‘Bystanders’

Though the scholar most associated with the concept, Raul Hilberg was not the first person to apply the ‘bystander’ concept to all those who were ‘neither perpetrators nor victims’.Footnote ⁷ In his 1987 book The Holocaust in History,Footnote ⁸ Michael Marrus devoted an entire chapter to ‘bystanders’ – whom he understood to be individuals, collectives and institutions who stood by in disbelief, including the ‘Anglo-American allies, neutrals, churches, the Jews themselves, and others’.Footnote ⁹ As Marrus admits, his perception of the ‘bystander’ concept was influenced by research on the indifference of the West to the fate of the Jews, especially in the accounts given by David S. Wyman's book The Abandonment of the Jews and Monty Penkower's The Jews Were Expendable.Footnote ¹⁰ Nevertheless, it was Hilberg and his book Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders, published first in 1992, which ‘decisively established a previously diverse subject matter in one of three monolithic blocs’.Footnote ¹¹

Hilberg does not offer much of a definition when he writes about ‘bystanders’. For him these were simply the ‘contemporaries of the Jewish catastrophe’, those who ‘saw or heard something of the event’. And whilst, as Hilberg asserts, many of those in Europe would not have agreed to be called ‘bystanders’, he goes on and applies it also to Jewish leaders, allied governments, neutral countries and churches.Footnote ¹²

For both Marrus and Hilberg, ‘bystander’ was not a judgment but a broad, universal concept. Marrus urged scholars to try and ‘comprehend the behaviour and activity (or inactivity) of bystanders by making a painstaking effort to enter into their minds and sensibilities’.Footnote ¹³ Hilberg went further, as he placed both those who helped the Jewish victims and those who ‘did or obtained something at the expense of the Jews’, as well as the ‘countless others [who] watched what had come to pass’, under the ‘bystander’ umbrella.Footnote ¹⁴

Many have seemingly adopted this wide concept, including scholars such as Deborah Lipstadt, for whom it also included ‘neutral governments and agencies, Jews living in relative safety, occupied countries, ordinary Germans, and above all, the Allied governments’.Footnote ¹⁵ Victoria Barnett, while showing the thin line between activity and passivity as well as complicity and indifference in Nazi Germany, has defended the usefulness of the concept but proposed to ‘define the “bystanders” not so much as a specific group of people, but rather in terms of a process that shapes the behaviour of those involved, occurs over a period of time, and is determined by numerous factors and dynamics’.Footnote ¹⁶ The recent debate on Dutch society under the German occupation has, however, revealed difficulties in assessing the level of ‘knowing’ that is needed to delimit who is a ‘guilty’ and who is an ‘innocent bystander’.Footnote ¹⁷ Many others have claimed the concept is not only too broad, and thus not analytically useful, but also that it no longer matches what we know of the past.Footnote ¹⁸ Mary Fulbrook, writing on those who would pass as ‘innocent bystanders’ after the war, has claimed that it was precisely these Germans who

Some scholars, including Levine, have proposed dismissing the term altogether and even suggest a substitute:

Others, such as Robert M. Ehrenreich and Tim Cole, have looked for ways to include different actions or diverse kinds of ‘bystanders’ without completely rejecting the concept. Both authors expressed their reservations about the concept, stemming from its semantics, but have continued to use it as ‘it is currently the most commonly accepted designation for this third segment of the population. As this area of debate continues to develop, however, a more neutral term (e.g. ‘general population’) should be introduced and adopted’.Footnote ²¹

What Ehrenreich and Cole propose for now is to treat all three of Hilberg's concepts as dynamic, scalable entities or models, flexible enough to analyse societies on different levels, including micro and macro history. By placing the ‘bystander’ concept on a horizontal line, the authors manage to include a broad spectrum of involvement under the concept and show how interdependent all three concepts in reality are.Footnote ²²

More recently, the ‘bystander’ concept has come under criticism from scholars who investigate the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Initially Omer Bartov included all ‘those who did not carry out genocide and related atrocities, and those who were not subjected to these policies, namely, the vast majority of German occupied Europe's population’ under the ‘bystander’ category.Footnote ²³ In his latter work on Jewish–Christian relations in Buczacz, however, Bartov has argued that the concept loses its meaning when applied to the Holocaust in the East:

