák and Rudolf Žáček wrote “Ukradené” vesnice. Musí Česi platit za 8 slovenských obcí? [“Stolen” Villages: Must the Czechs Pay for 8 Slovak Villages?] (Český Těšín: Muzeum Těšínska, 1993), in which they defended the 1920 border settlement and its spiritus movens Edvard Beneš. They noticed little familiarity with the issue in Czecho-Slovakia and dismissed Slovak calls for compensation. 24. Rick Fawn, The Czech Republic: A Nation of Velvet (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 2000), 139. 25. Jiří Pehe, “Czech–Slovak Relations Deteriorate,” RFE/RL Research Report (30 April 1993) (Munich: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Institute, Notes 137 1993); quoted in Robert A. Young, The Breakup of Czechoslovakia (Kingston, ON: Queen’s University, Institute of Intergovernmental Relations, 1994), 61. 26. Czecho-Slovakia (the Czech and Slovak Federal Republic) ceased to exist on 31 December 1992 and the two successor states, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, took its place as of 1 January 1993. Czecho-Slovakia was spelled with and without a hyphen in 1918–92.