A history of anti-Semitism in Hungary, culminating in the Nazi Holocaust, has been published in Budapest, according to a Hungarian radio report monitored here. It consists of a collection of essays entitled “The Jewish Question — Assimilation and anti-Semitism,” edited by historian Peter Hanak.
Budapest Radio said the book examines the background to the events in 1944 when the Hungarian authorities became accomplices in the politics of genocide.
In a foreword to the collection, Imre Poszgay, a leading Hungarian politician, says that Hungarian society has still to make a full analysis of the roots of the extermination of more than 500,000 Hungarian Jews in the Nazi concentration camps.
All the contributors are agreed, he continues, on the shamefulness of the episode, a feeling that was not adequately encouraged immediately after World War II because of the understandable but strongly mistaken view of the Communist Party and government leaders of the time that it was better not to open up past wounds.
However, his reluctance to bring things out into the open has left many wounds still unhealed. The contributors reject simplistic arguments on both sides, but call on all Hugarians to examine their consciences.
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