What characterised the Holocaust in the East, Bartov argues, was its communal character. As a result, the ‘category of bystanders in these areas was largely meaningless, since everyone took part in the events, regardless of whether they suffered or profited from them’.Footnote ²⁵ In short, the proximity of events created not only an absurd sense of ‘normality’ but also disallowed passivity and indifference. Indeed, Jan T. Gross has already demonstrated how ‘fuzzy’ all three catchall concepts of the triad are – considering that ‘each episode of mass killing had its own situational dynamics’ – in his path-breaking monograph Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, a book that continues to shape the study of ‘neighbours’ in Nazi dominated Europe.Footnote ²⁶ And as others working on the ‘intimate violence’Footnote ²⁷ that took place ‘at the margins of the Holocaust, far from the factories of death, far from the well-oiled machine of destruction’,Footnote ²⁸ including Natalia Aleksiun and Jan Grabowski, argue, a micro historical perspective renders the ‘bystanders’ concept useless and obsolete.Footnote ²⁹ What follows is a response to this conceptual discussion, introducing Sartori's concept formation and the ‘ladder of abstraction’ to the debate.

Sartori's Concept Formation and the ‘Ladder of Abstraction’

Giovanni Sartori – a political scientist like Raul Hilberg – was an influential writer on democracy and political parties among other areas of study, including constitutional engineering. He is also known for his texts on the methodology of social sciences. He authored numerous key methodological essays – and by methodological we mean qualitative methodology, methodology as a way of thinking rather than research techniques. What Sartori was particularly interested in is logos, or, as he put it, ‘in a very crucial sense there is no methodology without logos, without thinking about thinking’.Footnote ³⁰ In an introduction to a book titled Concepts and Method in Social Science: The Tradition of Giovanni Sartori, its editors praise Sartori as standing ‘at the forefront among scholars who have tackled problems of conceptual confusion’.Footnote ³¹

Sartori believed that only a productive analysis might lead to the formation of concepts.Footnote ³² What was for him especially important, however, was an accurate, precise usage of these concepts – from both a semantic and analytic point of view. So what was he actually saying? Concepts cannot be separated from language as ‘[b]ad language generates bad thinking’,Footnote ³³ nor from semantics, as ‘the central trait of a natural language consists of its semantic properties’.Footnote ³⁴

There are two interrelated and inseparable levels of discourse for Sartori: a general (or ordinary) discourse and a scientific one. Each needs to rest on three elements, namely ‘(a) meanings, (b) words, (c) phenomena-or-facts’, or, when it comes to scientific discourse, ‘(a) concepts, (b) terms [words], (c) data’.Footnote ³⁵ In other words, neither the general (ordinary or everyday) nor scientific concept can be separated from words – and, by extension, words cannot be separated from their meaning. A precise, correct usage of terms and concepts was fundamental for Sartori as it is what determines good and bad comparisons or, to use his own words, ‘comparing and miscomparing’.Footnote ³⁶ Comparison – and every scholar would probably attest to this – is crucial as it helps us confirm or refute generalising theoretical claims. What is necessary, however, is to compare what is comparable and avoid what Sartori calls ‘cat–dog’ comparisons.Footnote ³⁷ Scholars can make different mistakes along the way that can lead to a ‘cat–dog’ comparison, and the most common one is conceptual stretching, a problem that Sartori paid particular attention to during his prolific academic life.

Conceptual stretching is the over generalising of a concept, using the concept as an umbrella for merely everything. Sartori warned that by using a concept irrespective of practical circumstances, it loses its basic heuristic value, leading to its ‘empirical vaporisation’.Footnote ³⁸ The concept of ‘mobilisation’ is often used to illustrate the point here.Footnote ³⁹ If we stretch it too far, it marks each and every activity in the society. By doing that, however, we may not notice the difference between, for example, political mobilisation and participation. While political mobilisation is forced from above, participation is voluntary and spontaneous. This is a simple yet crucial distinction. Disregarding these differences may lead to the misunderstandings of reality and its misinterpretation in further usage.

