From Radio Slovakia International

Every fifth child in Slovakia lives in a family suffering from poverty, 4 out of 10 Slovaks cannot afford to pay for a week's holiday while one third of Slovaks is not able to face unexpected expenses. The EU statistics on income and living conditions results presented by the Statistics Office of the Slovak Republic also show that more than 16% of the Slovak population are in poverty. The most affected are the unemployed, lone-parent families and families with 2 adults and more than 3 children.

Ludmila Ivancikova from the Statistics office confirms that children from socially disadvantaged environment are at a high risk of poverty: "It can affect their education and employment which will be reflected again in their poor income." "The experience of long-term poverty affects a child's personality development," adds the Slovak Academy of Sciences researcher Zuzana Kusa. In Slovakia, the risk of poverty is set as a monthly income of less than EUR 373 while in the case of a 4 member family the threshold limit represents the sum of EUR 783.

Poverty is not, however, defined only by the size of the income but also by what can be afforded with the money earned by the employed person. The EU statistics shows that one third of the Slovak Republic's population is not able to finance unexpected expenses and every fourth Slovak cannot pay for a week-long holiday. Zuzana Kusa from the Slovak Academy of Sciences pinpoints a new phenomenon: "An increase of the number of households endangered by different arrears has also been observed."

The risk of poverty differs from region to region and this difference is significant. While in the Bratislava region, with the Slovak capital in its centre, only 4,5% of the population are living in destitution, in the Presov region with the highest rate of the Roma population, the risk of poverty applies to 19% of citizens.

Slovakia is one of the countries with the lowest rate of poverty and social exclusion in the EU. According to the latest results, Slovakia ranked third in the EU in 2017 following the Czech Republic and Finland. On the other side, the country with the highest number of people at risk of poverty in the EU is Bulgaria with almost 39% of its citizens living in destitution.
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Martina Šimkovičová, Photo: Flickr/Filter Collective

From Slovak Spectator

SEVENTY years ago, on June 16, 1944, the US Air Force bombed 80 percent of the Apollo refinery in Bratislava, claiming the lives of 176 locals.

Apollo was a joint-stock company, which in 1896 launched the operation of the Apollo refinery, popularly called Apolka, where mineral oils were refined and petrol, kerosene, paraffin, candles, Vaseline, tar and even artificial ice were produced. During the Second World War, Slovakia’s official ally, Nazi Germany, controlled the production, and the refining of diesel fuel and oil was modernised to produce fuels for the German army.

The refinery on the Danube’s left bank was attacked by US bombers in several waves on June 16. Numerous employees of the Apollo facility died, as air raid shelters failed to protect them from the burning oil. The city’s inhabitants were also among the fatalities, as bombs targeted residential areas of Bratislava. To commemorate the victims, Bratislava’s fifth bridge, finished in 2005 near the original site, was named Apollo.

The air raid’s success was in part due to a female industrial spy from inside Apollo, as Slavo Kalný writes in the book Bombardovanie Apolky (The Bombing of Apolka).

In 1946, the remains of the Apollo factory were nationalised, i.e. confiscated by the state, and incorporated into the national enterprise Slovak Refineries of Mineral Oils, which was renamed in 1949 to Slovnaft, a national enterprise. The refinery operated there until 1963, when it was moved to a new location on the city’s outskirts, Vlčie Hrdlo, the TASR newswire wrote.

In May 2005, an exhibition took place in Bratislava’s Primate’s Palace, showing the fate of the Apollo refinery from the founding charter until the tragic events of June 1944.