The synagogue at Liptovsky Mikulas: Slovakia's ever-present past.

The Slovak town of Liptovsky Mikulas lies near the Tatra Mountains, in a countryside of almost other-worldly natural magnificence. Ruins of castles look down from heights over the Vah, a river along which Slavs have lived since the sixth century. Jews are known to have been in Prague during the tenth century; possibly, some arrived in this part of Slovakia at the same time.

My wife's parents were born in nearby villages, and some relatives still live there. Besides its location, Liptovsky Mikulas has several distinctions. One is a succession of Jewish mayors during the latter years of the nineteenth century, a time when Slovakia was experiencing violent anti-Semitic outbreaks. Another is that the Hlinka Guard, a Slovak version of the SS, used the town as an assembly point for Jews sent to Auschwitz. During a visit in 1977, I asked our driver to take us to where the Jews had been ordered to gather. It turned out to be a nondescript courtyard. Elsewhere in Slovakia, I had seen plaques citing events of World War II, but here I saw no reminders of the deportations.

Our driver suggested we might like to see something else. He drove a short distance, parked, and we walked about a hundred feet between two buildings.

Suddenly, there loomed a synagogue. Its architecture resembled that of the Orthodox temple in which my father had worshiped in Cleveland, when I was a child, except that this synagogue had a wire fence around it, bullet-hole pockmarks on its walls, and padlocks on its doors. The Communist authorities of the time apparently did not think it of practical value as a warehouse, the use to which they had put other abandoned Jewish houses of worship. It stood empty, alone, forgotten.

I found myself saying Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. I had the eerie feeling that while I was looking at the synagogue, it was watching me. A stranger who was a coreligionist had arrived. The edifice wanted communion. It had no one to whom to turn and I could not turn away. For me, the building symbolized the Eastern European civilization from which my parents stemmed, a civilization that Hitler's war utterly and finally ended.

My wife is a Slovak-American Catholic, and without exception, our hosts had greeted me warmly. Crucifixes in their homes attested to their commitment to Catholicism. But a half-century earlier, their leaders had proclaimed Slovakia a "Catholic state," and had condemned tens of thousands of Jewish neighbors to death, although they had committed no crimes. Monsignor Jozef Tiso (1877-1947), Slovakia's premier, condoned robberies and deportations, and his compatriots held him in high esteem.

Perhaps some of my wife's relatives or their friends had played a role in the destruction of Slovak Jewry? One of my wife's relatives, whose brother had married a Jew, offered the theory that Tiso really wanted to save Jews from the Germans, but given the SS, he had too few opportunities to do so. I found this hard to believe. True, some wealthy Jews, who paid very large sums to Tiso and other fascists, had lived. But others who had done so died along with poorer brethren.

Much else that I heard troubled me. On the one hand, part of what has been said about the arrogance of wealthy Slovak Jews struck home. On the other hand, nothing could make me forget the synagogue. At one and the same time, I believed the worst of my wife's people and yet saw daily demonstrations of their genuine hospitality. I had to learn more about what had happened.

For nine hundred years, between 1000 and 1918, Slovaks lived under brutal Hungarian oppression. Their relationship to the conqueror resembled that of the Irish under British domination. Magyars, also largely Catholic, treated Slovaks like human livestock. Clerical anti-Semitism in Slovakia made Jews out to be Christ-killers and ritual murderers of Christian children. But except for the most benighted Slovaks, what concerned non-Jews about Jews was not theoretical ties to the Devil but actual ties to Hungarians. For almost in their entirety, Jews comprised the commercial classes that organized and managed the Slovak economy on Hungary's behalf.

Budapest reciprocated by removing one legal barrier after another to full Jewish citizenship. Some Slovak Jews converted to Catholicism, and a much larger number assimilated. But nearly all Jews ate and dressed better than most Slovak Catholics, and had better housing.

Overwhelmingly, the Slovak Catholics' reaction was to make anti-Semitism an integral part of their nationalism. Slovaks defined Jews as contemptible collaborators. The Jews, meanwhile, drew closer to their Hungarian protectors.

Tiso's independent Slovak Republic, created in 1939 and collapsed in 1945, never amounted to more than a loathsome caricature of Nazi Germany. It considered Hungary the main enemy and concentrated on looting Jews. Slovaks could apply to local offices and obtain Jewish-owned businesses, homes, and whatever other properties they wanted, at laughable prices. They did not have to witness the deportations of Jews, for the Hlinka Guard and the SS took care of such details.

The most poignant artistic attempt to portray what occurred at the time is a 1965 film made in Slovakia, The Shop on Main Street. The plot concerns a simple Slovak carpenter who acquires a button shop owned by a senile Jewish widow who is soon to be deported. She eventually grasps what is happening and why. He is tom between a basic decency and circumstances beyond his control. In the end, both perish: she, accidentally from a fall; he, by suicide, which he sees as the only way out. In New York, a visitor from Slovakia told my wife that the movie was nothing but "Jewish politics." The conversation shocked us, as did the idea that Slovak separatists actually dreamt of reestablishing an independent Slovakia on the Tiso model.

Both ideas turned out to be eminently thinkable. As Slovakia prepared to secede from Czechoslovakia in 1993, Slovak officials rehabilitated Tiso and publicly honored the memory of Monsignor Andrej Hlinka, the founder of Slovak fascism and the Hlinka Guard. They shouted the old fascist slogans in the streets and prepared to use the old fascist symbols on street signs.

History was being replayed. Except that some major changes had to be written into the script. For one thing, just 3,000 Jews now live among 5 million Slovaks, whereas 90,000 lived among 3 million in 1939. For another, no Jews hold critical positions in the Slovak economy. Thus another manifestation of a post-World War II Eastern European phenomenon: anti-Semitism without Jews. But how can you claim the existence of Jewish conspiracies when you can't identify a single Jewish conspirator?

Given this conundrum, I was surprised in April 1994, when Slovakia competed with Hungary to offer restitution to Holocaust survivors. On the face of it, the announcement from Bratislava made no sense. But that is where multi-billionaire and philanthropist George Soros enters the picture.

Soros, born a Hungarian Jew and very nearly deported during the Holocaust, began establishing "foundations" in Eastern Europe during the early 1980s. They are now located in sixteen countries, including Slovakia. Soros's allowed purpose is to manage a sort of one-man Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe. He can make available extraordinary sums of money, if he so chooses. His foundation in Ukraine, which saw ghastly anti-Semitism during World War II, has thus far received $250 million.

There are many theories about why Soros does what he does. Some think that he is supremely egotistical. Others, that he wants to affect the destinies of whole nations. And still others, that his philanthropy is a smoke screen for manipulating economies in the wake of the Soviet collapse. But whatever Soros's reasons, Eastern European leaders compete for his attention.

Where does this leave me? I wonder about leaders who offer restitution for events they deny occurred, after they learn of possible foundation grants and investments by a Jew. Is this a return to the "court Jew" of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who served as a private financial adviser to kings, emperors, and dukes? I don't know what to make of it, as I don't know what to make of the welcome I received in Slovakia.

The problem for me is best symbolized by that synagogue in Liptovsky Mikulas. What it said to me is that we should be exposing criminal regimes, and refusing to honor fascist thugs and those who finance them.

MILTON GOLDIN is a fund-raising counsel and writer who lives in Tarrytown, New York.