Remembering property dispossession: Family resilience after the Holocaust in Slovakia

This study examines how family resilience is negotiated in the context of the dispossession of Jewish property in Slovakia during and after the Holocaust. It asks what creates or disrupts an intergenerational sense of resilience in the family when legal, material, and moral injustices remain unresolved across generations. We do not understand resilience as a completed recovery from trauma, but as an ongoing intergenerational process through which families negotiate the enduring effects of adversity through memory transmission and moral positioning. Based on long-term oral history, ethnographic, archival, and autoethnographic research, the article analyses two family cases set against the layered history of Jewish property dispossession: from Aryanization through postwar restitution and socialist nationalisation to restitution after 1989. The first case follows the descendants of a Jewish family whose former property, a manor house, was confiscated, later destroyed by the construction of a reservoir, and reconstructed in an open-air museum. For the family members, the building became a mnemonic anchor for loss, trauma, and interrupted belonging. Long-term ethnographic research into family memory and anthropological filmmaking reopened intergenerational communication and enabled symbolic redress, even though legal and material restitution remained impossible. This strengthened family members’ sense of resilience by supporting a narrative of family endurance despite continuing loss and trauma. The second case examines the memory of a non-Jewish family whose morally coherent family narrative was disrupted by the discovery that a great-grandfather in the family had Aryanised a Jewish business. In their intergenerational communication, silence helped to preserve a family identity based on decency, self-making, and continuity. Its disruption generated moral uncertainty and revealed the fragility of a sense of family resilience sustained through selective remembering. The article argues that a family’s sense of resilience is reshaped through processes of remembrance, silencing, acknowledgement, and moral positioning. It may be sustained or reconstructed when the past becomes narratable, symbolically acknowledged, and integrated into intergenerational communication and self-understanding. It may be constrained when institutional outcomes deny harm or legitimise contested legacies, or when selective family narratives prevent engagement with troubling knowledge.