Marking the Memorial Day of Hungarians Deported to the Soviet Union, Bence Rétvári, deputy leader of the co-ruling Christian Democrats, said the victims of communist regimes "remind us that sovereignty is our greatest treasure which we must protect."
Addressing a commemoration at a memorial to the victims of Gulag in Budapest, he said that "freight carriages packed with people being sent in one direction or another" had been made possible by "puppet cabinets when Hungary did not have a sovereign government." "Labour camps were established and people were delivered when foreign ideologies took over power in Hungary," he said.
He noted that between 700,000 and 800,000, or every 12th Hungarian were deported to Gulag camps in the Soviet Union right after the Second World War, which means that "nearly every Hungarian family was impacted and many of those people never returned," Rétvári said.
Parliament named November 25 as the Memorial Day of Hungarians Deported to the Soviet Union on May 21, 2012, as the first group of Hungarians deported to the Gulag returned to Hungary on this day in 1953.