What also applies – and this is what we find useful in the on-going discussion on ‘bystanders’ as wellFootnote ⁴⁰ – is that concepts have different levels of abstraction and should be considered accordingly. In other words, concepts can – and should, at least according to Sartori – be placed on the ‘ladder of abstraction’.Footnote ⁴¹ What does he mean by this? If a concept is defined by a large number of attributes (wide intension) and is therefore applicable only to a limited number of cases (narrow extension), it is a so-called low-level concept. This one is situated low on the ‘ladder of abstraction’. When a concept is defined by a minimum number of attributes (narrow intension) and is therefore widely applicable (wide extension), this is a high-level concept, which is located at the top of the ‘ladder of abstraction’. As Peter Mair, another political scientist who insisted on the use of appropriate concepts and closely followed Sartori's writings on the matter, put it:

Concepts thus can have different meanings depending on their ‘level of abstraction’. This implies that rather than asking how many meanings a concept has, it makes sense to look for how abstract it is.Footnote ⁴³ But what can a scholar of history take from this? On top of the ‘ladder of abstraction’, concepts have theoretical validity and are very well applicable, but only at a general level. The further we descend on the ladder, the harder it becomes to apply a concept. On the lowest micro historical level, concepts can completely lose applicability but not their general validity: ‘we rightly complain that our categories are too general (and too vague) when they are theoretical, and too minute and descriptive when they are not’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Applying these words, which were principally addressed to political scientists, to historians of the Holocaust needs further explanation. Sartori was not, and this needs to be underlined, passing judgment on research conducted on the micro level. That was far from his intention; the point here is again on the limited analytical usefulness of concepts on the lowest level of abstraction.

The multitude of recently published works on the Holocaust using a ‘from below’ perspective give clear evidence that this angle of research is far from descriptive, of course. Many of the historical works that apply a microhistorical lens have been transformative, offering a far more complex perspective on events that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote ⁴⁵ Doing so, this scholarship has also contributed to how (and with what) we identify the ‘bystander’ concept. This is precisely the point we extend on: the microcosm of a particular event offers a dense understanding of a reality that cannot be captured by a concept. This dense reality, however, provides us with identification markers that are essential for forming a concept that can then be used on a higher level of abstraction.

In short, concepts should not be rejected automatically. If a concept cannot be applied on the lowest level of the ladder, we need to adapt the degree of its applicability. Nevertheless, there are analytical limits with regard to the portability of concepts between various ‘ladders of abstraction’ – and we will demonstrate these perimeters in the following empirical section.

Jews and Gentiles in Slovak Historiography

Hilberg's work, including his triad of ‘victims’, ‘perpetrators’ and ‘bystanders’, also influenced Slovak historiography of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Many scholars, however, have applied these concepts somewhat carelessly, and this is especially the case with the ‘bystander’ concept.Footnote ⁴⁶ What is more, Slovak scholarship seems to have neglected the majority society for a relatively long time, focusing (and understandably so) on the higher echelons of the authoritarian wartime regime first. Eduard Nižňanský, a prominent historian of the field, used critical words when it came to the state of research, claiming that ‘most authors analyse the history by looking at three main groups: victims (Jews); murderers (across the broader spectrum of the HSĽS [Hlinka's Slovak People's Party] ruling elite); and the silent majority. In terms of assigning responsibility for events, authors tend to see the majority Slovak population as a kind of background element, for example, as a difficult to describe silent majority’.Footnote ⁴⁷ It was primarily research into the looting of Jewish property that left scholars with more pressing and uncomfortable questions regarding the involvement of the majority society in the Holocaust in Slovakia, questions they could no longer avoid.Footnote ⁴⁸ If a ‘bystander’, as the Oxford Dictionary of English tells us, is ‘a person who is present at an event or incident but does not take part’, then the on-going research on Aryanisation should have erased this category from the history of wartime Slovakia,Footnote ⁴⁹ or so it would seem. The level of popular interest in the officially sanctioned robbery was so widespread that some authors speak of Slovakisation, rather than Aryanisation, of Jewish property in the largely Roman Catholic country.Footnote ⁵⁰ Despite mounting evidence, scholars including Nižňanský have nevertheless continued to speak of a ‘silent majority’ in Slovakia:

