The history of a community, a nation is the history of belonging of the people living in it, so it is important that every generation should know what our predecessors had undergone – the Minister of Defence said in Csepel during a commemoration held to mark the 70th anniversary of the Don catastrophe on January 14.

According to Minister Csaba Hende, the Hungarians are famous for being able to rise from completely hopeless situations and to restart their lives. The Minister is of the opinion that this was what the youth of today’s grandparents and great-grandparents did when they restarted their lives after World War I, Trianon and then after World War II and the suppression of the 1956 Revolution.

Invited by the local government of Csepel and Mayor Szilárd Németh (Fidesz-KDNP), the politician participated in a wreath-laying ceremony at the World War II memorial in the 21st district of the capital. Afterwards he gave an exceptional history lesson to schoolchildren in a local community center.

Among other things, the Minister told the students that the soldiers who had lost their lives while carrying out orders faithfully in the line of duty, arms in hand, died as heroes, regardless of whether the war they were sent to was later considered a successful or an unsuccessful, right or wrong, just or unjust one. He said that those who had fallen in the Don bend – be they Hungarian soldiers or forced laborers – had all died as heroes.

He also told the students that it had been impossible to commemorate the victims in the Kádár regime, and that the benefits for war invalids, orphans and widows had been taken away with a stroke of the pen in 1949 for the alleged reason that these soldiers went to fight a war against the Soviet Union and they were all Fascists. He added that this had not occurred in any of the Socialist countries except Hungary.

Even today, we do not have any exact figures about the losses suffered by the River Don. Some sources estimate the losses of the 2nd Hungarian army at around 93,500 while others at 120,000 or 148,000. The exact number of the fallen and the prisoners of war cannot be established. The Don catastrophe is the biggest defeat in Hungary’s military history. Since the Crusades, this had been the farthest distance where Hungarian troops were fighting away from their homeland.

(MTI)