It seems that historical monuments have more to say about the time in which they are built than the time they commemorate. On March 15, 1928, a large crowd gathered at Riverside Drive, New York, among them the 520-member delegation of the Horthy regime, to dedicate a monument of Lajos Kossuth, the hero of the 1848 Revolution. Progressive Hungarian-Americans boycotted […]
The Second World War ended in Hungary in April 1945. The old regime was gone, to be replaced by a new one based on idealism, lies, hypocrisy and lust for total control and cruelty. The new regime, called Communism, had a new ideal for its citizens. The new man would be of the working class background, intelligent, dedicated, courageous and […]
Democracy is not a right. Democratic values must be fought for and protected every day, sometimes in seemingly small ways, and even in Canada. This was the overarching message of this past Sunday’s commemoration of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in Ottawa’s Beechwood Cemetery, organized by the Ottawa Hungarian Forum. The Forum is a fledgling grassroots community group in the Canadian […]
The Spectrum, a Utah-based news site, has granted the HFP permission to republish an insightful and moving story about a Hungarian who fled her homeland in 1956 and settled in the United States. Her story, recorded by Kevin Jenkins, is very candid and is especially relevant in light of the refugee drama still unfolding in Europe. * As millions of […]
My grandfather fled Hungary in January 1957, never to return, but his young family stayed behind. Between 1954 and 1956, he was a prisoner sentenced to hard labour at the coal mine near the village of Csolnok, in northwestern Hungary, after having been found guilty of conspiring against the state. He fled to Canada in 1957 and from his new […]
Dear Editor, In 1956, just after my sixth birthday, my father was asked by American Secretary of State Dulles and President Eisenhower to take over the State Department Refugee Relief Program to deal with the thousands of Hungarian refugees fleeing the Soviet invasion. For the next year, I seldom saw my father. Some nights he would appear on American television […]
