Hungary commemorates 1945 liberation of Budapest ghetto

BUDAPEST, Hungary — Hungary’s Jewish community commemorates the 75th anniversary of the liberation by Soviet troops of the Budapest ghetto, where over 70,000 Jews were confined near the end of World War II.

While some 550,000 Hungarian Jews were killed during the Holocaust in Nazi-run death camps, in forced labor battalions or by the Nazis’ Hungarian allies, many Budapest Jews survived the war. They went into hiding in the ghetto or were helped by sympathetic foreign diplomats like Sweden’s Raoul Wallenberg.

Hundreds of people attend the commemoration today at Budapest’s Dohany Street Synagogue, the largest in Europe, including Holocaust survivors, diplomats and politicians.

Robert Frolich, the synagogue’s chief rabbi, speaks of “ambivalent feelings” surrounding the commemoration, which contains pain and mourning, but also the “celebration of life.”

“Seventy-five years ago, Europe’s last ghetto, the Budapest ghetto, was liberated. This is what we remember today,” Frolich says. “Ambivalent feelings gather inside us, because the reason for the event, the liberation of the ghetto, is itself ambivalent.”

“It contains pain, it contains tragedy and the mourning which cannot be put into words, which is unspeakable and can only be experienced. At the same time, it contains joy, relief and the celebration of life.”

— AP