My mother was one of nine siblings. I never knew my grandparents, who were, after they had been rounded up by the Hungarian gendarmes sent to Auschwitz concentration camp some eighty or so years ago. My mother together with only two of her sisters survived the horrors of the Holocaust. My mother lived her entire life with the number tattooed on her arm and the horrors of the Holocaust burnt into her soul, the memory of the tragedy of her parents and siblings.
Today in Budapest, with a kippah on my head together with my a fourteen-year-old son, we march in Memory of my mother on the March of the Living which happens to be Mother's Day in Hungary.
Every Holocaust victim, survivor and murdered person had a mother. Each murderer, and each silent bystander had a mother. The righteous had a mother. Had a mother who gave him birth, nursed, and healed him when he was ill, and a father who cherished him, educated him and cared for him.
My son asks: how could the Holocaust have happened eighty years ago?
I ask: how could it have happened that on 7 October 2023, children, women, and men, old and young, were murdered, abused, raped in Israel and kidnapped to Gaza where they are held hostage until this day?
The Nazis' 'Final Solution' and the terrorists' 'Palestine from the river to the sea' are synonymous with anti-Semitism. The anti-Semitism of the fascists and the anti-Zionism of the terrorist’s stem from a distorted and false belief led by cruel desires to destroy as well as fanaticism. What they all have in common: is rampant, unrelenting, and inhuman hatred.
The Righteous saved their fellow Jews with humanity and solidarity.
It is up to us, as parents, fathers, and mothers, to educate our children to be humane or to hate. The March of the Living is the March of Solidarity, the March of Unity, the March of Remembrance, and the March of Learning.
Dr. Peter Nogradi
MAZSIHISZ
Vice president
