Germany occupied its ally Hungary on March 19, 1944 and the Auschwitz transports soon commenced on a rapid schedule. On July 6, 1944, Hungary’s regent Miklós Horthy issued a decree stopping the deportations of Hungary’s Jewish citizens. He did not do this out of concern for the fate of Jews, but due to the dramatically deteriorating military situation for Germany […]
Hungary’s young and photogenic Justice Minister Judit Varga recently visited Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp and declared her “zero tolerance for antisemitism.” Hungary has “taken several steps to prevent our country’s Jews from being exposed to any kind of antisemitism that has become more and more widespread in the world.” What Varga did not mention is her government’s institutionalized efforts to rewrite […]
I am grateful for having received a fascinating newspaper clipping from Tomas Korper, in response to a piece appearing in HFP entitled The Genocidal Priest — The Last Interview with András Kun. The letter writer’s father, trying to survive the Holocaust by posing as a military officer, was captured by Kun in Budapest and was brutally beaten by him and […]
We were asked to share this new and innovative project with the readers of the Hungarian Free Press, and we are happy to do so. A website called HolokausztFoto.hu is being launched on June 21, 2019 at 4:30 p.m. in Budapest’s Nappali Kávéház (Vasvári Pál utca 3) with the participation of historian András Lenárt, journalist János Dési and Miklós Tamási […]
It is rarely mentioned in Hungary that many Christians perished in labor and concentration camps during the Hungarian Holocaust. One Christian group, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, was viciously victimized. Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse to join armies, participate in political life or take a national oath. The origin of their faith goes back to the Bible Student movement of the 1870s founded by […]
We know from the revelations of the past nearly two decades that some of the men who joined the Roman Catholic priesthood were socially and emotionally maladjusted, and used their position of authority to abuse the most vulnerable in their community. There are also today a number of priests, sometimes younger ones, who not only subscribe privately to the most […]
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 […]