In 2005 a collection of documents on Jewish–Gentile relations in Slovakia during the Second World War was published. It was the seventh of what is now an eight part collection of primary documents on the Holocaust in Slovakia.Footnote ⁵² This edition of sources, collected by some of the finest historians on the subject, released an impressive number of documents on the position of the autonomous government towards the Jews, on the role of the president and the government in the Holocaust, on deportations, labour and concentration camps in the country and, for instance, on the Jewish Centre, an institution set up by the government to administer Jewish affairs in the wartime period. The seventh volume, edited by Nižňanský, stands out. The ninety-five documents collected here signal that it is, as the subtitle also suggests, really only ‘an outline of the issue’ (náčrt problému). There seems to be, however, a more important conceptual problem here – if these primary documents speak of a largely involved majority society, does the concept of ‘bystanders’ used here still hold? One of the reviewers of this collection, Nina Paulovicova (Paulovičová), disagreed with the editor's choice to stick with the concept, claiming that the ‘format of Raul Hilberg's “victim-bystander-perpetrator” approach does not hold up in the face of these documents. Often the documents attest to the failure of any attempt to pigeonhole the conduct of contemporaries into neat categories.’Footnote ⁵³ Should the concept of a ‘bystander’ be, at least in the case study of Slovakia, dismissed as not useful? And is any attempt for a conceptualisation doomed to failure, as Paulovicova believes? In order to show the applicability of the concept on a particular setting (and its limits), we will now turn to the town of Topoľčany.

Jews and Gentiles in Topoľčany

The township of Topoľčany (Topoltschan in German, Nagytapolcsány in Hungarian) is located in western Slovakia, in the valley of the Nitra River. Jewish merchants were present in Topoľčany already in the fourteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁴ By the seventeenth century, when the Jewish settlement here was already permanent, Topoľčany flourished, becoming an important regional centre of crafts and trade.Footnote ⁵⁵ Attempts to expel Jews, first in 1727 and later in 1755, failed, and with more and more Moravian refugees arriving in Topoľčany in the second half of the eighteenth century, the Jewish population grew fast.Footnote ⁵⁶ From 561 Jews (23 per cent of the total population of 2,500 people) in 1830, their numbers had almost tripled by 1900 (1,676 Jews or 33 per cent of the total population of 4,944 people). Thirty years later, in 1930, the Jewish population of Topoľčany counted 2,192 people, 26 per cent of the overall population (8,731 inhabitants).Footnote ⁵⁷ By then Jews typically worked in commerce, industry or trade and had regular contact with the majority, mostly peasant, society from whom they bought agricultural products.Footnote ⁵⁸

The community remained largely Orthodox, even after the 1868 Congress of Hungarian Jewry that led to the establishment of three distinct religious frameworks in the Hungarian Kingdom: the Orthodox, Neolog (or liberal) and the Stats Quo Ante, comprising those who did not side with either of the first two.Footnote ⁵⁹ The town's rabbis, Abraham Ullman and Asher Roth, founded the Yeshivah of Topoľčany, and while the ‘first years were difficult . . . by and by, the yeshivah developed and became one of the largest and most famous in old Hungary’.Footnote ⁶⁰ In the 1850s the town also had a Jewish school, first with German and later Hungarian as the language of instruction. ‘Beth Midrash, a Kindergarten, an old age home, a kitchen for the needy, a Mikveh with public baths, a Matzot factory[,] a slaughter house and butcher shops’ all fulfilled the community's needs, and what's more, became a testimony to the rich religious life of one of the oldest Jewish communities in the Nitra region.Footnote ⁶¹

