The twin of the statue of the Pest lad erected in Csepel on 23 October was inaugurated on Friday afternoon in Szczecin, a port in the North of Poland. The welcome speech of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was read out at the ceremony, which was attended by Szilárd Németh, deputy head of the parliamentary group of Fidesz.

The monument, a work by the sculptor Richárd Juha, which was gifted to the city of Szczecin by the 21st district of Budapest, pays tribute to the fact that „sixty years ago the citizens of Szczecin adopted the Pest lads who fought in the streets of the Hungarian revolution”, the Hungarian Prime Minister’s letter reads which was read out by Hungarian Ambassador to Warsaw Iván Gyurcsik.

Mr Orbán highlighted: Szczecin was the first city in Poland which sent an aid consignment to the besieged Budapest in the autumn of 1956. As he reiterated, the people of Szczecin „in response to the retaliations in Hungary, repeatedly took to the streets, and chased the head of the local Soviet consulate to a cellar”.

With this, the Prime Minister’s letter referred to the incident when the people of Szczecin protested outside the local Soviet consulate on 10 December 1956, demanding the release of Imre Nagy and the discharge of János Kádár, and they broke into the building of the Soviet representation, and set it on fire. The protest was broken up by the troops of the Polish security board (KBW) and the police.

Former Mayor of Csepel Szilárd Németh, too, made mention of the event in his speech, pointing out: the Szczecin Soviet foreign representation was the only one in the entire Eastern bloc which was besieged and occupied. As he reiterated, in 1956 Szczecin and Csepel were twin cities, and even a stamp was released in the Polish city in which there are two intertwined hands and the inscription Szczecin-Csepel.

He stressed: the Polish did the most for the cause of the Hungarian freedom fight who were the first to send aid consignments to Hungary. In reference to the Polish blood donations, he said: „There is brotherly Polish blood in the arteries of many a Hungarian patriot to this day.”

At the ceremony, the messages of Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydlo and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, President of the governing party Law and Justice were also read out. Lénárd Borbély, Mayor of Csepel attended the event as well.

As part of the ceremony, an outdoor exhibition entitled 1956 – Poland-Hungary. History and Commemoration was opened under the auspices of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance in one of the central squares of Szczecin on Friday afternoon. In the evening, Kossuth Prize winner pianist Gergely Bogányi gave a concert playing works by Chopin at the Szczecin Philharmonic Hall.

(MTI)