Cardiac Region: For the Day of Homage to the Victims of Communism

Article by Mr Viktor Orbán in the daily Magyar Nemzet, commemorating the Victims of Communism and Nazism

Dátum: 2004-04-13 13:58:00, eredeti URL: http://archiv.fidesz.hu/index.php?Cikk=22237
KCMDB-be feltöltve: 2024-05-04 19:52:44.244813, Feltöltő: fidesz_hu_scraper_v2

Without its history a nation "would be like a child, who does not know what happened to it yesterday." These are the words of Mihály Babits, who goes on to say: "such a nation would lose the major part of its essence, such a nation would lose its past, it would no longer be a nation, and it would become extinct with each generation, ephemeral like the mayfly. The basis of human consciousness is memory: the nation's consciousness is its historical memory. (...) the present can be understood only through the past: the future can be built only upon the past."

Many have looked forward to the moment, when we could at last devote a day of homage to the victims of communism. When we would decide that not only can the past not be eradicated - it must not be forgotten either. That moment has arrived on the threshold of the new millennium in 2000, and we passed the parliamentary resolution about a memorial day for the victims of communism. We believed that history was worth knowing so that we could learn its lessons; that we should be able to hope: all the suffering that had inundated man during the twentieth century, could not happen again.

We have to know therefore about war, about the expulsions, the dictatorships, the holocaust, the gulags, the ethnic and social cleansings, about the twentieth century of trials and tribulations. We have to know what happened in Hungary, what happened in all of Europe. If we want to know what and how everything happened, if we want to find explanations for the whys, then we have first to remember. To remember those who have perished, who no longer have a voice. If we do not lend them our voices, they shall for ever remain mute. After all, the dead stay alive only as long as they are remembered.

Remembering is one of man's most important capacities. Without that ability, acquired knowledge cannot be accumulated, and we people could not occupy our designated place in the order of Creation. All of us have heard of accidents, from which the victim emerged with a total loss of memory. It is a morbid state of the soul, of consciousness, from which one should try to recover as fast as possible.

But what happens, if a nation becomes a state-aided amnesiac? In such cases the same applies as to the injured, traumatized individual: it has to be restored to health, as soon as possible. A country, whose consciousness is damaged, which is being kept in a state of amnesia, needs help for its recovery. Everyone can help it to convalesce, who does not forget to remember, who dares to and wants to know, what has happened to him, to his family, his friends, his neighbours. What happened to Hungary, to Europe.

Everyone helps with the convalescence, who bows his head with us before the memory of the victims of hatred and barbarism. Who lights a candle of remembrance on this day, and thinks of those who were persecuted, humiliated, maimed, and terrorized for their beliefs, origins, class-affiliations, nationalities and political convictions; who were robbed of their lives, whose formative years were embittered, whose old age was rendered hopeless. Granted: he who ignores the past, carries fewer burdens on his shoulders, but he moves into the future weightlessly. He, who does not carry any ballast, easily loses his foothold. Because knowledge of the past is like the pull of gravity. It enables us to stand with both our feet on the ground. It helps us to find our feet even in the most difficult moments.

Many a wounded, hurt fellow citizen lives among us. There are some, who have never managed to arrive at today, but there are also those, who have already brought the past to a close in their hearts, who live in the present and remember. It would be good, if more-and-more people belonged to that category, to the rememberers. To those who remember, face the fact that they can no longer change the past, and therefore turn towards the memory of the victims.

When we therefore remember the victims of communism, we remember the past. We remember an entire country, our victimized mother country. The worker made out to be a saboteur, the peasant branded a kulak, the citizen persecuted as a reactionary, the industrialist labelled a parasite, the soldier and labour serviceman condemned to forget the army. But even those people became victims of communism, whose own beliefs caused them to be hoist on their own petard, and by the time they woke up to it, they had already paid too great a price. All those underprivileged people, who, hoping for a better future, changed their beliefs, their principles. Many poor peasants thought that by at long last obtaining land, they would be able to work it freely, whereas in the end even the little they had had was taken away from them. Many workers thought that the factory would really become theirs. How many were the ones, who had no other goal but to put their engineering, economic or other expertise at the service of raising the country from its war-induced debility. Today we evoke their memory as well.

Communism was one of the world's most cruel systems and one of its greatest catastrophes, which claimed more than 100 million victims worldwide. All this is really beyond our understanding. We wince, when we hear or read about it, but our minds and hearts baulk at a state of permanent dismay. Our pain felt for the victims of communism is not Weltschmerz. This term carries no weight in the Hungarian language. It is void of meaning. The victims of communism in Hungary - and for that matter everywhere else in the world - have names. When we hear these names, the nerve-ends of the nation begin to tingle, and shivers run through its nerves: not only have we heard of them, we know these names, their images live inside us, and we recall their faces, their gestures, their embraces.

That is the way it is, even if many of us have no personal memories, no experiences of the terror. If truth be told, we are all survivors, who carry on the lives of our forebears. We have inherited not only their belongings, but also their memories. It is memory which fastens the nation together like an invisible clasp, because the nation is that community, in which everything that happens to the other happens to us too.

If we want to be genuine survivors, we have to evoke not merely the names of the humiliated and the distressed. The genuine survivor - contrary to public belief - thinks of himself as well, because his name too has a place on the endless list of victims. Because, apart from having been deprived of his freedom, of his relatives, and friends, he has lost time. And there is no more valuable a commodity than time. Not only older people have missed out on time, those who by 1990 had left the best parts of their lives behind them, but our children as well, to whom, apart from our encouragement, we often could not, and still cannot give everything we would want to. Not even today.

