The events that took place in Katyn in 1940 and then in Central Europe are the common history of all European citizens and nations, which show the real face of existing socialism – Tamás Vargha, the Parliamentary State Secretary of the Ministry of Defence said at a commemoration held for the victims of Katyn in Budapest on Saturday, April 13.

The State Secretary stressed that what happened there was “a decision taken by some power technocrats who had lost their souls. This decision seemed rational but in fact it was unspeakably cruel, and was implemented by completely dehumanized murderers”. They wanted to kill a nation, to kill all those who resisted the Bolshevik-style transformation of society. He told his audience that we must remember in this park created in memory of the Katyn massacre, so that we know “that we belong together here in Central Europe because we share with each other our past, our fate, our interests and our lives. “We must remember so that we know and understand how important and how valuable treasure the Polish–Hungarian friendship is.” – Tamás Vargha said.

Actor Pál Oberfrank, the narrator of the ceremony said that “Budapest is the very first capital in Central Europe where a memorial park was created in 2010 as a reminder of the mass murder known as the Katyn massacre”.

On Saturday, close to 22,000 Polish victims were remembered during the commemoration held on the memorial day of the Katyn victims. They had been carried off to the Soviet Union in 1940, then were executed and buried in mass graves on Stalin’s order in a forest near  Katyn.

In his speech, Andrzej Krzysztof Kunert, the secretary general of the Polish Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites related the history of the Katyn martyrs’ park, which is the brainchild of István Tarlós, the former mayor of Óbuda, the incumbent Lord Mayor of Budapest. He said that this site is special for Hungarians and Poles as it symbolizes the friendship between the two nations.

Besides the MoD State Secretary and the Polish secretary general, also present at the commemoration were Roman Kowalski, the ambassador of the Republic of Poland to Budapest, deputy lord mayors István György and Miklós Csomós, Balázs Bús, the mayor of Óbuda, several Members of Parliament, including Erzsébet Menczer and Gábor Tóth (Fidesz), András Aradszki (KDNP), Katalin Ertsey (LMP) and the members of the Sixty-Four Counties Youth Movement, a number of other politicians, private individuals as well as the representatives of non-governmental organizations.

(MTI)