Israel’s Prime Minister and leader of the Likud party invited Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to visit. Authoritarian Orbán is generally not a welcome guest in the EU or North America; President Obama and Trump have never invited him to the White House. Mr. Orbán is creating a new history for Hungary, a heroic one. His regime has decided to downplay […]
Politicians and activists of the Christian Democratic People’s Party (KDNP) decided that it was time to affix labels to buildings and houses in Budapest that serve as homes to NGOs, which work with legal immigrants and refugees. The stickers affixed to the entrances of these buildings read: “An organization that supports immigration” (Bevándorlást támogató szervezet, in Hungarian). Note that KDNP […]
June 4th is the day when Hungary and many Hungarians in the diaspora remember the Treaty of Trianon, signed in 1920, which led to the loss of two-thirds of historic Hungary’s population and almost three-fourths of its land. The Ottawa Hungarian Community Centre (OHCC) held its commemoration, including an exhibit, a cultural program and a meal, this past Sunday. I […]
My father, Arthur Schwartz, arrived in Canada 70 years ago as one of the 1,123 Jewish orphans that Canada admitted after the Holocaust. Born in Kosice, Czechoslovakia, in 1923, he grew up in an Orthodox Jewish working-class family. In 1938, Kosice was annexed to Hungary. Hungarian Jews were subjected to persecution and anti-Semitic laws such as work restrictions and the […]
Malcolm Turnbull, the Australian Prime Minister, is angry. He says those who accuse his energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, of being a dual Australian-Hungarian citizen just do not understand the history of the Hungarian Holocaust. Josh Frydenberg’s mother Erica Strauss was born in 1943 in the Budapest ghetto. That is where the fascists had pushed all the Jews in together, as […]
András Siewert, the director of Migration Aid, wore a t-shirt with a yellow star bearing the words “Jude,” and underneath it the line “I am a refugee” when he arrived to give an interview to the HírTV news network. He was speaking with prominent journalist Olga Kálmán right after shameful events in the village of Őcsény, where the Orwellian government-sponsored […]
Sir Karl Raimund Popper’s astute observation that “[t]rue ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it” is especially relevant to how some belittle or deny Col. Ferenc Koszorus’ action that prevented the more than 250,000 Jews living in Budapest from being sent to the German death camps in July 1944. Ignoring the historical record (e.g., […]
A Catholic memorial service for George Oláh, Nobel Prize Winning Hungarian-American chemist was held on September 19 at the Fiumei Road Cemetery. His final wish was to bring his ashes to Budapest and the eulogy was given by Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary. I had been in contact with Oláh for a decade or so. To my surprise on […]
I am neither a writer nor a historian, but in 1944 my father (Kálmán József) was more than an acquaintance of Admiral Horthy and has been a friend of Horthy’s Senior Aide-de-Camp, General Gábor Gerloczy. In November 1944 I was 18 1/2 years old, a labor camp escapee surviving in Budapest in a self designed military uniform and having freed […]
Elza Brandeisz is a deeply religious Hungarian woman. She is a member of The Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Hungary. On November 12, 1995, the Holocaust organization Yad Vashem in Jerusalem recognized Ms. Brandeisz, as Righteous Among the Nations, a person who risked her life to hide Jews during World War II. Among others, she hid George Soros. Elza Brandeisz was a […]
