The Land of Forgetting (Krajina zabudnutia)

Abstract

About the Author: Anton Baláž (1943) is a Slovak prose writer, television and film screenwriter, radio playwright and publicist. After 1989 he started to work as the editor-in-chief of Slovenský denník. In the first year of the independent Slovak Republic (1993) he worked in the office of the President of the Slovak Republic. Baláž’s work is very varied, but one important trend can be observed – it is preoccupied with less known topics of Slovak history. In the second half of the 1990s, Baláž returned thematically to the Jewish past, specifically to the Holocaust of the Slovak Jewish community. His work focuses on the first postwar years. It concentrates on the fate of the Jews who survived the horrors of concentration camps and then tried to reintegrate into ordinary life and to find a new sense of life. He followed the fates of Jews since the 1960s, but decided to write about this topic only in the second half of the 1990s.