Holocaust Memorial Day In Hungary
- 16 Apr 2015 3:00 AM
Hungary cannot stand “mute and helpless” over the spreading of “evil ideas”, János Lázár, the head of the prime minister’s office, said, addressing a commemoration marking Hungary’s Holocaust Memorial Day. After what happened at the Danube embankment in the winter of 1944—when Jews were shot into the river—and in Auschwitz “there can be no such thing as innocent anti-Semitism, anti-Gypsy sentiment or segregation in the Hungarian language.”
Lázár said there are to be no admissions made to “the successors of those who dragged our compatriots to the embankment 70 years ago” or those who “today spit into the orphaned shoes left behind by the murdered”.
Lázár was referring to recently revealed evidence from five years ago that Jobbik lawmaker Gergely Kulcsár had spat into one of the memorial’s bronze shoes, erected on the Danube bank in the memory of the thousands of Jews who were shot into the Danube by Arrow Cross militiamen.
Since 2001 Hungary marks April 16, when in 1944 the incarceration of Jews into ghettos began. Hungary had a Jewish community of 725,000 before WWII. Two-thirds of them were exterminated in the Holocaust.
Source www.hungarymatters.hu
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