Bratislava: Pope Francis opened his first full day in Slovakia on Monday by meeting the country’s president ahead of the country’s Jewish community to respect the dead Holocaust and redeem the involvement and racial crime of World War II.
Francis arrived at the Presidential Palace looked good and rested on the second day of the four-day pilgrimage to Hungary and Slovakia who marked its first international sightseeing since undergoing intestinal surgery in July.
In a message to the Slovak people written in the conference palace, Francis wrote that he came as a pilgrim to Bratislava and prayed that the country might be “a message of brotherhood and peace in the heart of Europe.” After a tight day in Budapest on Sunday, Francis, 84, spent Monday in Bratislava where the peak of his visit was an afternoon meeting at the capital Holocaust Memorial, which was built on a synagogue location destroyed by the Communist regime in the 1960s.
He went to the event that had been called on Sundays for Christians and Jews to work together to stop the resurrection of antisemitism in Europe, saying it was “a fuse that should not be burned.” Slovakia stated his independence from Czechoslovakia on March 14, 1939 and became a Nazi doll country with a politician and Roman Catholic politician, Jozef Tiso became the country’s president.
Under his government, the country adopted a strict anti-Jewish law and deported around 75,000 Jews to the Nazi Death camp where around 68,000 perish.
Tiso was sentenced to death and was hung in 1947.
Now, only around 5,000 Jews living in Slovakia, most of the Roman Catholic countries amounted to 5.5 million are now ruled by the Central Coalition Government of the Four Parties.
Only last week, the government officially apologized for the racial laws that disarmed their country’s Jews on their human rights and civilians, preventing their access to education and ratifying their property to non-Jewish owners.
Marked the 80-year anniversary of the “Jewish Code” adopted on September 9, 1941, the government said in a September 8 statement that “felt the current moral obligation to openly reveal the sadness of the crime carried out by the past regime.” The code was considered as one of the toughest anti-Jewish laws adopted in Europe during the war.
Slovakia is now home to the fars of our Slovak Party Party, who already have members in the Slovak Parliament since 2016.
The party openly advocates the World World World World World Heritage Nazi.
The members use Nazi salute and want Slovakia out of the European Union and NATO.