BRATISLAVA, Czechoslovakia -- When Frantisek Hutka arrived here 55 years ago in the capital of Slovakia, all but five of the mailmen were Czechs.
And that was just the beginning.
"There were Czechs everywhere, in all the offices," said Mr. Hutka, who became the sixth Slovak mailman in town.
To the fiercely proud Slovaks, being dominated by the Czechs is a sore point.
It is a point that even today threatens the stability of Czechoslovakia, a country of 15.7 million people struggling to overcome the ravages of 41 years of Communist rule.
Mr. Hutka was encountered in the heart of this provincial city, on his way down Slovak National Uprising Square to play chess with cronies at a government recreation center.
He is a roly-poly 80-year-old whose light blue eyes sparkle and laugh even when he says vicious things about the Czechs.
And he had a lot to say. For example, he paused in Slovak National Uprising Square to accuse the Czechs of cowardice. The square commemorates the Slovak uprising against the Nazis in 1944.
"The Czechs didn't do it," he said. "We contributed to the liberation."
Of course, the Czechs have a stinging retort: The majority of Slovaks prospered under the Nazis, and they were the only people in Europe who paid the Nazis to take local Jews away.
The antipathy between Czechs and Slovaks is rooted in 1918, when the Republic of Czechoslovakia was formed. The Slovaks thought they were entering into an equal partnership, a federal government in which two semi-autonomous republics shared power.
Instead, they found that the Czechs, who outnumbered them 2-1, controlled the government and the economy. Slovaks were treated like illiterate, poor country cousins, which, in a sense, they were.
When the two peoples merged, the Czech lands were more economically developed and the Czechs were better educated than the Slovaks, who inhabited a largely agricultural region.
The Czech version of events is that they had to control the post office and other civil services in Slovakia because there weren't enough well-educated Slovaks to do the job.
Mr. Hutka remembers things a bit differently.
He was one of nine of children from a poor family, but he learned Morse code and the operation of the telephone system, skills that qualified him to work in the developing urban world.