Zionist activity centred on the youth but was not particularly strong, at least not until the 1930s, probably because of what some called the ‘vehement opposition’ of Avraham Eliezer Weiss, the town's chief rabbi since 1921. Many survivors, including Aladar (Aladár) Weiss, recall Topoľčany being a religious centre with its three small synagogues and the Great SynagogueFootnote ⁶² – ‘a splendid building, the most beautiful in town and the pride of the Jewish community’.Footnote ⁶³ Some attest to the somewhat multicultural atmosphere in the town and good relations between the different peoples of this town.Footnote ⁶⁴ But even those survivors who do not have fond memories of Jewish–Gentile relations and point to anti-Semitism being ‘rife among the inhabitants but largely latent’ even in the pre-Second World War period, speak of the existence of two largely interdependent communities in Topoľčany.Footnote ⁶⁵ Jews had an irreplaceable position in the town and felt themselves to be an integral part of Topoľčany's life. For instance, Joseph Felsenburg and Karol Pollak, both Jewish, served as deputies to the head of the municipality in the interwar period. Other Jews were elected to the town's administration.Footnote ⁶⁶ In his German-language testimony, Aladar Weiss uses the German word sogar to stress how integrated the Jews were in Topoľčany: there was even a Jewish policeman in the town.Footnote ⁶⁷

But if this was so, what changed with the establishment of an authoritarian regime in March 1939? And what was the actual position and role of the majority population vis-à-vis official anti-Semitism in the six ‘long’ years of 1939–45? Survivors began trying to understand the changing mood and attitude of the majority society towards the Jews in wartime Slovakia much sooner than scholars did. Lillian Steinberg, born in Vienna and raised in Topoľčany, said that her family's closest friends were Gentiles who ‘lived in our house, basically, and we were going to their homes’. What seemed to haunt her was why those she called her closest friends took a role in what was euphemistically called the ‘solution to the Jewish question’ or, in its Slovak variation, ‘eliminating Jewish influence in the social and economic life of the country’. As Steinberg attested, ‘I could never imagine . . . that these same people could have switched within a second and become the collaborators of Hitler's idea to destroy the Jews from the surface of the world’.Footnote ⁶⁸ As we have argued elsewhere, the popular interest in Aryanisation (which we will come back to later in this section) implicated a vast majority of Slovak society in the Holocaust, turning locals against their neighbours. For many of the majority Slovaks, the Holocaust was a profitable business, and the proximity of memory and robbery further hampered Jewish–Slovak post-war coexistence.Footnote ⁶⁹ Yet, who were the collaborators or ‘perpetrators’ here? And were there any ‘bystanders’ in Topoľčany during but also directly after the war?

The township of Topoľčany was liberated on 2 April 1945, allowing – according to different sources – between 320 and 700 Jews to return from camps or from hiding.Footnote ⁷⁰ The post-war Jewish community of Topoľčany was not a typical one, at least not in the Slovakian context. Most of its members were former inmates of the country's largest labour camp in Nováky, near the city of Prievidza in central Slovakia. The major Slovak-Jewish underground movement emerged here, forming a special Jewish Unit that fought in the Slovak National Uprising (Slovenské národné povstanie) when the camp was liberated in August 1944. With the suppression of the uprising, many of the camp's former inmates went into hiding, thus escaping the renewal of deportations that followed the German occupation of the country. A relatively large number of intact families, and a (again, relatively) high number of children among them (about 20 per cent) contributed to ‘intensive efforts . . . to re-establish personal and community life’ after the war.Footnote ⁷¹ The community renewed its activity quickly, and the ‘“Rosenthal” synagogue, the only one that remained, was restored; Philip Nagel was elected as the community head. It employed also a Shokhet and a Cantor’.Footnote ⁷² The return of the Jews and the re-establishment of Jewish life were, however, clearly not welcomed by all. Post-war anti-Jewish hostilities in the town and its vicinity culminated in the 1945 Topoľčany pogrom, an event that seemed to give few arguments in favour of the applicability of the ‘bystander’ concept.

