Budapest Survives Nazi Face-Off Weekend

From what we can tell, Budapest is still standing, meaning that Saturday's much-feared skinhead march did not lead to a city-wide Armageddon. According to a report by newswire Reuters, "more than 100" neo-Nazis took up vigil outside the German Embassy up on Castle Hill to protest the incarceration of one Ernst Zundel, a white supremacist who has been imprisoned in Germany for denying the Holocaust. There was apparently no serious trouble at the rally, at least compared to pervious occasions when the Castle was occupied by such folks. Then again, this time the far-right loons were outnumbered about 100-to-one.

Meanwhile, several thousand people participated in Holocaust Memorial Day events. The "March of the Living" set off from Liszt Ferenc tér, stopped at the Dohány utca Synagogue and ended up on the bank of the Danube near Kossuth tér, where a statue commemorating Jews who were shot and thrown into the river during World War II was unveiled. The iron statue is called "Shoes on the Danube Bank" and depicts sixty pairs of old shoes. During the ceremony Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány promised that his and future governments will do everything to "protect human life" and to banish hatred. He added that one of the most valuable lessons of the 20th century was that the thought of hatred can be followed by the word of hatred which can be followed by the act of hatred, all of which sounds pretty good until you remember the jerks up at the castle, who deserve big buckets of hate, among other things.

Finally, perceptive reader M.A. writes in to remind us of the passing of Kálmán Ferenczfalvi, a Hungarian hero who died last week at the ripe old age of 84. During the closing stages of World War II Ferenczfalvi was employed as the head of a labor brigade on which many Jews worked, and, disregarding orders, deployed those in his charge to guard the local HQ of the International Red Cross, as well as forging papers to keep as many people as possible out of the fire. All in all, he is credited with saving as many as 2,000 people from deportation and extermination, and in 1988 was made an official "Righteous Gentile" by Israel's Yad Vashem Institute. We'd say that Ferenczfalvi is on his way to a better place, except our guess is that he got there before anyone knew he was dead - on a friggin' rocket sled.