There will be European unity and a genuine dialogue when Western-Europe is both able and prepared to regard the crimes of communism, together with the crimes of Nazism, as the shame of Europe, Minister of Human Capacities Zoltán Balog stressed at the Sunday inauguration ceremony of the Malenky Robot Memorial erected at the Ferencváros Railway Station in Budapest.
As he said, the example of the Visegrád Four, too, demonstrates: the past and the desire to rid ourselves of it may even forge communities, remarking that those living in the territory situated between the River Elbe and Vladivostok all had a chance to find out about the reality of the Gulag by the middle of the last century, and so “it is not a specifically Hungarian story”.
The Minister reiterated: more than a hundred million people fell victim to communism, in Central-Europe the number of fatalities exceeded a million, and in Hungary, too, someone from almost every family was taken away to forced labour camps.
He added: between 1950 and 1956, 630 thousand judgements were passed to the detriment of the accused in a million court cases, 30 thousand people were imprisoned after the 1956 revolution, and three hundred persons were executed. There are some 61,500 people living today who underwent political rehabilitation and whose pension supplements the Government doubled in two stages.
Mr Balog highlighted: the forced removal of hundreds of thousands of people served a dual purpose as far as the Soviet Union was concerned. On the one hand, to break resistance, and on the other hand, to use forced labourers in order to make up for the shortage of workers.
He added: neither intention proved to be successful as Hungary rose up in 1956, while the kidnapped people worked with extremely low efficiency, and some one third of them did not even survive the inhuman conditions.
The memorial year came to an end, but remembrance remains, the Minister stated who reiterated, in the context of the venue: in the middle of the last century, the railway was one of the symbols of “what humans are capable of”.
He added, at the same time, that this is from where the trains carrying soldiers left, this is where the carriages transporting the injured arrived, but the Ferencváros railway station equally witnessed urban misery and poverty, the lives of the “wagon residents” coming from the detached territories, and the departure of the trains heading for Auschwitz and the Gulag and those transporting Swabians in Hungary.
Deputy Metropolitan Mayor Alexandra Szalay-Bobrovniczky reiterated at the event that some one hundred thousand people were deported from the capital to the Gulag, mentioning that the atrocities of the communist regime were concealed for decades.
Concealment and enforced concealment are not permissible in the history of a nation, the politician said, drawing attention to the importance of remembrance.
Péter Eötvös, President of the Crimes of Communism Foundation took the view that the threat of forgetting is looming, and this was another reason why it was important that the Government declared 2016 a Gulag Memorial Year. As he said, the younger generations today need to be told what cruel forced labour camps were to which minimum 800 thousand people were forcibly taken from Hungary.