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| Hungarians mark anniversary of liberation of Jewish ghetto
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(L to R) Hungarian Deputy Prime Minister Peter Kiss, Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany and Economics Minister Janos Koka with an unidentified person attend the religious ceremony on Wednesday in Budapest's main synagogue to mark the 61st anniversary of the Liberation from the Nazis of the city's Jewish ghetto. Some survivors of the ghetto attended the ceremony.
Photo: AFP Copyright 2006
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Hungarians have marked the 61st anniversary of the liberation of the Budapest Jewish ghetto, where thousands died but tens of thousands of others were spared deportation to a certain death as Nazi troops retreated in the last days of WWII.
More than 1,000 people, including survivors, students and Hungarian prime minister Ferenc Gyurcany joined a solemn special religious ceremony last Wednesday in Budapest’s main synagogue, located on the edge of the former ghetto.
Tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews were kept in appalling conditions by Nazi German forces and their Hungarian allies, the Arrow Cross.
They were liberated from the ghetto when the Soviet Red Army arrived in the capital and breached the fence surrounding it on 18 January 1945.
Survivors of the ghetto, top politicians and church representatives attended the service in Budapest’s large Dohany Street synagogue.
More than 400,000 Jews were deported to the death camps from Hungary in 1944, mainly from provincial towns and villages.
But 60,000 people survived in terrible conditions in the narrow streets of Budapest’s seventh district, despite constant efforts by the Nazis and the Arrow Cross to destroy them.
Almost 40,000 Jews survived elsewhere in the city, thanks to the efforts of foreign diplomats and many ordinary citizens, priests and nuns.
’Free Europe’
During the service, Chief Rabbi Robert Frohlich spoke of the contradictory feelings among the survivors.
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Victims' names on metal leafs at the commemoration tree for 600.000 Hungarian victims of the Holocaust in the Raul Wallenberg park after the solemn religious ceremony marking the 61st anniversary of the liberation of Budapest Jewish ghetto 18 January.
Photo: AFP Copyright 2006 | "We mourn because a whole Jewish world was destroyed in the Holocaust, because our family members were murdered," he said.
"But we also rejoice because we were saved and we give thanks for the liberation and for the life we received."
There is still controversy in Hungary over whether the entry of the Red Army into the city, and the subsequent behaviour of the troops, was a liberation or an occupation.
For the Jews of Budapest however, it was certainly a liberation.
Russian ambassador Valeri Musatov read out a statement from the foreign ministry in Moscow at the ceremony.
He said the defeat of Fascism with Soviet help was the first step in creating, "a unified, democratic and flourishing Europe".
Three-month ghetto
Outside the synagogue, which is believed to be the biggest in Europe, victim’s names are written on metal leafs at the commemoration tree for the 600,000 Hungarian victims of the Holocaust in the Raul Wallenberg park.
The Budapest ghetto, where Jews were forced by the Nazis to live in Budapest, during WWII, was made of several blocks of the old Jewish quarter of the city surrounding the main synagogue.
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Jewish cantor Laszlo Fekete sings during the solemn religious ceremony marking the 61st anniversary of the liberation of Budapest's Jewish ghetto.
Photo: AFP Copyright 2006 | It was surrounded by a high fence that was guarded so that contraband could not be sneaked in, and people could not get out.
The Nazi occupation of Budapest took place in March 1944. The ghetto was only established for less than three months, between November 1944 and the liberation of the city on 18 January 1945.
As with other ghettos that had been set up in other parts of Nazi-occupied Europe the area was completely cut off from the outside world: no food was allowed in, rubbish and waste were not collected and the buildings were overcrowded, leading to the spread of diseases such as typhoid.
More than half of those that were forced into the ghetto in 1944 were sent to concentration camps.
Around 50,000 Jews are living today in Hungary.
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