The pogrom of September 1945 has been already scrutinised in historiography. Ivan Kamenec, Jana Šišjaková and more recently Anna Cichopek-Gajraj have examined the events, exposing the dynamics of the post-war anti-Jewish violence in Topoľčany as well as its most important actors.Footnote ⁷³ Others, such as Petr Bednařík and Ivica Bumová, have studied the Czech and Slovak press coverage (or the lack thereof) on the pogrom.Footnote ⁷⁴ Jan Láníček has revealed the attitude of the Czechoslovak central organs to the pogrom, fearing it might discredit the republic's democratic image.Footnote ⁷⁵ In 2004 Dušan Hudec produced a documentary about the pogrom, giving space to numerous contemporaries of the event.Footnote ⁷⁶ While recognising the need to further expose the many important details of the pogrom that are still unknown, our aim here is not to offer a novel perspective on the events. Rather, we revisit the accounts to demonstrate the limited applicability but also the usefulness of the ‘bystander’ concept in Topoľčany and in general. This is done to show when the ‘bystander’ concept can capture (and when it cannot) a historical reality on the ground, contributing thus to the earlier summarised debate on ‘bystanders’ to the Holocaust.

Hours-long disturbances that took place on 24 September 1945, accompanied by the plundering of houses, resulted in forty-seven Jews being injured.Footnote ⁷⁷ Eighteen of the injured Jews needed to be admitted to a hospital. Events leading to the pogrom escalated quickly. On that Monday morning about sixty women approached the District National Committee (Okresný národný výbor), demanding that nuns teaching at a local convent school keep their posts.Footnote ⁷⁸ The District National Committee's vice-chairman reassured the women that this information was untrue and redirected them to the local school inspectorate. By the time the group reached the inspectorate their numbers had increased to 160 people, and further unfounded allegations resonated through the crowd: ‘the Jews tore down the crosses and holy pictures in the classrooms, the hospitalers from Bojná were dragged away by the Jews; Jews do not work and still enjoy above standard lifestyles and are involved in illegal business’.Footnote ⁷⁹ The school inspectorate, however, gave the predominantly female crowd the same response: nuns will continue teaching at the convent school. Before the atmosphere in the crowd could calm down, yet another dangerous rumour started to circulate – that a local doctor, a Holocaust survivor, had been inoculating children with poison. Someone claimed that some of the children had already died as a result of the tampered vaccination.Footnote ⁸⁰ Karol Berger, who had already had a medical practice in the town before the Second World War, did inoculate children on that day, but as a special committee instituted by the Health Commission (Povereníctvo zdravotníctva) later confirmed, the serum was ‘perfectly safe’.Footnote ⁸¹

What caused the demonstration in Topoľčany to grow into a pogrom? And who were those beating local Jews and ransacking their businesses and homes? These questions need to be answered before conceptualising events in Topoľčany. According to the post-war authorities, including Major Rudolf Viktorín from the Headquarters of National Security (Hlavné veliteľstvo národnej bezpečnosti), the above stated false rumours that had been spreading through the town played an important role in the outbreak of violence. However, what seemed to play even a bigger role, in his opinion, was greed mixed with feelings of injustice: ‘the Jews received from their allies some extra rations of food articles, distributed by the NV [National Committee; Národný výbor]’.Footnote ⁸² Lieutenant Ján Ondrašovič stressed that economic reasons were also a factor in his situational report dated 28 September 1945. As he was convinced, even though the ‘outrage’ against the Jews culminated with spreading the aforementioned rumours, the ‘rebellion’ of people was in reality caused by other factors:

Returning Jews became inconvenient witnesses of how engaged the majority society was in robbing the Jews whilst the wartime Slovak state was in existence.Footnote ⁸⁴ This was also at the core of testimony given by Ondrej Weiss and Ernest Kohn, both Jewish survivors from neighbouring villages, from early October 1945: ‘according to all signs, all these described events are organised, organised by Aryanisers who herewith wanted to prevent the restitution of property’.Footnote ⁸⁵

One of the most recent scholarly assessments of the Topoľčany pogrom stems from Martin Wein, and although we would argue with how the author applies loaded concepts (such as ‘fascism’), it seems correct to maintain that anti-Semitism is not sufficient to explain post-war anti-Jewish violence in the country. As Wein argues, we also have to take into account ‘Slovak fascists’ fear of losing their “Aryanised” property’.Footnote ⁸⁶ In her comparative work on Jewish experience in post-war Slovakia and Poland Cichopek-Gajraj also interprets the pogrom as a result of wartime complicity, writing: ‘when about 750 Jewish survivors returned to Topoľčany, the new owners and their families turned against them, especially since the majority of the returnees were well-to-do former owners who survived thanks to their financial resources’.Footnote ⁸⁷ In these accounts Aryanisation is used in its wider meaning: as the sum of all anti-Jewish measures that lead not only to the impoverishment of the Jewish community but which also tied the majority society to the regime.

