Hungarian Jews remember Holocaust tragedy 80 years after liberation of Auschwitz
Hungarian Jews remember Holocaust tragedy 80 years after liberation of Auschwitz
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On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, in which nearly half a million Hungarian Jews lost their lives at the hands of the Nazis, Tamás Léderer still can't shake the sense that the world hasn't learned from the horrors of the 20th century.
Born in Budapest in 1938, Léderer, unlike most of Hungary's Jewish population, survived the Holocaust and evaded deportation to German camps by hiding in basements in Hungary's capital. His parents, he said, ripped the mandatory yellow star from his clothing to conceal the fact that he was Jewish.
As the world observes International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Monday, 80 years after the Nazis' most notorious death camp at Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on Jan. 27, 1945, Léderer, 87, says the risk of hate-fueled violence against Jews and other groups continues to unsettle him.
“I must not forget," he said of the fate of the some 565,000 Hungarian Jews that perished in the Holocaust, the mass murder of Jews and other groups before and during World War II. "In my subconscious, I can never get over the possibility that a six-pointed star could be placed on my gate again at any moment. It is always in my mind.”.
The Nazis killed some 6 million European Jews during the Holocaust — nearly 10% of them from Hungarian territories. An estimated 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were killed in Auschwitz-Birkenau, some 435,000 of them Hungarians, more than any other nationality.
Tamás Verő, a prominent rabbi in Budapest, lost many of his family members in the Holocaust. His grandmother, who returned alive from Auschwitz, once told him that she thanked God that he'd become a rabbi so he could ensure the genocide would never be forgotten.
