Frida Hermann’s family lived in the small eastern Slovak village of Bunkovce. In March 1939, as she walked to school, she noticed three airplanes in the sky and agitated Slovak gendarmes on the street, one of them shouting, “they’re coming!” “Within an hour or two, there was the Hungarian military with their little toy tanks,” Frida mockingly recalled. She was witnessing the local fallout of a much larger international event.

In March of 1939, Adolf Hitler decided to put an end to the Czechoslovak state. At the urging of German officials, Jozef Tiso declared independence for Slovakia on March 14, and later that night, the German army occupied the remainder of the Czech lands and established the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Simultaneously, the Hungarian army moved into the easternmost parts of former Czechoslovakia and occupied Carpathian Ruthenia. In the tumult of so many concurrent changes in sovereignty, the Hungarian army took the opportunity to occupy eastern Slovak territory in order to create a border that could protect a key railway line connecting Poland and Hungary. Hungarian troops advanced westward from the city of Ungvár and attempted to occupy a corridor on the western side of the railway line. Slovak soldiers resisted the encroachment and a series of battles, both infantry and air, ensued, which resulted in a few dozen military and civilian deaths.

Although the newly formed Slovak state inherited some of the vastly superior Czechoslovak military equipment, at that exact moment they were particularly vulnerable as many army personnel were on the move—Slovaks stationed in Czech areas were in transit home to Slovakia, while Czechs stationed in Slovakia were in the process of returning to the Czech lands. This left a shortage of trained soldiers to operate heavy artillery and fly airplanes. It enabled the Hungarians to win what became known as the “little war,” despite their technological disadvantages.

For Frida Hermann, all this meant that she was stuck at school and could not get home to her parents, eight kilometers away, “because war was raging” around her. When the fighting was over, it turned out that the new border between Slovakia and Hungary was in her backyard.