The Day of Remembrance for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes was a Hungarian-Polish-Lithuanian initiative.Continue reading
The Director of the House of Terror marked the Day of Remembrance for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes during an event held at the museum.
“The two halves of Europe are still separated by the different experiences of dictatorships,” Mária Schmidt, the Director of the House of Terror Museum said at an event marking the Europe-wide Day of Remembrance for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.
“The West still shrugs its shoulders as a kind of disinterested outsider when we talk about the crimes of communism,” she noted.
The conservative historian recalled that “when the eastern half of Europe won back its freedom in 1990, Western Europe expected the East to embrace their view of history, which barely mentioned communism. We hoped our stories would be shared stories, but we are still the only ones bowing our heads,” she added.
According to Schmidt, Hungarians have a “deep understanding of the national socialist and communist dictatorships, and hate both with all their hearts.” Those who want to build dictatorships today have more sophisticated methods than weapons, the historian said. “But we Hungarians will not let others tell us what to do and how to do it, and we will not let them take away our freedom,” she added.
The memorial day marks the anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in 1939, the non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Featured photo via MTI/Koszticsák Szilárd