The Kallos Family Book 2022

APPENDIX 2 • 59
Budapest’s controversial monument to the
victims of the German occupation of Hungary,
which was erected July 2014 in Szabadság
Square. The monument depicts Hungary as
the innocent and unsuspecting Archangel
Gabriel being attacked by a German imperial
eagle. Above the bird’s right claw is a ring
marked ‘1944’. The Hungarian inscription
on the memorial is A NÉMET MEGSZÁLLÁS
ÁLDOZATAINAK EMLÉKMŰVE, which, in
English, is MEMORIAL FOR THE VICTIMS OF
THE GERMAN OCCUPATION.
PHOTO RETRIEVED FROM THE INTERNET.
TRANSLATION BY JUDIT KEGLY.
From the moment it was conceptualised there
were continuous demonstrations against the
planned monument. Consequently, it was erected
in the middle of the night after the area had been
evacuated and sealed off by police. When the
square reopened protestors threw eggs and kefir
at the completed monument. As a result, it has
never been officially inaugurated.
Today there is still a continuous protest
monument called the Eleven Memorial that is
constantly dismantled by authorities only to be
replaced and expanded by the local community,
who consider the German occupation memorial
to be a symbol of falsification of history that
confuses the war’s victims with its perpetrators.
Protestors hang laminated photographs
together with the tragic stories of murdered
Hungarian Jews. They also place suitcases in
front of the revisionist German Occupation
Memorial as a reminder of Hungary’s
complicity in the Holocaust, particularly its
enthusiastic 1944 deportation of its 455,000
Jewish citizens, including the Kallos, Ruttner,
Ickovics, Slyomoivcs and Klein families, to
Nazi death camps.
At the base of the monument to the right
is a plaque in English, Hebrew, German and
Russian that reads: ‘In memory of the victims.’
A nearby truncated column bears the same
inscription in Hungarian.
PHOTO RETRIEVED FROM THE INTERNET.