For over 16 years, Auschwitz survivors and their families have watched with pain and outrage as democracy has been eroded in Hungary, as the experiences of Hungarian Holocaust survivors have been excluded from public discourse and school curricula, and as Nazi sympathisers have been rehabilitated in the public sphere.
Under the Orbán government and the Fidesz administration, all this distortion of history went hand in hand with the harsh marginalisation and defamation of political dissidents, as well as of groups of Hungarian Sinti and Roma. In keeping with Orbán’s directives, these people were targeted by his extremely anti-European and xenophobic smear campaign. That is now over: despite all the attempts at incitement by right-wing extremists who rushed in with their support from all over the world, the vast majority of Hungarians have voted out Viktor Orbán’s doggedly anti-European and pro-Russian ideology and his system of financial favours and corruption.
Speaking in Munich, Dr Eva Umlauf, President of the International Auschwitz Committee and an Auschwitz survivor, emphasised: ‘For all of us in Europe, this is an incredibly important day. It seems that the relentless advance of far-right ideology in Europe can hardly be stopped anymore. Yet today, through their vote, the people of Hungary are showing us that they can nip things in the bud and put an end to what seems like an irreversible trend towards self-aggrandisement and the destruction of democracy. Suddenly the emperor stands naked and we once again recognize his wretchedness, and our renewed openings. I send my regards to all our friends in Hungary and think of Imre Kertész, the Jewish-Hungarian Nobel Prize-winning author and survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, whose writings Orbán ordered to be removed from school textbooks. We very much hope that, following his death in 2016, he will now receive justice in his homeland.’
And Christoph Heubner, Executive Vice-President of the Committee, added during a visit to the Auschwitz Memorial: ‘All those people in Europe who have placed their hopes in far-right ideologists, with their typical, age-old outbursts of racism and exclusion, should now look very closely at Hungary, one of the EU countries where, in a span of 16 years, a regime has built up a system of corruption, bled the country dry and lined its own pockets. With this election result, the Hungarian people have held up a mirror to all far-right parties and groups. It says: this is what a country looks like which was entrusted to you for 16 years, only to become a victim of your machinations.’
