Ecumenical Commemoration In Budapest Marks Roma Holocaust, Roma Murders

  • 4 Aug 2014 10:00 AM
Ecumenical Commemoration In Budapest Marks Roma Holocaust, Roma Murders
The Sant’ Egidio community held an ecumenical commemoration of the Roma Holocaust in Budapest on Sunday evening. The event also marked the fifth anniversary of the murder of a 45-year-old Roma woman in Kisléta in north-eastern Hungary.

“It is important that the survivors find in themselves the power to govern their own fate,” Zoltán Balog, the human resources minister, said at the event. Administering a service in the Heart of Jesus Church in Budapest, János Székely, Coadjutor of Esztergom- Budapest, apologised to the Roma and the Jews for the fact that 70 years ago so few had been brave enough to stand by them.

At the commemoration a letter by Hungarian Holocaust survivor Éva Faludi, who had witnessed the execution of the Roma inmates at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1944, was read out. Faludi said that the past had constantly to be talked about because this was the only way to prevent its reoccurrence.

The commemoration was attended by former president László Sólyom and Italian ambassador Maria Assunta Accili.

The Sant’ Egidio community, set up by students in Rome in 1968, commemorates each year the anniversary of the murder of more than 3,000 Roma at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp on August 2-3.

Source www.hungarymatters.hu

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