25 February 2013, Budapest
Ladies and Gentlemen! Respected Companions in Remembrance!
We are standing on the threshold of an era in which remembrance and memory will become especially important. The number of those who were eye-witnesses to the wickedest of deeds in the history of humanity are growing fewer day by day. Societies form their self-image, and make it continuous through generations, by establishing a culture of remembrance. Without remembrance and memory there can be no family, no community, no nation. Take away someone's past, and they are at your mercy. Wherever we may be in the world, a memorial erected in remembrance of the victims of communism represents the same idea: it took place. It took place and now it's time for you to ask questions! It is our task to establish the times and places for such remembrance, at which each and every generation can face these issues. It was in this spirit that we declared February 25th Communism Memorial Day. We must never forget that the 20th century we have left behind us was perhaps the bloodiest century in the history of humanity. The torture, maiming and destruction of millions may be linked to the two terrible ideologies of the century, Nazism and communism. The two are perhaps more similar than one would think at first glance. Our great poet Attila József must have suspected something of this when we wrote: "perhaps spin a new yarn, that of fascist communism." The Kolyma gulag network alone, which included 100 camps and operated from 1931 to 1953, was six times the size of France. The families of the victims were stripped of the most basic of all human feeling, the expression of grief towards the fate of another man, and so they were ultimately prohibited from living a humane life.
It was forbidden to even speak the names of those who had been murdered, tortured, kidnapped, dispossessed and deported. Even their names were to be obliterated. It was even forbidden to bury the dead. The path of the communist dictatorship was lined with thousands of unmarked graves into which bodies were thrown face down and corded in wire. The words of Gyula Illyés rush forwards from one's memory: "Because [Tyranny] is standing, From the first at your grave, Your own biography branding, And even your ashes are its slave". Plots 298, 300 and 301 of the Rákoskeresztúr New Public Cemetery have become the symbolic sites of national solidarity and protests against communism. It is here that those politicians, public figures, soldiers, workers, peasants and students who were sentenced to death in the illegitimate trials held between 1945 and 1956 are buried. When we were finally able to lay their bodies to rest, we felt it important that beside the coffins of Imre Nagy and his associates there be a symbolic, sixth coffin. The sixth coffin symbolised Budapest youngsters who died with rifles in their hands. It symbolised farmers who were beaten to death. It symbolised protestors who were mowed down by volleys of gunfire. And it symbolised those died agonising deaths in ÁVH (the State Protection Agency, Hungary's secret police force from 1945-1956. Ed.) torture chambers
Ladies and Gentlemen!
Our task today is to build a country in which no one can be discriminated against because of their gender, origin, religion, political views and national or linguistic affiliations. This is why we have created a new Fundamental Law that assures more rights than ever before and declares the inviolability of human dignity, the rights to freedom and personal safety and the protection of property.
Ladies and Gentlemen!
Our task today is, however, also that we should not allow those victims whom the dictatorship was unable to erase from our memories, to now be forgotten after all. Let us not allow the crimes of communism and national socialism to be pitted against each other in a war of numbers that leads us nowhere, because we must never forget that as Pilinszky wrote, a transit camp is an enclosed area of undetermined form, and this is irrespective of what symbol lies above its gate. We must also never forget that while a single person lives in Hungary who was persecuted or tortured by people who wore the symbol of the dictatorship, then lifting the ban on such symbols shall not be relevant, and goes against everything that our nation's new Fundamental Law determines as human dignity.
Ladies and Gentlemen!
It is with a compassionate heart and thoughts of gratitude that the nation today pays its respects to the memory of the victims.
(Prime Minister’s Office)
