“Our commitment must be to remember the victims who perished, respect the survivors still with us, and reaffirm humanity's common aspiration for mutual understanding and justice.”
-- Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust
Book Presentation in Budapest
13.05.2013
Organized by the Holocaust Memorial Center and the Ács Városért Társaság, an NGO formed by local patriots in the town of Ács, a new book on the 1944 Strasshof deportations was presented at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Budapest on May 8, 2013.
Austrian historian Dr. Irene Suchy published her Strasshof an der Nordbahn: Die NS-Geschichte eines Ortes und ihre Aufarbeitung in 2012, a comprehensive monograph on the history of a Nazi distribution camp in annexed Austria. In the end of June 1944, about 15,000 Jews from the Hungarian provinces escaped the deportation to the Auschwitz extermination camp as a result of the negotiations between the Nazis and Zionist groups. Instead, they were deported to Strasshof and from there to various working camps throughout Austria, where most of them ultimately survived the war.
Dr. Suchy’s presentation was followed by a lecture by Dr. Szabolcs Szita, the director of the Holocaust Memorial Center, who conducted in-depth historical research on the fate of Hungarian deportees in Austria during WWII in the 1980s. The guests to the event included His Excellency Dr. Michael Zimmermann, the Austrian Ambassador to Hungary, György Frisch, the director of the Hungarian Union of the Persecutes of Nazism (NÜB), as well as survivors of the Strasshof deportations Tibor Drucker and László Hacsek.
The book presentation also served as a launch event for the so-called National Pilgrimage organized for May 13, commemorating the 69th anniversary of the beginning of the mass deportations from Hungary in 1944.