Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has laid a wreath before a plaque at Budaörs railway station, near Budapest, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Hungary.
On January 19, 2013, parliament declared this day an official state day of remembrance of the deportation and expulsion of ethnic Germans, which began on January 19, 1946. The first train left from Budaörs.
Zoltán Kovács, State Secretary for International Communications and Relations, said on Facebook that the deportation of Swabians had caused Hungary an “irreparable loss”.
The anniversary was marked by the national self-government of Germans in Hungary in an online event. Chairwoman Ibolya Hock Englender said the first cattle cars deporting ethnic Germans from Hungary left on January 19, 1946, transporting “humiliated, dispossessed people robbed of their homes to the unknown”.
Further trains of ethnic Germans followed, even when tens of thousands had already been taken to the Soviet Union for forced labor starting from 1944, she added.
Photo credit: Magyar Hírlap