Maslen’s parents, both 30 years old, were among 64 people killed by Nazi soldiers on a freezing Sunday morning in January 1945, a warning to others of the fate that awaited them should they be brave enough to aid the anti-fascist partisans of the Slovak National Uprising.

The youngest victim was 14 months old, a boy shot dead in the arms of his 11-year-old sister.

Finished with Ostry Grun, the commandos moved further up the valley to Klak, where they killed another 84. Both villages were razed to the ground.

The partisans had found shelter in the mountains, food, warmth and a change of clothes in the villages below.

“It was very dangerous for anyone who was helping them,” said Stanislav Micev, a historian and director of a museum dedicated to the Slovak National Uprising in the city of Banska Bystrica, the seat of the uprising some 70 kilometres from Ostry Grun. “They were putting themselves and their whole families in danger.”

The heavy price paid by the villagers is not immediately apparent to a visitor to the valley, where lives were rebuilt after the war amid picturesque rolling hills and forests now popular with hikers. Once a year, the villagers mark the massacres, while in May local bikers ride to Napajedla in the Czech Republic, the first town where the fleeing villagers found help after the war, in a gesture of gratitude.

So it did not go unnoticed when, in 2016, 17 per cent of voters in Ostry Grun cast ballots in favour of the far-right People’s Party Our Slovakia led by Marian Kotleba, a neo-fascist who openly celebrates Slovakia’s wartime Nazi puppet state and who was elected regional governor of Banska Bystrica, his hometown, three years earlier.

The party won 14 seats in the 150-seat Slovak parliament and followed up the success this year with third place in European Parliamentary elections in May.

In Ostry Grun, the party came first – a phenomenon, experts say, that speaks volumes of the disconnect between history and contemporary politics, of Slovakia’s failure to come to terms with its wartime past and of the disaffection of young people who have no memory of the threat of fascism.

They feel abandoned by the system, which is a problem across the country.

To his voters, Kotleba is not a fascist, said Martina Strmenova, part of the civil society movement Not in Our Town that was formed in Banska Bystrica after Kotleba became regional governor.

“Even though he never distanced himself from his actions in his younger years, he changed his rhetoric. And people only see the new things,” Strmenova told BIRN. “They feel abandoned by the system, which is a problem across the country.”