“The Hungarian state bears responsibility for not having defended its citizens during the Holocaust; there is no collective guilt, but there is state responsibility”, Minister heading the Prime Minister’s Office Gergely Gulyás said at a commemoration to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
At the event, which was organised by the Holocaust Memorial Center, the Minister highlighted: “The Government has always spoken very clearly with relation to the responsibility of the Hungarian state”. “It is a fact that in the thirties the rise of anti-Semitism also reached Hungarian society, and was embodied in the intolerable restriction of Jewish rights, and it is a fact that the deportation of Jews began following the German occupation, but none of this cold have occurred without the activities of Hungarian public administration”, he explained.
“The Government is proud of the fact that Jews and non-Jews can live side-by-side today in a flourishing cultural and religious life, and in security”, Mr. Gulyás declared. “Hungary has learned from the past and knows that a common future must be planned and realised together with the Jewry”, he added.
“The Holocaust happened in an age when the existence of the individual was called into question, and in which preserving humanity and all human values required a major decision. In an age in which the whole Jewish community were marked death and millions were murdered. Even id the suffering was followed by liberation, what they experienced remained with the survivors for the rest of their lives”, he declared.
According to the Minister, behind the numbers that indicate the multitude of victims, we must see the human fates, and we must preserve the memory of the victims, of those who were destroyed by the murderous dictatorship that was driven by the race theory.
“The loss is not only that of the Jews, but of all of Europe; is not only a loss for the Hungarian Jewry, but for the whole Hungarian nation”, Mr. Gulyás said. “The Holocaust was the result of disavowing Western civilisation that rests on Jewish-Christian foundations, because both Jewish and Christian moral teachings regard human life as sacred, and this is what lives on in the original declaration of civil liberties”, he states.
Israeli Ambassador to Budapest Yossi Amrani stressed: “The Holocaust is an inconceivable and indescribably tragedy, that it is our duty to remember. The survivors bear a heavy burden, an almost unbearable memory, and there is no consolation for their painful memories”.
The Ambassador said that in his opinion the stories of the survivors present the terrible acts that occurred during the Second World War and led to it, when life was one with fear and the renouncing of fundamental rights. “It is our moral duty to remind our fellow human beings of the tragedy that befell us, so that nobody can be a target of extermination”, he emphasised.
“It is your duty to tell their stories, the story of the Jewry and of anti-Semitism. It is your mission to not compromise with relation to the truth and to state this, because you owe this to both history and the victims”, the Diplomat highlighted.
Chairman of the Holocaust Public Foundation Andor Grósz spoke about the fact that we are looking ahead to an important year, because March will mark the 75th anniversary of the Nazi occupation of Hungary, which began “the sinister series of events that led to horror”, the Holocaust. “The few who survived those events as children are now over eighty, and for this reason one of the Public Foundation’s important goals is to record as many memories as possible from the survivors so they can be preserved for posterity as eternal witness”, he pointed out. “There is still much to do with relation to researching and teaching the Holocaust, forming a culture of remembrance and increasing tolerance, we are still far from an idea state of affairs”, he said.
Director of the Holocaust Memorial Center Tamás Kovács told those present: One third of the victims of Auschwitz were Hungarian Jews, and he has set as his task to preserve their memory and to the younger generations so that this can never happen again.
The Auschwitz death camp was liberated on 27 January 1945, in commemoration of which on 1 January 2005 the UN General Assembly declared 27 January the International Day of Commemoration in memory for the victims of the Holocaust. The unanimously adopted resolution states the “duty of commemoration and teaching” to ensure that future generation come to know the story of the Nazi mass murders, which claimed six million victims, the vast majority of the Jews.