The mortal remains of 85 soldiers were symbolically reburied on Tuesday. The Minister of Defence declared that the nation will never forget those who gave their lives for their homeland.
This year, experts from the Institute of Military History were able to uncover and exhume the remains of a total of 1,234 soldiers during excavations at 34 sites in 16 counties in Hungary. Well over 1,000 bodies were recovered from the cemetery of the former Baja POW camp alone, 16 from Gyöngyös and 10 from Kemence. However, the researchers were mostly unable to differentiate the mortal remains according to nationality.
Only around 100 Hungarian soldiers, 30 Soviet soldiers and 20 soldiers from the German Wehrmacht could be identified with certainty. The mortal remains of the foreign soldiers were handed over to the partner organisations in Russia and Germany. At the ceremony on Tuesday at the Budapest Central Cemetery in Fiumei út, 85 heroic dead were honoured, 53 of whom could be identified by name.
Hungary shows respect for its dear dead
‘The homeland does not forget those who sacrificed their lives for it,’ emphasised Minister of Defence Kristóf Szalay-Bobrovniczky at the reburial of the soldiers. The heroic dead now rest in a special plot for soldiers who died in the First and Second World Wars. Hungary shows respect for its dear dead, who answered the call of their homeland to fight with weapons in their hands and – as they swore – to defend it even at the cost of their own lives.
This sacrifice is eternal and timeless, because continuing on this path creates freedom for the survivors. This also applies, and even more so, when in times of peace fewer and fewer people remember what happened during the war.
Turning point
The communist dictatorship trampled on the memory of the heroic dead, and during the fall of communism the disrespect went so far that shopping centres and petrol stations were built on gravesites. Since then, however, there has also been a turnaround in the care of war graves, not only with the law passed in 2012, but ‘also in people’s souls’.
The minister called for the past to be passed on to future generations so that young people also know what today’s free Hungary is built on. ‘We, who bow before our heroes, know that we are one with them, from whom we have inherited life, this country and the community of the nation, just as we are one with those who come after us and to whom we want to bequeath this heritage in its entirety,’ Szalay-Bobrovniczky explained.
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