“Uncovering the communist past will be the most important task of the Commission on National Remembrance, the legal framework of which is currently being debated in Parliament,” said the Parliamentary Secretary of the Ministry of Public Administration and Justice on Sunday, at the commemorative ceremony held in Salgótarján on the anniversary of 8 December 1956, when a volley was fired into a crowd of protesters.
Bence Rétvári said that he was hoping for the Commission to be a brave ally to those uncovering such attacks on civilians and mass murders. The Christian Democratic Party politician recalled how the new Fundamental Law opened the way to conducting criminal proceedings against perpetrators who enjoyed the protection of the former State Party for forty years or the limitation period of whose actions the Constitutional Court deemed expired in the 90s.
The State Secretary emphasised that the legal possibility of disclosing the names of the criminals and prosecuting those responsible for the imprescriptible crimes of communism already exists today.
An organ recital was held at the Church of Saint Joseph the Worker’s in memory of the volley’s victims in Salgótarján, after which the several hundred attendants held a torchlight march through the town to the site of the 1956 volley, today called December 8 Square.
Police and secret service personnel opened fire from the police constabulary and the County Council buildings in the Nógrád County seat on unarmed workers tricked by provocateurs into gathering at what used to be Market Square to call for the release of two jailed worker’s council leaders on 8 December 1956. Archive sources show that 47 people lost their lives in the volley, but the records of the Association of Hungarian Political Prisoners put the death toll at 131, including women and children. This is because death certificates were made out in neighbouring villages and for different causes of death for many of the victims in the interest of diminishing the tragedy, and to alter the cause of death to take the requests of family and relatives fearing further reprisals into account. 8 December has been Salgótarján’s Day of Mourning since the regime change.
(Ministry of Public Administration and Justice)
