Holocaust Remembrance Day in Hungary – PestGirls
Holocaust Remembrance Day in Hungary
Every year on April 16 in Hungary, the day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust in Hungary is commemorated by the fact that in 1944 the closure of the Hungarian Jewish ghetto began on this day. On the anniversary of the liberation of the Budapest ghetto on January 18, 2000, Zoltán Pokorni, the then Minister of Education, suggested that the Holocaust be commemorated in high school on April 16 every year. This had already taken place that year, and the National Assembly held a commemoration on 17 April.
The first massacre of the Holocaust, which also affected Hungarian Jews, took place on August 27-28, 1941, in Kamenets-Podolsky, Ukraine, where the German SS executed 23,000 Jews, most of whom were deportees from Hungary, mostly stateless. After the German occupation of Hungary on March 19, 1944, the Sztójay government enacted a series of anti-Jewish laws ranging from wearing the yellow star to providing bicycles to occupying the Jews’ homes. On April 28, 1944, the Decree on Ghettoization was published, according to which the Jews of the smaller settlements were gathered regardless of gender or gender, then transported to ghettos and concentration camps on the outskirts of a large city, and the Jews of the city and Budapest were crowded in fenced ghettos. Ghettoization in Transcarpathia began at dawn on April 16, 1944, before the decree was published. The measure was implemented throughout the country in a few weeks, and people classified as Jewish were crowded into star houses in Budapest.
Mass deportations began on May 15, 1944. The German staff headed by Adolf Eichmann with the participation of the Hungarian administration and the gendarmerie in a few months, four trains a day, a total of 147 trains, were transported to 437,000 rural Jews in death camps in Auschwitz. Miklószó Horthy stopped the deportation of Budapest’s Jews on July 6 as a result of the government of the international protest. After the unsuccessful attempt to break out on October 15, 1944, the Arrow Cross Party led by Ferenc Szálasi came to power. The new “leader of the nation” renewed the deportations: in November and December, about 50,000 Jews from Budapest and on duty were taken to Germany, most of whom were driven west on foot. The Jews left in Budapest were locked up in two ghettos in November, and thousands of Jews were killed by Arrow Cross gunmen. Several diplomats and church figures, including Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden, Carl Lutz of Switzerland, Pope Nuncio of Italy Giorgio Perlasca and Angelo Rotta, tried to save the persecuted. The survivors of the Budapest ghetto were released on January 18, 1945, and the survivors of the concentration camps in the spring of 1945.
The 1941 census showed 725,000 Israelis in a country with increased territory after the revision. Two-thirds of them died as a result of labor service, deportations, and deliberate genocide. Rural Jewry was completely exterminated, and about 100,000 of those living in Budapest escaped. Historians put the number of Roma in Hungary who lost their lives in concentration camps as victims of the Holocaust between 5,000 and 70,000. (The victims of the Gypsy Holocaust and the powdery mildew are commemorated in Hungary on August 2.)
The opening of the Holocaust Memorial Center on Páva Street in Budapest on April 15, 2004 is connected to the commemoration day. Commemorations will be held all over the country this year as well, on April 24 – after a forced two-year break due to the coronavirus epidemic – a traditional Walk of Remembrance will be held.
Source: MTI; Photo: MTI / Koszticsák Szilárd