The Government is setting up a Memorial Committee, headed by the Minister of Cuman Capacities, to oversee the successful realisation of this year’s Memorial Year for Hungarians deported to the Soviet Union, Parliamentary State Secretary Bence Rétvári announced. The Committee’s role will be to make recommendations and provide its opinion and advice on planned projects.
According to Mr. Rétvári, the Government declared 2015 the Memorial Year for people deported to the Soviet Union as political prisoners and forced labourers as a fitting tribute to mark the 70th anniversary of mass internments for forced labour in the Soviet Union that began in 1944-45.
In the interests of assuring the widest and most successful possible realisation of the Year’s events, the Government has asked, among others, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the International Association of Gulag Researchers, the Ödön Lénárd Foundation, the National Circle of Germans in Pécs-Baranya and the Association of Former Hungarian Political Prisoners and Forced Labourers in the Soviet Union to participate in the work of the Memorial Committee.
Mr. Rétvári recalled that during the Second World War, Soviet armed forces arriving in Hungary – the Red Army, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), the People’s Commissariat for State Security (NKGB) and Soviet Military Intelligence (SZMERS) – detained and deported large numbers of civilians aged 13 to 76 through deception to work for years as forced labourers in the Soviet Union. People were told they were needed for “a little work” (malenkiy robot) or that they needed their documents checked and it would only take a few minutes. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were tricked in this way to prevent protests, resistance and attempts to escape, he noted. Victims included those interned and deported as political prisoners by the communists who arrived together with the soviet troops, thus facilitating their forced takeover of the country, the Parliamentary State Secretary said.
200-230 thousand civilians were deported for the current territory of Hungary for use as forced labourers, he continued, including 150-170 civilian men and boys as prisoners of war and 50-60 thousand men, women, boys and girls as German internees.
30-40 percent of those deported died from starvation, deprivation, circumstances that didn’t provide for even the most basic human needs and forced hard labour, but some Hungarian towns and villages lost up to 60 percent of their internees. The Soviet authorities provided no official information regarding their deaths and in many cases there is still no information to this day concerning how their lives abroad ended, Mr. Rétvári noted.
The survivors came home physically and mentally broken and had to continue their lives with the stigma of having been detained by the Soviet authorities, while unable to speak about their experiences in the Soviet Union here at home. When they arrived back in Hungary they were threatened with being taken back to the gulag if they ever spoke about their experiences. The deportees, most of whom were released in 1947-48, soon realised that despite their best hopes it was not freedom that awaited them at home; a political system was being constructed in Hungary that they knew only too well from their period of internment in the Soviet Union.