On this day of homage, in the year 2004, we should remember not only the victims of communism. It is the sixtieth anniversary of the year when the country suffered the stifling twentieth century's immense tragedy. The "outrage of the century" - as the poet Pilinszky called it. 1944, the year of the Hungarian holocaust. Our historians are trying to take stock of the magnitude of the devastation, but the fact is that Hungarian culture and Hungarian life is still reeling from the loss of blood. We are not the only ones in this situation. Most of Europe is, since that which should never have happened, happened in many other European countries as well. We, Christian Hungarians and Jewish Hungarians, have endured sufferings that bind us together, and some that turned us against each other. 1948-49 was a shared time of trials and tribulations that welded us together. The nightmare of 1944 turned us against each other.

Shame wedged itself between Hungary's Jewish and non-Jewish fellow-citizens during that tragic spring of 1944. The shame of the outcasts was the shame of humiliation. Guilt painted the blush of shame onto the faces of those who rejected them. The majority was ashamed of its inability to act. This mortification, these varieties of shame still linger on in our midst. The shame and the bereavement have not yet disappeared without a trace. The whole of Europe has been struggling for the past decades with its comprehension and its spiritual and moral resolution. With a lot of patience, with tact and empathy towards the other's suffering, we might succeed. If we are wise enough, and if we possess the inner reserves to empathize with each other's pain, each other's losses, then we can do something in order that the wound should not become deeper. And if we approach each other with enough tact in fulfilling our moral obligation to remember, we have a chance of reconciliation, a chance for the hard-to-articulate word to reach from one soul to the other. And then at last remembrance will soften into harmony.

We have to realize that, although the suffering caused by the "feral doctrines" was meted out to our Jewish compatriots, destroyed their lives and property, this attack, because it was directed against part of the nation, what is more, an integral part of it, in actual fact caused an injury to the totality of the nation from which it is difficult to recover. This wound was inflicted on the heart of the nation. And it is in the interest of all of us that it should heal as soon as possible. It is a shared interest, a shared responsibility. A shared past, a shared future. Here at home, and in Europe as well. Europe has paid an enormous price for realizing that in the name of no force, no ideology can the annihilation of a peoples, a nationality, a class ever be tolerated. Perhaps the time has come that history, jolted out of its course by the horrors and ghastliness, should once again find its natural banks. The stream of our history can hardly be turned back, that stream - sometimes leaving behind, sometimes dissolving its burdensome flotsam and jetsam - has to keep flowing on. Because that is what history is.

Perhaps the time has come that after so many lies, so much silence, so much bias, we should at last see our history in its totality. Perhaps enough time has passed for us to comprehend and own up to the various fates and sufferings. To own up to our shame and to fulfil our tasks to pay our respects to the mourners. Perhaps the time has come not to weigh up one ordeal against another. We have to know about every kind of suffering, to remember every ordeal. We cannot pick and chose from the past, memory cannot be selective. The two totalitarian systems, communism and Nazism were not choosy about its victims either.

However hard we looked, we couldn't find three more different types of people, than Count István Bethlen, Hungarian prime minister, Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat and Béla Kovács, Smallholder member of parliament. Yet in one respect they were nonetheless alike. All three of them had a mission, and tried to protest against inhumanity. Eventually all three of them were dragged away to the Soviet Union. That fact does not necessarily put them on the same level, but it is still worth our while to reflect on what it denotes that destiny has sealed these three so different intentions and fates in such a similar manner.

When we remember the victims of communism, let us think of those, because we know of such fates too, who had a taste of both totalitarian systems. First they got to know the horrors of one, and then the other. There were those, who lived through the concentrations camps, only to be incarcerated on their return in Rákosi's jails. At the same time we know of Arrow Cross men, who became the willing servants of the communist dictatorship. There were those, who came to grief in both systems, while others who profited both from the one and from the other. And let us accept that those who have undergone one suffering, empathize with that of the others'. But the victims are stronger than their executioners not only because there are far more of them, but also because someone always places flowers on their graves.

Anyone, who has ever bandaged a child's injured knee, knows that even hard-to-cure wounds do eventually heal. All one has to do, is to treat them with care. Every wound has first to be cleansed, and then one has to see to it that it should not become infected. The wounds that have been inflicted on the nation's body are manifold. Still, it is in the interest of all of us that they should heal as soon as possible. We can only talk about a shared future and a shared responsibility for it, if we agree on the unconditional respect the individual's dignity.

It was the outrage of the century that at the dawn of the modern age the dikes of civilization were washed away, giving way to barbarity, and allowing the fanatics of world domination to control death-factories and slave camps. We have had to learn time and again that neither grand ideas, nor abominable ideologies need passports at borders. They come and make inroads: the noble and the barbaric alike. And we - if it comes to it - have to make a choice. We are free, we have to decide for ourselves what we think, how we act.

A fine teacher once said that on the wall map of Europe our nation can be covered by half a palm. It is true: we can try it, we can put our palm on Europe's cardiac region - maybe even Csíksomlyó fits under it. Thus, when we light a candle of remembrance to the memory of the victims, protecting the flame in the crook of our hand, we are holding Hungary in the warmth of our palm.

Let us take care of her!

Magyar Nemzet, 25 February 2004