In its narrow meaning ‘Aryanisation’ marks the two Aryanisation laws proclaimed in Slovakia. The first Aryanisation law, officially entitled On Jewish Enterprises and Jews Employed in Enterprises, was introduced in June 1940 but remained effective for only three months. Growing difficulties, including corruption behind and in the process itself and the German–Slovak talks of late July 1940, put Aryanisation on hold. With the introduction of Slovak National Socialism, a result of the Salzburg talks, a new and more radical version of the Aryanisation law was introduced in November 1940. Based on this law, officially On Jewish Enterprises, the majority of the roughly 12,300 Jewish owned businesses were liquidated, giving their competitors a clear lead on the market. Only slightly more than 2,200 Jewish businesses were Aryanised.Footnote ⁸⁸

Numbers from the Topoľčany district do not substantially diverge from records of those from Slovakia as a whole: the overwhelming majority of Jewish owned businesses in the Topoľčany district were liquidated (442 cases, 83 per cent) and only eighty-nine businesses were Aryanised (17 per cent). Every single new ‘owner’ of an Aryanised establishment had a recommendation from the Hlinka's Slovak People's Party; some could even pride themselves on the fact that the paramilitary Hlinka Guard supported their application.Footnote ⁸⁹ While in the end only a few could get their hands on lucrative businesses, many participated in the robbery by purchasing deported Jews’ possessions at below the market price, and these auctions of Jewish belongings typically took place in public.Footnote ⁹⁰ Needless to say, the Aryanisation process was awaited with a great deal of expectation and hope. Periodical situational reports addressed to the State Security Headquarters (Ústredňa štátnej bezpečnosti), modelled on the Gestapo, testify that Topoľčany residents were especially interested in acquiring land owned by Jews.Footnote ⁹¹ It was precisely this widespread ‘interest’ in getting something out of the so-called Jewish question that facilitated the Holocaust in Topoľčany and Slovakia in general.

Symptomatically, not even the 1945 Topoľčany pogrom resulted in significant changes in popular attitudes towards Jews. In an outline of morning news for August 1946, we hence read that

The here outlined coexistence of Jews and Gentiles in Topoľčany, both during and after the Second World War, demonstrates how difficult it is to conceptualise historical events. As shown, lives of Jews and Gentiles in wartime Topoľčany were too intertwined to allow absence from the September 1945 pogrom. Witness testimonies help further dynamise the seemingly static actors of the events on ground, showing that virtually everyone had to take a position, both during the Holocaust and after the liberation. The same applies to the pogrom alone – everyone needed to make a choice, whether this meant protecting Jews from the outburst of violence, or by participating in the beatings or by consciously refraining from any public activity on those days.Footnote ⁹³ Each of these decisions impacted the lives of the others. Having said this, can the ‘bystander’ concept be applied to wartime and post-war Topoľčany at all? Or should we dismiss the concept completely and look for a better fit? Sartori's works on concept formation that we have elaborated on earlier provides us with guidelines on where to apply the concept – and where not to.

‘Bystanders’ in Topol'čany?

If we zoom into the Topoľčany pogrom, one might be inclined to side with scholars who urge us to dismiss the concept of ‘bystanders’ (translated into Slovak usually as divák, the same for onlooker) altogether. The pogrom of September 1945 points towards a majority society which had been deeply involved in the looting of Jewish property during the Second World War fearing that the return of whole Jewish families meant that the survivors would reclaim their belongings – and testify about what happened to them in the wartime period. In many ways, survivors became the consciousness of the town.

