Hungarians remembered victims of the Holocaust up and down the country on April 16th, the day when occupying German forces – with the assistance of the Hungarian gendarmerie - began establishing ghettos in Hungary.
“The Holocaust affected the entire Hungarian society and the remembrance is about the present and the future, in order to avoid this happening again,” Justice Minister László Trócsányi said at the commemoration ceremony.
Between April and June a total 437,000 Jews were rounded up in 170 ghettos and camps around Hungary.
Some 400,000 Jews from the former territory of Hungary were killed during the Holocaust. One in ten of all Holocaust victims were Hungarian Jews and every third one died in the largest concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Hungary currently has a Jewish population of about 100,000.