The Holocaust is one of the greatest tragedies of not only the Jewish community in Hungary, but of the history of the whole of Hungarian society, Csaba Latorcai, Deputy State Secretary for Priority Social Affairs at the Prime Minister’s Office said at the commemoration held on Thursday in the former Auschwitz death camp.

Mr Latorcai attended the March of the Living held for the 25th time in Oswiecim in South-East-Poland at the head of a Hungarian delegation of 150. The event is organised on the premises of the former Auschwitz Lager, which was operated by the occupying Nazi Germany, on the occasion of the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. On Thursday morning the Hungarian delegation comprised above all of graduating secondary school and university students and the Presidents of the Jewish Heritage in Hungary Public Endowment (MAZSÖK) and the Federation of Jewish Communities in Hungary (MASZIHISZ) conducted a separate commemoration in tribute to the Hungarian victims of the death camp at the Hungarian barrack No. 18 in Auschwitz.

The memory of the Holocaust which is „one of the greatest tragedies of not only the Jewish community in Hungary, but of the history of the whole of Hungarian society” must be kept alive „so that future generations may not commit the same atrocities, in the light of the past, which have happened once before”, Mr Latorcai said. “By fostering this memory, and introducing the history of the Holocaust in an authentic and balanced manner, we may get closer to the goal: atonement for what happened”, the Deputy State Secretary continued. As he pointed out, the refurbishment of synagogues in Hungary and the Carpathian Basin and the renovation of abandoned Jewish burial sites form part of the fostering of memories.

In the afternoon the Hungarian delegation will attend the central commemoration of the March of the Living together with more than 500 other foreign delegations. As part of this, the some eight thousand attendees will cover a three-kilometre walk on one of the routes of the World War II death marches connecting together the Auschwitz I Lager and the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.

The March of the Living, which forms part of an international educational programme initiated in 1988, is organised on the international Holocaust remembrance day first celebrated in 1951. It was initially held every two years, and has been an annual event since 1996.

Nazi Germany originally established the Auschwitz (Oswiecim) concentration camp for Polish prisoners in 1940. The nearby Birkenau (Brzezinka) lager was set up two years later, and in addition to a number of other camps operated in the territory of occupied Poland, it became the principal site of the extermination of the Jews.

Experts of the Auschwitz museum estimate the number of deportees banished to the camp complex to be around 1.3 million, 1.1 million of whom were Jews, but there were many Polish, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war as well. More than 430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to the camp: they constituted the most populous group of Jews. According to the data of the Auschwitz museum, 325,000-330,000 of them were killed in gas chambers immediately after their arrival, and some 25,000 perished during the course of later selections. The number of people who were killed or perished in the death camp was minimum 1.1 million.

(MTI)