This book examines the impact of border changes and migrations on the Hungarian-Slovak borderland between the years 1938 and 1948. It traces the history of this territory through two changes in sovereignty, multiple military occupations, the cataclysm of world war, and ten years of nearly continuous migrations and ethnic cleansings of its residents. As he accompanied Hungarian troops occupying what days earlier had been Czechoslovakia’s southern frontier in November 1938, writer Sándor Márai commented that “the border is on the move. The nation is expanding.” His observation can be applied broadly to the period under exploration. Borders were on the move all over Central and Eastern Europe in the World War II era. And these border movements caused massive upheaval throughout the region—meaning that hundreds of thousands of people were themselves on the move in response to the shifting borders—that would last for a decade. Borders on the Move, then, is a slight adaptation of Márai’s words, and it seeks to understand what the massive movement of boundaries and people meant for the Hungarian-Slovak borderland. It takes up this task by investigating the everyday consequences of geopolitical events that are well-known from the perspective of national histories, but does so explicitly in the context of the borderland.

In the twentieth century, sociologists Mathias Bös and Kirsten Zimmer have noted, millions of Europeans “‘migrated’ between political units due to shifting borders” without ever leaving their homes. In the World War II era alone, over 800,000 square kilometers of territory changed hands once or more. These migrating borders, or nomadic borders as they are sometimes referred to, not only “move” civilians from one political unit to another, but also have a tendency to promote physical movement of populations as well, through voluntary migration or ethnic cleansing.

Until 1942, Nazi Germany led the efforts to redraw boundaries in Central and Eastern Europe as part of the goal of creating a “New Europe” dominated by an expansive German empire, supported by a network of smaller allied, economically subservient states. In the later years of World War II, the Soviet Union, with the support of its Western allies, took the lead on reversing German territorial gains and incorporated huge amounts of territory for itself along the way.