Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony on Friday marked the memorial day of the Hungarian victims of the Holocaust, at a virtual inauguration ceremony of a statue in Budapest’s 13th district.
The inauguration of the statue by Zénó Kelemen was originally planned for the March of the Living on April 25 but has been reorganised due to the coronavirus epidemic.
In the video posted on Facebook, Karácsony said “the Holocaust casts a long, dark shadow over our entire civilisation, but our civilisation has to live on, with all the weight and consequences of what happened.”
Even during a destructive pandemic, the memory of the victims has to be kept alive, and the memory of those who “did not watch idly as fellow humans were cruelly sent to their death in the name of a mad ideology.”
“At the time, there lived several hundreds of true people in Budapest who risked their lives to help their Jewish brethren without hesitation, often reviewing their backgrounds, education and earlier ways of thinking in the process,” Karácsony said.
Parliament declared April 16 the memorial day of the Hungarian victims of the Holocaust in 2001, marking the anniversary when Budapest Jews were first locked into ghettos in 1944.
Featured photo by Márton Mónus/MTI
