Budapest Honors Jews Saving Jewish Children Amid Nazi Protests
Budapest Honors Jews Saving Jewish Children Amid Nazi Protests | Hungary | Europe
Amid fresh concerns about the rise of neo-Nazi groups here, Hungarians could see a memorial plaque Tuesday, October 16, in honor of nuns who saved around 50 Jewish children and their parents from the Nazi death camps. It was unveiled in Budapest late Monday, October 15, at the site of a former boarding school where the nuns sheltered the children from the German Nazi death squads and Hungarians cooperating with them. About 600,000 Hungarians Jews died however in the Holocaust. The school, which today houses the state prosecutors’ office, was on the same block as the headquarters of the Arrow Cross, the leading Hungarian fascist party that controlled Hungary from October 1944 to April 1945. However Monday’s event was overshadowed by a gathering elsewhere in the Hungarian capital where supporters of the Movement for a Better Hungary (Jobbik) and its paramilitary Magyar Garda (Hungarian Guard) in front of a court and detention center in Budapest. Jobbik and Magyar Garda supporters, many holding Arpad flags used by the Arrow Cross party, gathered to commemorate 44-year-old teacher Lajos Szogi who was killed one year ago in northeastern Hungary by an angry mob of gypsies, who prefer to be known as Roma. The lynching in the village of Olaszliszka came after Szogi accidentally sideswiped and slightly hurt a 14 year-old Roma girl while driving through the village, investigators said. Rights groups have accused Jobbik and the Magyar Garda however of using the incident for their own anti-Roma and anti-Jewish agenda.
