BUDAPEST (JTA) – A Holocaust memorial in Budapest was defaced days after a memorial to Raoul Wallenberg was defiled in the city.
The vandalism of the memorial by the Danube River apparently took place Thursday night. Hungarian media on Friday published a photo of the monument with spray-painted Stars of David and the phrases “This is not your country, dirty Jews” and “You are going to be shot there,” with an arrow pointing to the river.
Many Hungarian Jews were shot on the banks of the Danube by local Arrow Cross fascists during World War II.
The memorial, erected by the then-communist government in 1986, is a copy of a memorial statue at the Mauthausen camp in Austria. It honors “resistance fighters, deserters and persecuted ones who were murdered on the bank of the Danube in the winter of 1944-45.”
The vandalism came days after unknown vandals hung pigs’ feet on a Budapest statue of Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews during the Shoah.
