On January 19, 1945, Kassa’s residents awoke to find the Soviet Red Army had entered the city overnight, the seventh occupation force to take control of the city since 1918. The Soviets entered a city that was severely depopulated. Most of the city’s Jews were gone, deported several months earlier to Auschwitz. German troops had withdrawn hours before, along with much of the city’s administration. The Red Army was able to liberate the city without firing a shot.

Still, Milan Danko, a child at the time of Košice’s liberation, recalled that people “did not dare to enjoy their freedom.” Shops and restaurants remained closed and the city “was empty, sad, and frightened.” The next day, Hungary’s provisional government signed an armistice agreement withdrawing from the war and forfeiting all of the state’s territorial gains since 1938. Kassa was officially Košice again. A new civilian administration was installed in the city, but it answered to the Soviet commander. Fear of becoming the rape victim of a Red Army soldier kept many women inside their homes, out of view. Zoltán Mesko remembered his mother and sisters hiding in the cellar during the first days of their “liberation.” Men soon discovered they were also at risk for forced labor brigades. Anton Felber, a civil engineer working in the city’s power plant in 1945, was one among hundreds of local men rounded up and taken to the Soviet Union. Felber worked in a lead mine in North Ossetia for three years, until he was finally able to repatriate to Czechoslovakia. Although fear of the Soviet occupiers was the immediate concern, the residents of Košice could also anticipate needing to adapt to yet another process of state integration, where redistribution of political and economic capital would once again transform the city.

A few months after the Soviets entered the city, in April 1945, Košice became the temporary capital of the Czechoslovak Republic. As part of the borderland’s return to Czechoslovakia, over the next several years residents were subject to a number of actions designed to cleanse the region of its Hungarian population and characteristics. The government combined internal and international forced migration, population exchange, and compulsory assimilation to ethnically transform southern Slovakia in the years following World War II. Border changes once again precipitated a massive reorientation of the residents’ relationship to the state.