(Listen to the BosNewsLife report here…)
Bos report – Download (MP3)
Bos report – Listen (MP3)
At the event in Hungary’s Holocaust Memorial Center, Jewish youngsters dedicated their music to the relative few Hungarians who saved Jews during World War Two, when the country was for the most part a close ally of Nazi Germany.
About 600-thousand Hungarian Jews died in the Holocaust, carried out by German Nazis and Hungarian fascists. The 16 honored Hungarians disagreed and began hiding Jews for which they received the Righteous Among the Nations award.
It is given by Israel’s Jerusalem-based Holocaust memorial authority, Yad Vashem, to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
SURVIVING RELATIVES
In most cases only surviving relatives received medals, but some elderly rescuers managed to attend the ceremony. Trembling of old age and emotion, they stood on the platform, in front of the Hungarian president and other high ranking diplomats.
Among those honored were workers hiding one or more Jews in their basements and a supervisor of a Budapest Hotel who managed to save the lives of 100 Jews by using double lists of guests and false names.
And, then there was Gizella Csertan, who was a young Christian girl inviting a Jewish family to stay in her village. "One day a family without a man was knocking on the door… They were not wailing, they were not complaining, only their eyes spoke to us,” she recalled, fighting back tears. “The friendship of these two families, a Jewish and a Christian, brought together by the war, and this good friendship had cemented and is still cultivated.”
Hungarian President Laszlo Solyom said in a brief speech that many more Hungarians saved Jews. But that view was not shared by Israeli officials.
Yad Vashem Chairman Yosef Lapid, a former Justice Minister, told BosNewsLife that as a Hungarian Holocaust survivor he has mixed feelings about Budapest.
HEWISH GHETTO
He still recalls the Budapest Jewish ghetto and Hungary ‘s controversial role in the war. “I have very hard feelings about the behavior of the Hungarians in the Holocaust. Because most of them kept silent. And when you keep silent, you collaborate with those who do terrible things."
Lapid is also concerned about a rise of anti Semitism in Europe, and especially in Hungary. “Yes unfortunately there are now neo-Nazis very active in Hungary. And we don’t have here the law that exists in Germany, for instance, which makes it a crime when someone uses religious or racial hatred to inspire
crimes,” he said.
“I hope that the Hungarian authorities will pass such as law, because there have been atrocities [here] which are unthinkable nowadays," Lapid added.
While these controversial issues were not solved at Thursday’s ceremony, organizers made it clear this event showed that at least some Hungarians risked their lives to save the others during the Holocaust era. (Part of this BosNewsLife News Story also airs on Voice of America (VOA) with www.voanews.com and Deutsche Welle radio with www.deutschewelle.de ).
