Govt official marks Holocaust Remembrance Day

Csaba Latorcai, state secretary at the human resources ministry, attended a ceremony marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day at Budapest's Holocaust Documentation Centre on Monday. In his address, Latorcai advocated "learning from the past, gaining strength from the sacrifice of the victims of 20th century dictatorships and from the example of those who saved lives". "It is up to us whether we promote peace or allow unrest to take over the world around us," he said. Tamas Kovacs, head of the centre, noted that one third of the people who died in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp had been deported from Hungary. "Their only sin was being Jewish or Roma, or being unwanted for some other reason," he added.