Joseph Paučo, Unconquerables, trans. Andrew Bachleda (New York: Vantage, 1958), 225 pp.
This “novel” doesn’t really add up to a novel, and a prefatory note admits as much: “For reasons of personal security, it has been necessary to present some of the characters under fictional names. The basic structure of the work, however, is factual; only several minor details are imaginary.” In other words, what we have here are 225 pages of reporting of communist atrocities against Slovak Catholics, loosely connected in a structureless narrative. As far as I can tell, it was composed in Slovak but published first in English translation in the United States, with a Slovak edition appearing in 1961 but also only in the U.S.
A structureless narrative recounting atrocities wouldn’t necessarily be the worst thing in the world, even from a literary perspective. Fiction has long served the purpose of telling the world truths that are otherwise too hot to handle, as the translator of this book alludes to by comparing it to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (a gross overstatement, but point taken). Slovakia has long been overlooked on the world stage, and the persecution of the Catholic church—which reached a nasty peak in 1950 and saw huge numbers of imprisonments and tortures especially of priests, monks, and nuns—remains relatively unknown in the annals of communist crime.
Author Jozef Paučo had left his native country in 1945 but kept close ties, which is why he wanted to alert citizens of his new nation as to what horrors were happening behind the Iron Curtain. He seems in retrospect a bit absurdly optimistic that the U.S. would listen and do something about all the Slavs under the Soviet thumb, but you can’t blame him for trying.
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However, if it’s going to be lousy as a novel, it has to at least be otherwise spotless in its reporting, and that’s where I have the second and larger problem with this book, and more broadly with Paučo. Let me make it clear that I have no soft spot whatsoever for communism or illusions about what it is, either idealistically or actually. But you cannot talk justly about the horrors of the twentieth century and pin the blame only the communists. There are also fascists of all stripes, and Nazis in particular. And Paučo basically gives the latter a pass.
It took me awhile to notice the omission. What first alerted me was the fact that the Slovak National Uprising against the Nazis was never mentioned—only the later Soviet invasion that succeeded where the Slovaks had failed. It is accurate to call the latter an invasion; the Soviets set the Slovaks up for failure because they wanted to occupy the country themselves, once they got the Nazis out. But Slovakia at this time was not a sovereign territory. It was a puppet government under Hitler. So to speak only of Soviet invasion and not of Nazi control is extremely misleading.
The second warning sign was how the book waxes eloquent about Slovak nationalism. Since nationalism is an almost universal fault in political discourse of the past two centuries, it would be ridiculous to hold Paučo uniquely responsible for falling prey to it, however silly his claims—speaking of Slovaks as if they were a recognizable entity for a thousand years or more, praising their exceptional qualities of faith and hospitality and uprightness, asserting an unchanging love of democracy and freedom etc etc etc. For sure, the Magyars turned on the Slovaks, but only late in their millennium-long history together; for sure, Czechs came in and took a lot of key jobs, but largely because Slovaks were left uneducated by the Magyars and thus unqualified to take said jobs. But you’d think from Paučo’s telling that Czechs were a bigger threat to Slovakia than Nazi Germans!
And that leads to the most serious problem with this book: Paučo’s blind admiration for Jozef Tiso and his predecessor Andrej Hlinka. (Paučo admired Tiso so much that he even wrote a biography of the man.) His admiration was bound up with his nationalism, because Paučo clearly thought that Slovakia deserved its own independent republic and got exactly that during World War II—but again, with no remarks on how exactly it came about. The truth is that Hlinka and later Tiso, both priests, hitched Catholicism onto nationalism with a soft spot for fascism as a key to a wholesome religious state. The Nazis dismembered the successful democratic Czechoslovak nation in the late 1930s in order to occupy the Czech part (this is the “Sudetenland” you learned about in high school social studies). The so-called “independent” Slovak republic was merely a pawn under Tiso’s rule.
Tiso was hardly a heroic figure making the best of a bad situation. Among other things, under his watch Slovakia became the only country to pay the Nazis to deport their Jews! He (and most other Slovaks) did think that the Jews were being relocated to labor camps, not death camps, and tried to stop the trains once it became clear what was really happening. But the plain fact is that Tiso was a willing fascist collaborator throughout his reign.
Tiso was tried and executed after the war, but Paučo makes it sound like yet another expression of communist oppression of good Slovak Catholics. It’s worth noting that although communists held a great deal of power at the time of Tiso’s conviction, they had not yet staged their coup d’état. So, under the circumstances, it’s not altogether surprising that the U.S. was deaf to Paučo’s accounts of the real suffering of Slovak Catholics and unmoved by his appeals for help! The Americans may have despised the communists, but they had fought to stop the Nazis.
If anything, this almost unreadable novel redeems itself as a demonstration of the perils of blind focus on your enemy without a hard look at your own team. Communism was truly evil: but so was fascism. You can’t eradicate evil at one extreme by collaborating with it at the other. A lesson that our world today could stand to remember.