Hungarian Gulag Labourers Remembered – Conference

Budapest, November 24 (MTI) – Remembrance was held for the 800,000 Hungarians taken to forced labour camps in the Soviet Union during and after WWII, in an international conference on Monday.

Bowing to the memory of hundreds of thousands of innocent Hungarians forced by authorities of Stalin’s totalitarian regime into internment and labour camps in 1944-45 is long due in Hungarian society, Andras Majorszki, the president of the Society of International Gulag Researchers, said in Szerencs, in north-eastern Hungary.

Janos Havasi, a researcher, called for a research centre to be set up to collect archive materials, personal accounts and studies. Russian authorities handed over several documents to Hungary in the late 1990s, he said.

Research work at the Gulag in the Donetsk region is seriously hampered today due to the current armed conflict there, he noted.

Parliament in 2012 declared November 25 a day of political prisoners and forced labourers in the Soviet Union.

The number of those who were executed, or died from starvation or illness is estimated at 200,000.

Photo: www.historia.hu

Source: http://mtva.hu/hu/hungary-matters