Slovak Novels in English #40: A Slovak's Flight to Wonderland

Joseph Pauco, A Slovak’s Flight to Wonderland, 2nd ed. (Cleveland: First Catholic Slovak Union, [1963] 1979), 240 pp.

First things first: I’m not actually sure whether this is a novel. I think it is. But it’s hard to tell.

It might just be half and half. The first half of the book relates, mostly in the third person, the fate of a handful of Slovaks in the immediate aftermath of World War II, fleeing Slovakia for fear of the “liberating” Soviet troops advancing from the east, into the only negligibly friendlier arms of Austrians in the west. The Slovaks spend time in camps and eventually get designated refugees by kindly American forces.

Told like a novel, these parts have a lot of specific detail that sound like they were experienced firsthand. Plus the occasional, unexplained use of “we” on the part of the narrator.

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But then, once everyone arrives in America, the book shifts into what is best described as short essay format. And the essays seem to come from the author himself, though that’s never exactly clarified. Conversations are documented in great detail, mostly debating communism. The most interesting part of the book are the outsider’s view of American quirks, like voter habits, Cadillacs, “Negroes” (depicted positively, with the happy assertion that the race problem is all but solved in the U.S.), banquets, shorts, and even chewing gum.

If not exactly well conceived, the book would appear from this description to be innocuous. The problem is far more in what’s not said than in what is said. The criticisms of communism are fine, and entirely deserved, in my judgment. What’s lacking is equal attention paid to criticizing fascism.

Alas, as I already know from a previous Paučo effort, he and his ilk were fawning devotees of Tiso, the Catholic priest who governed the Nazi puppet state of independent Slovakia. Even putting the best construction on it—justified fear of communism, two decades of frustration at patronizing mistreatment by Czechs and thus gratitude for Slovak “independence,” and perhaps genuine ignorance of Tiso’s complicity in deporting Jews—it’s just impossible to justify the oversight.

This book was first published in 1963, after all. Paučo had nearly two decades to reckon with his nation and his Catholicism’s collaboration with fascism. Indeed, it remains something of a mystery to me why there hasn’t been more open Catholic reckoning with its complicity in fascist regimes throughout Europe, to say nothing of in Latin America.

And I say this as someone with zero sympathy to communism. But the enemy of your enemy is not your friend. Lutherans in Slovakia learned this the hard way, too, by assuming anti-fascist-Catholic communists were therefore their allies. They sure as hell weren’t.

I appreciated Paučo’s enthusiasm for America. He has the classic immigrant’s admiration for what really does make the United States a grand and admirable experiment. But I can’t fathom how that learning in a democratic society failed to shed light on his Tisoist sympathies.