Viktor Orbán's speech in the Kozma utca cemetery at the ceremony marking the renovation of the plot for fallen Hungarian Jewish heroes
Ladies and Gentlemen, and all gathered here today,
Today, on the one hundredth anniversary of the liberation of Uzsok Pass, we have gathered here at the Kozma utca Jewish cemetery to pay our respects to the Hungarian Jewish soldiers who died in the First World War. And although we are here to pay tribute to the heroic dead of the First World War, we must not leave without mention of the Hungarian Jewish victims of the Second World War concentration camps. Tomorrow in Auschwitz we will remember the victims of the Holocaust, and there the Hungarian government will convey the pain and the loss of the Hungarian people. This was a tragedy for the Hungarian nation and an irreparable loss for the Hungarian Jewish community. In the First World War our army offered its soldiers advancement regardless of origin. Two and a half decades later we were without compassion and indifferent when we should have helped; and there were many Hungarians – very many – who chose evil instead of good, shame instead of honour.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
One hundred years after the events, in Hungary there is still an unjust lack of recognition for the soldiers who fell in the First World War. Even after the fall of communism, history books recounted the battles fought as if there were only victims, but no heroes. Yet to describe a soldier who falls in combat as merely a victim is unforgivably and unworthily belittling. We citizens of a more fortunate age see as heroes those soldiers who marched endless kilometres in the teeth of hostile cannon fire, through waist-deep snow, on half-frozen stream beds and on roads turned to seas of mud, to engage a frequently more numerous enemy force at the end of their gruelling path. We must see as heroes those who lived long months in snow-laden or flooded trenches, who fought for and defended their country. We must also see them as heroes because a war which started as one of retribution had by the end of the year been transformed into a true defence of the homeland, in which it fell to our soldiers to drive the enemy away from the threshold of their country, and even of their own homes. The painful annals of Hungarian history testify to what awaits the country when an enemy army breaks through the Carpathian passes. If in nineteen-fourteen to fifteen the line of defence in the Carpathians had failed, the Hungarian Plain would have become a theatre of operations, and Budapest a city under siege. All this did not happen because we had an outstanding minister of defence, Baron Samu Hazai, who created a seventy-thousand strong force almost out of nowhere to send as reinforcements to relieve the northern front, and then in a fortunate – or rather, inspired – moment decided to place Sándor Szurmay at their head. Szurmay and his troops were ready to fight for the Carpathians down to the last bullet and the last man. One hundred years ago, in temperatures of minus twenty and after a three-day battle, they managed to regain from the Russians the gateway to the country: Uzsok Pass.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
We could venture to say that without the sacrifice and heroic conduct of the Hungarian Jewish community, the defence of the country's territory could hardly have succeeded either that winter or later. All of your ancestors, the soldiers and doctors serving on the front, always remained faithful to the belief that was expressed thus in one of your community’s journals when the troops were being mobilised: “Hungarian Jewish brothers and sisters! In heart and spirit we have united and inseparably merged with our nation. It is therefore with intense fervour that we offer our lives for the sacred land, and for this great and noble nation.” To this day we do not know exactly how many Hungarian Jewish soldiers were killed in the war, but the fact that from Budapest’s Jewish population alone four thousand died says much about the scale of the loss.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
At a distance of one hundred years we must give thanks for the lives sacrificed in war and saved for peace. On the grave of one of the heroes buried here we can read the following: “He fell for his country, for his brothers and sisters, for Hungarian Jewry.” Standing here among the graves, all that happened to us seventy years ago is incomprehensible. The road that led from heroic Hungarian Jewish comradeship in the First World War to the concentration camps is incomprehensible. Walking among these graves it is also incomprehensible that after the Second World War there was a political system in Hungary which even sought to erase the memory of the soldiers buried here. Whole armies disappeared from cemeteries and records. The Heroes’ Cemetery in Rákoskeresztúr was destroyed, with the loss of eighteen thousand heroes’ graves, including those of ten thousand Hungarian soldiers; at the same time, most of the official records were destroyed. Those military graves which escaped the destruction were engulfed in weeds and consumed by decay. On the centenary of the Great War it is our moral duty to seek out the existing graves, and to create a register that preserves the names of our fallen soldiers. We answered the call of this moral duty when we decided to renovate the heroes’ graves in the Kozma utca Jewish cemetery. I am convinced that only a community that keeps a record of its members can stay strong. In a world of constant upheaval, only a community that honours the sacrifices made for it will find its home. The sacrifice of Hungarian Jews in the First World War played a major role in Hungary time and again being able to find its feet, and in our nation retaining its vital force.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Europe has had to work hard so that the struggle waged by nation states against each other could finally be resolved into peaceful remembrance. We must never forget, however, that we must defend peace again on a daily basis, lest we follow the path of those sleepwalking state leaders of nineteen-fourteen, who so easily cast peace aside. Before nineteen-fourteen, nobody could have foreseen that a Europe which had reached previously unimaginable levels of economic, technical and cultural development was not at the gateway of peace and prosperity, but on the verge of the bloodiest century in history. Let the soldiers’ graves here be permanent reminders. Let them remind us that in Europe's external and internal conflicts the deciding voice must never again be that of weapons.
Glory to the heroes!
(Prime Minister's Office)
