Dignitaries marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day at Budapest's Holocaust Documentation Center yesterday.
Csaba Latorcai, state secretary at the human resources ministry, said the government’s measures over the past nine years helped create a milieu in which there is an “unprecedented blossoming of Jewish culture … and security”.
Latorcai advocated “learning from the past, gaining strength from the sacrifice of the victims of 20th century dictatorships and from the example of those who saved lives”.
“It is up to us whether we promote peace or allow unrest to take over the world around us,” he said.
Israel’s ambassador Yakov Hadas-Handelsman warned that anti-Semitism was again on the rise across the world and xenophobia went hand-in-hand with Holocaust denial.
Vladimir Sergeev, Russia’s ambassador, said he was proud of the soldiers of the Red Army who had liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Budapest ghetto.
Photo credit: Origo