Holocaust Memorial Day

On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, "in the first place, we commemorate a Hungarian national tragedy, of which we were a part both with several hundred thousand innocent victims and having participated on the side of the perpetrators" the head of the Prime Minister's Office, Gergely Gulyás was quoted by MTI as saying at a commemoration at Budapest's Holocaust Memorial Center on Tuesday.

Gergely Gulyás said the Hungarian nation was involved in the tragedy in which "outstanding and innocent citizens, children and women were deported, tortured and murdered", while the Hungarian state was also involved because "not only did it fail to protect its citizens but contributed to the heinous crimes by way of thoughts, deeds, and acts of omission." At the same time, he noted that "the heroes that remained human amidst inhumanity and saved lives by risking their own."

Andor Grósz, the head of Hungarian Jewish federation Mazsihisz, said in his address that "the Holocaust is a single tragedy in time, space and proportions - a nadir of not only in the history of Jews but of mankind. That is why we need to repeat again and again: the Holocaust is not just a Jewish cause."

He added the Holocaust claimed six million Jewish and tens of thousands of Roma victims. "We often see them as numbers, a crowd without faces, far away from us, but they were people with dreams, desires and feelings, just like us," he said.

He also noted that historians were "in arrears with researching the Roma Holocaust" and called for increased focus "to reveal the atrocities that happened in Hungary, and the losses of the Roma".

Israel's ambassador to Hungary, Maya Kadosh said that the greatest tragedy of the Holocaust was not that the Nazis murdered people on an industrial scale, but that the world remained silent. The world decided to ignore the smoke from the gas chambers until the ash covered the whole continent, she said. She added that the world was similarly silent now, when "people are killed in Tehran's streets in broad daylight". Israel stands by those who seek freedom, she added.