The struggle against communism was a true fight, the Minister heading the Prime Minister’s Office stated on Tuesday, on the Memorial Day of the Victims of Communism in Budapest.

Gergely Gulyás highlighted that communist dictatorship had claimed 100 million victims world-wide.

According to estimates, 700,000 Hungarians were forcibly taken away for ‘malenky robot’. Three hundred thousand of them never returned. There are no statistics about how many were crippled, and sustained permanent physical and psychological wounds, he added.

Let us remember the generations who were killed, driven away, taken to forced labour camps, the Minister said, stressing that there are broken human lives and generations behind communist dictatorship shrouded in a cloud of secrets and concealment.

Hungary is now three decades after the fall of communism and a peaceful change of regime. It is an important result of the struggle fought for remembrance that Hungary was the first to make the memorial day of victims of communism official, Mr Gulyás said.

He pointed out that while communist dictatorship had ended in Hungary, communists and their sins were still “living with us”.

The murderous ideology, too, is still around, the Minister said, reminding members of his audience of the exhibition ‘Budapest is Free’ organised by the capital’s new leadership which, in his view, is a tribute to Soviet occupation and the killing of thousands of people.

Those who want to find excuses for murderers and want to lessen their horrific deeds speak about democracy in vain because their words are not credible, he stated.

At the commemoration held in the Uránia National Film Theatre, Mária Schmidt, government commissioner for coordinating the Memorial Year ‘30 Years of Freedom’, Director General of the House of Terror Museum, stressed that 70 years ago, “the most inhumane regime”, communism had claimed one hundred million victims: executed, humiliated, tortured, forcibly relocated people crippled psychologically and physically fell victim to the regime.

Those who rejected communism were faced with death, ice-cold rejection or “that certain faithlessness”. “These are the cold facts,” the government commissioner said, adding that the most horrible aspect of this is that it all happened.

“Nothing destroys one’s soul more than the lack of truth,” Mrs Schmidt said, highlighting that for half a century after World War II, Europe lived in a shroud of “concealment, denial and half-truths”. She said we must open the eyes of those who did not experience the cold reality of communism.

Mrs Schmidt said Hungary had paid a terrible price for the crimes of communism.

Though we have been free for thirty years, we need more time to definitively clear away the rubble of the almost half-a-century-long dictatorship, she said.

Parliament declared 25 February the Memorial Day of the Victims of Communism in 2000 in memory of the fact that it was on this day in 1947 that Béla Kovács, Secretary General of the Independent Smallholders Party was arrested unlawfully and forcibly taken to the Soviet Union.

(MTI)