Abstrakt
The book Kněz prezidentem: Slovensko Jozefa Tisa [Priest as President: Jozef Tiso's Slovakia] is a translation of the Polish original Słowacja księdza-prezydenta: Jozef Tiso 1887-1947 (Kraków, Znak 2015). Its author, Andrzej Krawczyk, is a Polish historian and diplomat, the former ambassador to the Czech Republic and then to Slovakia.
According to the reviewer, the book has a rather compilatory character, as it is based mainly on published sources and contains some outdated and now obsolete theses. When Krawczyk stresses Tiso's pragmatism, his search for compromises and moderation when compared with local fascist radicals, he wrongly assumes that this meant that Tiso did not try to link Catholicism with Nazism.
In his quest for objectivity, the author often, but not very successfully, puts himself in the role of an arbiter in the dispute among Slovak historians over the interpretation of certain events and burdens his work with moralizing judgements that do not promote historical understanding