Sartori's work on concept formation and misformation offers a different perspective. If we apply his methodological writings to the discussion on the validity and usefulness of the ‘bystander’ concept, we see that a concept can have different meanings – meanings depending on the level of abstraction. What makes (necessarily generalising) concepts general is precisely that they have various, even contradictory, meanings: ‘the concept “human” covers both men and women, infants and elderly, Einstein and those illiterate. We will not reject general concepts only because individuals and individual cases differ from each other substantially.’Footnote ⁹⁴ As with any concept, the concept of ‘bystanders’ hence makes sense only when used for a body of cases. A concept is always a model, thus involving a certain level of generalisation. Dismissing general concepts altogether would lead to two extremes. It would either leave social sciences and humanities termless or we would need to establish a concept for every single historical occurrence.

Gentiles, in Topoľčany as elsewhere in Nazi occupied and dominated Europe, during the Second World War and after it, assumed different roles. Each role was a product of a conscious or unconscious choice, sometimes instant and sometimes a result of a shorter or longer deliberation. In every minute, hour and day of their lives, the men and women of Topoľčany made decisions with regard to the regime in place and its anti-Semitic policies. These decisions were at times influenced by the actions and thoughts of others, be it authorities, friends and relatives, or even strangers. Either way, they always impacted the lives of their Jewish neighbours, most of whom were in the end murdered. To take part in the earlier sketched out Aryanisation process, to obtain a piece of furniture or clothing at public actions, to spread rumours in the local vegetable market, to join the beating and looting of businesses and homes of Jewish survivors – or to refrain from it – were all results of making a conscious or unconscious, rational or irrational, choice.

Hilberg's usage of the ‘bystander’ concept is what Sartori would term a high-level concept, having a minimum number of attributes and therefore being largely abstract. Hilberg's general and universal definition of ‘bystanders’ as individuals, organisations and states that were neither ‘victims’ nor ‘perpetrators’ is a case in point. If we go down the ladder towards microcosm of the Holocaust and its aftermath, the concept cannot be applied to the pogrom in Topoľčany. The events of 24 September 1945 were too intertwined, pointing to a wide level of local complicity in the broadly defined wartime robbery of Jewish belongings. Hence, while we cannot conceptualise the actions of locals for particular events, these events point to a matter of choice – which, when elevated, forms the essence of the catchall concept of ‘bystanders’ to the Holocaust.

In other words, whilst the ‘bystander’ concept makes sense on higher ‘ladders of abstraction’, along with ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’, it is out of place when applied to a particular individual or event. This does not, however, mean that we should dismiss the concept altogether. Rather than moving the ‘bystander’ concept on a horizontal line, as Ehrenreich and Cole have proposed, it seems more useful to place it on a vertical ladder.

Mair's metaphor with the earlier mentioned ‘ladder of abstraction’ as a hot-air balloon also comes in handy when applying the ‘bystander’ concept to micro history, in this case to Jewish–Gentile relations in Topolčany. What we argue is that a specific event, however broad or complex, is where the balloon hits the ground. It is here that the basket is the heaviest. Our vision is limited, preventing us from making generalising observations. While seeing those nearest to the basket, possibly some of the women in the market or individual local authorities or even the Czechoslovak army, we are unable to conceptualise any of the behaviours we are observing. Only as we throw out properties does our basket become lighter, allowing the balloon to move upwards. The higher we fly, the better our view is of Topoľčany's events and actors. Now we may not only observe the crowd on the market or those involved in the widespread looting but also the numerous others whose actions and attitudes exceed the scope of our paper. This includes aiding Jews, for instance when in the peak of the anti-Jewish legislation in fall 1941 the leadership of the town's gendarmerie wrote a testimonial for Oskár Hecht, a local Jew, affirming that he is well liked in the society.Footnote ⁹⁵ We also see actors mentioned in witness accounts that are otherwise invisible in official accounts, including Gentile neighbours of Tereza Wiesnerová (Deutelbaum) and her sister Sida from Topoľčany. While some returned everything the Deutelbaum family had left with them before their deportation, others claimed that all was lost to the Russians who liberated the town.Footnote ⁹⁶ In other words, it is only when elevating from this microcosm that we can start conceptualising actors, events and processes on the ground. But it is precisely the microcosm that enables us to identify the fundamental attribute of the ‘bystander’ concept: the possibility of choice.