The Holocaust is a national issue, as hundreds of thousands of our fellow countrymen were torn from the body of the nation, said Minister of Agriculture István Nagy on Wednesday, at a commemoration ceremony held in Budapest on the occasion of the Holocaust Victims’ Memorial Day in Hungary.
Speaking at the Holocaust Documentation Center (HDK), István Nagy said that Hungarian society has still not recovered from the memory of the Holocaust, the brutal and senseless enslavement and deprivation of the lives of hundreds of thousands of „our compatriots loyal to the Hungarian community” in the name of a „degenerate ideology.”
He recalled that over the centuries, Hungarian Jews sacrificed their wealth and their lives for Hungarian freedom, and fought alongside their Hungarian compatriots on the battlefields of the 1848-49 War of Independence and in World War I.
The minister pointed out that the Holocaust is a mirror in which one cannot look and not be “horrified.” The face looking back from the mirror „asks us” whether „we are doing everything we can to ensure that the horror never happens again” and whether „we still feel responsible for the crimes of our ancestors.”
– István Nagy said.
He also said that it is „still a stain” on the nation’s conscience that it abandoned its compatriots to a foreign power that destroyed them with unprecedented inhumanity. This may be one of the reasons why „we Hungarians value peace above all else and never again want to fall victim to the marauding of foreign powers.”
He added that today Hungary is a safe country where Jews and non-Jews can live in peace.
The government condemns hatred, persecution and antisemitic manifestations against the Jewish people in all situations.
„It is our task to build a Hungary where it will never again happen that the state fails to protect its citizens,” and where future generations will grow up experiencing this confrontation with our past as part of our national memory, István Nagy said.
Andor Grósz, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Holocaust Public Foundation, said that 78 years on, it is still incomprehensible how people could be deprived of everything, their human dignity and ultimately their lives, just because they were Jews. How, in a country that had welcomed them a few years earlier, the public mood could have become anti-Jewish, how people could have watched with indifference, sometimes with glee, as their neighbors and colleagues were deported.
He added that the answers to these questions are available individually, but the overall picture, the totality of the tragedy of the Holocaust, is still incomprehensible and perhaps impossible to process. „The past is still with us and affects us,” and much hard work is needed to mitigate this impact.
In addition to remembrance and reminders, one of the most important tasks is to combat the spread of antisemitism and all inhuman acts worldwide, especially now when weapons are once again going off in Hungary’s immediate neighborhood, when once again „we must fear for our lives and our safety.”
– Andor Grósz added.
At the end of the commemoration, participants placed candles at the memorial wall of the victims.
The Holocaust Victims’ Memorial Day in Hungary has been held every year since 2001 on April 16 to commemorate the day in 1944 when the ghettoization of Hungarian Jews began.
