Calvin Synod Herald, 2014 (115. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

2014-03-01 / 3-4. szám

CALVIN SYNOD HERALD

9

Gestapo started the deportation “tens of thousands of Christian Hungarians are known to have rushed to the aid of Jews in distress, trying to shield and hide them ... and to help them in their futile attempts to escape. ... Young Christian girls have frequently been seen parading the streets of cities and towns with young Jews wearing the Star of David.” At first the Nazis didn’t control the government and Budapest, still under official control of Horthy and staunch loyalists, but the vise got tighter for Horthy and the freedom loving Hungarians.

One of the teenage Jews caught in the capital was Tom Lantos, who survived and became a U.S. Representative. He told the story to his colleagues in the U.S. House about the hero Col. Ferenc Koszorús and “one of the most remarkable examples of bravery and courage of the time.”

“By June 1944, the Nazis had incarcerated and liquidated most of the Jewish population of Europe. In the capital of Hungary, Budapest, there remained approximately 250,000 Jews still alive. ... He learned that László Baky, Secretary of State and director of all security forces, with the exception of the army, had planned a coup d’etat to install a police force completely subservient to the Nazis ... With the help of the Gestapo, Baky formed several battalions of ‘gendarmerie’ forces loyal to him. Orders from the Regent (sic Horthy) to disband the gendarmerie went unheeded. Col. Koszorús controlled the last remaining active army unit in Hungary. Realizing the severity of the situation, Colonel Koszorús consulted with the Regent and began preparations on his own to stop Baky and the gendarmerie battalions. On July 5, 1944 at 11:30 p.m., Colonel Koszorús ordered the units of the 1 st Armored Division to take up positions at strategic points in Budapest, sealing off all roads leading into the city. ... Colonel Koszorús informed Baky that if his gendarmerie did not leave and disband they would be destroyed. On July 7, 1944, Baky capitulated and evacuated his forces.”

“As a result of his extraordinarily brave efforts, taken at great risk in an extremely volatile situation, the eventual takeover of Budapest by the Nazis was delayed by 3 Vi months. This hiatus allowed thousands of Jews to seek safety in Budapest, thus sparing them from certain execution. It also permitted the famous Raul Wallenberg, who arrived in Budapest on July 9, 1944, to coordinate his successful and effective rescue mission.” - “His memory (sic Koszorús) is honored with a plaque in the famous Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest.” - Congressional Record, May 26, 1994

Closing the Jaws -Arrow Cross “On October 15, 1944, the Regent suddenly proclaimed that he had asked Armistice terms from the Allies and ordered the Hungarian Army to ‘cease fire,’” reported The British Society for International Understanding in its British Survey - Hungary, in December 1946. “No sooner did this happen than the Germans and their quisling henchmen, in the party known as the ‘Arrow Cross,’ occupied Budapest, carried off the Regent and reversed the orders given to the Army. The Arrow Cross leader, Szalasi, took over and ruthlessly attempted to suppress all resistance. The Germans, in the meantime, looted everything they could lay their hands on and sent it back to Germany.” Horthy was gone, the vise clamped shut.

With the Nazi sympathizers in control, the Gestapo had a free hand in rounding up the Jews throughout the land, and did so in earnest lest there be any at the impending end of the war. (The Arrow Cross would rear its venomous head again in later years.)

Free At Last! - Well, Not Quite

The Russians came into Hungary and joined the Germans in street to street fighting turning Budapest into rubble. Too busy saving their own skins, the Nazi deportations ended. What the Nazis left, the Reds hauled away in wagons pulled by Hungarian cattle. After the war ended, most of the Nazi sympathizer Arrow Cross traitors fled to the west (many to the Americas). A Provisonal Government was formed, but Russian troops overran the country and set up a Red single party government under Moscow’s control, a satellite again under brutal Russian boots.

It would stay that way until the consequences of Hungarians’ bravery, by first cutting the barbed wire, and the uprising of Hungarians in Temesvár, brought about the fall of Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall in 1989. It was not until the spring of 1990 that the back of the last Russian soldier crossed the bridge out of Hungary. Free at last! Thank the Lord, free at last!

Building the Future on Solid Ground

"We agree with the Members of the first free National Assembly, which proclaimed as its first decision that our current liberty was born of our 1956 Revolution. ”

“We date the restoration of our country’s self-determination, lost on the nineteenth day of March 1944, from the second day of May 1990, when the first freely elected organ ofpopular representation was formed. We shall consider this to be the beginning of our country s new democracy and constitutional order. " After years of enslavement by Russia, and forced by stooges to live under a constitution which entrenched the Communist party and its bureaucrats, the first years were tumultuous. Election of a new government without the Communists, trying to effect the transition to new freedom but unable to provide immediate relief for the nation’s poverty, the first attempt at real freedom was cut short. New elections returned the Communist government and its iron fist renewed the old ways of control of every facet of daily living with no prospect of shaking the gloomy prospects.

Fortunately, after they had driven the country into huge indebtedness, the stigma of rampant corruption resulted in new elections that restored the anti-Communists led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. With a supermajority in Parliament, reforms brought stabilization of the nation’s economy and an improved standard of living. The debt has been repaid, the deficits decreased annually, with more jobs and better wages every year. It also got rid of the old Communist constitution, with a bold new one - The Fundamental Law.

Recognizing the country’s thousand year old proud and