“Acknowledging the past, including my personal past, I bow my head to all the victims of the Holocaust” – a 444 report This is what President Tamás Sulyok said in the Upper House of the Parliament on Memorial Day for the victims of the Holocaust in Hungary.
What I have heard regarding my father in public in recent weeks has shaken me
said the head of state in front of Hungarian Jewish leaders and other guests on the 80th anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary. “It depends on the self-esteem of a nation that it looks at its past, it cannot deny it, but neither can it deny the possibility of self-purification,” said the President of the Republic in his speech. “I believe that instead of curse words and Janus-faced measuring of each other, we were born to be good, to accept each other,” said Sulyok, and then touched on his father’s story.
“I mightn’t question him, so his dropped words and silences remained. I can’t even ask today. I was born twelve years following the Holocaust, I heard in the family that we never harmed anyone, we had no enemies,” he said.
In an interview last summer, the President of the Republic Tamás Sulyok said regarding his father that following 1945 he was sentenced to death because of a personal vendetta once morest a communist party secretary and had to hide for years. Historian László Karsai in his article published on Hvg.hu on the other hand, he recently found out that László Sulyok was noticed by the authorities because of the above-mentioned article entitled Flag-breaking, and in fact he was wanted because they wanted to clarify what role he played in the Arrow movement. In the article, Sulyok also wrote: “Anyone who is free from Jewish blood, moral integrity and Hungarian National Socialist convictions can come to us.”
Tamás Sulyok called Karsai’s writing a genderless attack, and called his father “a socially sensitive, patriotic, philo-Semitic man”. “It’s an unfair situation, which, since it’s regarding my family, causes serious pain. I can say that before the regime change, as for most Hungarians, the past was taboo in our family as well,” he said, and added: “there was and still is a family legendary that preserved the stories regarding my father, as I stated earlier.”
In his article for Telex, historian Krisztián Ungváry analyzed in detail why the president told untruths regarding his father’s past.
April 16 is the day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust in Hungary. On this day in 1944, the ghettoization of Jews began in Transcarpathia, Kassa, and Szabolcs, and within a few weeks, almost all rural Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of the 850,000 Hungarian Jews living in the state at that time, 550,000-600,000 died in the Holocaust.
MTI writes that Israeli President Jichák Hercog greeted the participants of the commemoration in a video message and said he was grateful that Hungary took full responsibility for its collaboration with the Nazis and took an active role in international Holocaust organizations. Andor Grósz, the president of the Association of Hungarian Jewish Faith Communities (Mazsihisz), spoke regarding the loss that the Holocaust caused and still causes to Hungarians, which is still felt and immeasurable.
