The Holocaust is significant for the whole nation because hundreds of thousands of Hungarians had been “ripped from the nation’s body”, Agriculture Minister István Nagy said on Wednesday, at an event marking the upcoming Memorial Day for the Victims of the Hungarian Holocaust.
At the event held at the Holocaust Memorial Centre in Budapest, Nagy said Hungarian society had “still not recovered” from the era when hundreds of thousands of “our compatriots who were faithful to the Hungarian community were enslaved in a brutal and senseless way, all in the name of a degenerate ideology.”
Hungarian Jews have laid down their lives and wealth for Hungarian freedom over the centuries, he said, and fought together with their Hungarian compatriots at the revolution of 1848 and in the first world war, he said.
“Holocaust is a mirror we cannot look into without a cry of woe,” he said. “And we can ask the face looking back at us from that mirror: are we doing everything so that terror will not be repeated, and do we feel the responsibility for the sins of our fathers,” he said.
Parliament declared April 16 the Memorial Day of the Victims of the Hungarian Holocaust in 2001, marking the day when the ghettoisation of Budapest Jewry started in 1944.
featured image via Szilárd Koszticsák/MTI
