The Kallos Family Book 2022

58 • THE KALLOS FAMILY
Appendix 2
Hungary’s apology
Today there is no memorial in Tyachiv for the
5,000 Jews (2,000 residents and about 3,000
from the surrounding areas) deported by the
Nazis and their Hungarian collaborators to
Auschwitz–Birkenau in May 1944. There is,
however, a memorial for the Russian soldiers
killed conquering the area in October 1944.
On 23 January 2014, which marked the seventieth
anniversary of Germany’s occupation
of Hungary, Csaba Korosi, Hungary’s ambassador
to the United Nations, publicly apologised
for the first time for the role the country played
in the Holocaust. He stated:
We owe an apology to the victims because the
Hungarian state was guilty for the Holocaust.
Firstly, because it failed to protect its citizens
from destruction, and secondly, because it
helped and provided financial resources to
the mass murder.
In a letter marking Holocaust Remembrance
Day 2014, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor
Orbán wrote:
We cannot and do not tolerate the branding,
humiliation, or mistreatment of anybody
because of their religion or ethnicity.
Hungary’s President Áder joined the 28 April
2014 annual March of the Living event commemorating
the seventieth anniversary of the
Holocaust at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz–
Birkenau in Poland and gave a speech in which
he described the site as Hungary’s largest cemetery.
He reminded the gathering that every
third victim murdered in the camp was a
Hungarian Jew.
However, on 21 July 2014, only months after
President Áder’s speech, a controversial monument,
dedicated to ‘all the victims’ of Hungary’s
German occupation, was erected in Szabadság
Tér (Freedom Square), in the heart of Budapest.
The monument, which depicts Hungary as the
Archangel Gabriel being attacked by a German
imperial eagle, has been widely criticised by
several Jewish organisations and historians as
an attempt to absolve the Hungarian state and
most of the Hungarian population of their active
role in carrying out the deportations of about
455,000 so called Hungarian Jews to Nazi death
camp during the German occupation.
So incensed by the German Occupation
Memorial was Hungarian Labor Battalion
conscript and survivor Randolph Braham,
who, post-war became one of the leading world
specialists on the Hungarian Holocaust, that
as a protest he returned the state Order of
Merit award presented to him by the Orbán
government in 2011, stating that
I regard this to be a cowardly attempt to divert
attention from the role the Horthy regime
played in the annihilation of Jews and to
obfuscate the Holocaust with the ‘suffering’
that Hungarians incurred as a result of the
German occupation, whereas the historical
facts prove that rather than resistance, the
latter was received with general applause.