Defence Minister pays tribute to world wars soldiers at re-burial

“By bidding a last farewell to the soldiers and paying them a belated honour, we are sending them the message that they had died for their country that had in the end become our homeland,” Kristof Szalay-Bobrovniczky said. “Many of them have now found the peace they deserve after a century, some after eight decades as lost heroes and forgotten victims of a terrible war,” the minister said, adding that a war ended only once “everybody is accounted for, and can return to a due place in the remembrance of the nation”.

He noted that experts of the Military History Institute and Museum had completed the exhumation of 460 fallen soldiers in the country’s entire territory in 2023. “This year, 118 heroes of the first and second world wars have been laid to eternal rest in the Fiumei Street Cemetery, 60 of whom have been identified so far,” he said.

At the ceremony, Roland Maruzs, the deputy commander of the museum, said that out of the 460 soldiers exhumed 396 were Hungarian, 37 German, 15 Soviet, 3 Romanian while in the case of 9, the nationality of the army unit they had served in could not be established. The remains of the foreign soldiers have been turned over to the partner organisations, he said.

At the ceremony, Colonel Istvan Kindl, who died on Sept 21 in 1944 near Arad, was laid to rest, along with four other soldiers who fell in the first world war.