Post-WWII deportees from Czechoslovakia remembered

Ethnic Hungarians deported from Czechoslovakia after the second world war were remembered at a special meeting of the municipal council of Komárom, in northern Hungary, on Saturday.

“The post-WWII deportations were tragic and senseless episodes of our history while Czechoslovak policy makers failed to attain their goal of creating a homogeneous nation-state,” Zsolt Semjén, Hungary’s deputy prime minister, said in a letter addressed to the meeting.

“The 20th century has trampled on us Hungarians, but the deportees never gave up hope for survival. Nor should we forget on this day those who were expelled from here, the Jews and the ethnic Germans,” the journalist Zsolt Bayer said at the meeting.

In 2012, Hungary’s parliament declared April 12 the memorial day of deportees from Slovakia, marking the anniversary of the start of deportations in 1947.

The Benes decrees passed immediately after the WW2 deprived Czechoslovakia’s ethnic Hungarians and Germans of their citizenship and property on the basis of collective guilt. The close to 170,000 ethnic Hungarians deported have never received compensation.

Photo: MTi

Source: MTI