HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR
Historian returning award to Hungary
1/26/2014BUDAPEST — Randolph Braham, Holocaust survivor and historian, said Sunday that he is returning an award to Hungary to protest what he says are government efforts to rewrite history and exonerate the country from its role in the Holocaust.
Mr. Braham, 91, who received the Medium Cross of the Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic in 2011, also asked the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest to take his name off a facility that collects his research and publications.
A professor emeritus at the Center for Jewish Studies at the City University of New York, Mr. Braham told center officials that his action was because of government plans for a memorial to mark the March, 1944, Nazi invasion of Hungary.
He said the memorial was “a cowardly attempt to detract attention from the Horthy regime’s involvement in the destruction of the Jews and to homogenize the Holocaust with the ‘suffering’ of the Hungarians — a German occupation ... was not only unopposed but generally applauded.”
Miklos Horthy was Hungary’s autocratic leader from the 1920s through most of World War II.