Kamenec was born into a Jewish family in Nitra on 27 August 1938 and grew up in. His father, a civil engineer managed to secure an economic exception to the 1942 deportations, during which most Slovak Jews were sent to the extermination camps. Kamenec avoided the resumption in anti-Jewish persecution during and after the Slovak National Uprising by hiding with his family in a bunker from September 1944 to April 1945, when Slovakia was liberated by the Red Army. He attended secondary school in Topoľčany. He graduated from Faculty of Philosophy of Comenius University in Bratislava in 1961. Then he worked at the State Slovak Central Archive in Bratislava and the Slovak National Museum in Bratislava. At present, he works at the Institute of History of Slovak Academy of Sciences. He is a chairman of Slovak section of common Czech-Slovak Commission of Historians and a member of the board of directors of Holocaust Documentation Center. The main theme of his scientific research is the political and cultural history of Slovakia in the 20th Century. He deals especially with the history of the First Slovak Republic from the years 1939-1945, the political system and the political and cultural elites. He is a respected scholar in the area of the Holocaust in Slovakia and his work On the Trail of Tragedybelongs to basic works in this field. The work was written in the 1970s but was not published until 1991 because the topic was tabooed in Czechoslovakia during the communistic era. Some of Kamenec's critics have used his Jewish heritage to dismiss his academic work. Because of the controversial nature of his work, he has received death threats. However, Kamenec told The Slovak Spectator that he did not take it seriously because such individuals are not representative of Slovak society. Kamenec was awarded the, first class, by the president of Slovakia in January 2017 for his contributions to the academic discipline of history and the promotion of human rights and democracy.
Selected works
Monographs
1984 Začiatky marxistického historického myslenia na Slovensku. .
1991 Po stopách tragédie
1992 Slovenský stát
1998 Tragédia politika, kňaza a človeka.
2000 Hľadanie a blúdenie v dejinách. Úvahy, štúdie a polemiky.
2001 Tragedia polityka, księdza i człowieka.
2007 On the Trail of Tragedy. The Holocaust in Slovakia.
