A Jewish Memorial was unveiled in Makó on Thursday to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Holocaust and the one-hundredth anniversary of the construction of the town’s Reformed Synagogue. „The Hungarian Holocaust is party fratricide: it was perpetrated against Hungarians and Hungarians took part in committing it”, Minister in Charge of the Prime Minister’s Office János Lázár and the region’s Member of Parliament said at the inauguration ceremony.
This is such a simple and true statement, yet today there is no consensus on this issue, as should be the case in a strong, free and safe community, the Minister said.
Mr. Lázár stressed that “we still have work to do to ensure that the truth of this statement can serve as the basis for the raising and teaching of future generations”, so that what happened seventy years ago can indeed never happen ever again.
The victims were Hungarians, and so the Holocaust is also a national tragedy of the Hungarian people. There are still some, and unfortunately they sometimes still make their opinions heard in public life, who differentiate between Hungarian and Hungarian and who want to exclude certain people from the nation”, the Minister continued.
A portion of the perpetrators, and a significant portion, were Hungarian, and not just the guards who escorted the transports. Certain leaders of the Hungarian state have a heavy personal responsibility for the deportation of the Hungarian Jewry and for sentencing to death their own citizens, Mr. Lázár said.
The Memorial, which is located at the former site of the Reformed Synagogue, was created by artists László Bánvölgyi and Jenő Bodó according to a design by graphic artist Ildikó Karsai. It stands in memory of not only the destroyed church and community, but in commemoration of all the murdered Jews of Makó. The Memorial’s black granite frame, which stands on a stone pedestal, surrounds a pane of glass with an image of the former Synagogue, while the silhouette of the church is formed by stones placed within the monument.