Eight Orbán-paid activists have been abruptly recalled from Ukraine. They are part of the so called Petőfi Sándor Program. The Hungarian Government did not release their names. As part of an über-nationalist lobbying program, Hungary sends paid activists to western Ukraine to improve the national identity of the Hungarian minority by teaching Hungarian language, folk music and leading dance groups. […]
This year we observed Memorial Day, a Federal Holiday, on May 27. On this day the United States honors the military personnel who perished while serving in the Armed Forces. Many people visit cemeteries and volunteers place an American flag on each grave in cemeteries. It is not widely known that at least 50,000 Hungarian Americans served in the U.S. […]
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 […]
Attila Szász is an exceptionally talented Hungarian film director. A couple of years ago I saw his film Demimonde (Félvilág) at the Tiburon Fim Festival and I found it intriguing. His latest film Eternal Winter (Örök tél) takes place at the end of World War II when many ethnic Germans were rounded up in Hungary and sent to labor camps […]
In January 1943 the poorly equipped 2nd Hungarian Army was destroyed by the Soviet Red Army near the Don River. In the senseless battle tens of thousands of Hungarians froze to death. Some say that 93,500 lives were lost in less than two weeks, while others put the number at 148,000. The Horthy government covered up the disaster and falsified […]
Hungarian troops in Denmark? In 1945 Hungary’s generals and officers continued to fight alongside the Nazis serving the Third Reich even after the war had ended in Hungary. The occupation of Denmark was one of the most disturbing adventures of Hungary’s pro-Hitler army. In February 1945 Budapest was already free. The Red Army controlled eastern Hungary and Budapest; American and […]
Eighty years ago, British PM Neville Chamberlain went to Munich for a summit meeting with Adolf Hitler, to save the world from a military cataclysm. At the time, Hitler’s scientists were already working hard to unlock the destructive force of the atom. His „rocket men” were busy designing the first prototypes of the pilotless delivery vehicles that would pummel London […]
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 […]
On February 23, 2018 the Hungarian House on East 82nd Street in Manhattan hosted another program to celebrate Albert Wass. This is the fifth year that the Széchenyi Society has staged this event. Politicians, Hungarian-Americans, the Wiesenthal Center and other organizations have protested in the past; yet, the organizers were unfazed and the Hungarian House continued the program. (Read 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 […]
