BUDAPEST, Hungary, Feb. 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Events for everyone
interested in World War 2 history took place on February 13 in Budapest as part of the "Roads of Victory"
international project.
Historians organized a tour of well-known battle sites and a
lecture about the liberation of Budapest and the mission of the Red Army in
it.
"Roads of Victory" is a large-scale educational project of
Rossotrudnichestvo and the Russian Military Historical Society
(RMHS). Its purpose is to conduct events in six European
cities, liberation of which resulted in war medal honors:
Belgrade, Warsaw, Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, Prague.
The Budapest tour took its
participants to the Gellert hill, with its Liberty Statue
(Szabadság szobor). The statue was erected in 1947 to
commemorate the city's liberation from the Nazi forces by the Red
Army. Flowers were placed at the memorial for the Soviet
soldiers.
Another important stop of the tour was the Holocaust Victims
memorial "Shoes on the bank of Danube," erected in 2005.
Massive executions of Jews in Budapest continued until early 1945, with
executions in the thousands taking place on the Danube bank to
avoid interments.
The Budapest ghetto was
liberated by the soviet forces on January
18, 1945, practically with no losses to the
imprisoned. At the Holocaust memorial, flowers were placed by
representatives of the Hungarian antifascist and resistance
society.
Same day, Russian Center of Science and Culture (RCSC) extended
a general invitation to attend a lecture conducted by Victoria Petrakova, deputy head of the research
department of the Russian Military Historical Society, who
remarked, "It was a pleasure to meet such an interested audience,
with a large number of young people. We discussed that, as
time goes on, the battles of the Great War, its great soldiers,
role of the Red Army in liberating Europe of fascism, tend to get forgotten,
facts corrupted."
Guests of the lecture participated actively, with everyone
confirming that preserving historical memory is important.
Rossotrudnichestvo remarked that the importance of the project
is to demonstrate that Russia and
other countries have a common past, with more ties than we may
think. "Soviet soldiers and their sacrifices are worth remembering
truthfully, without falsifications. These are the facts we wanted
to deliver to Russian citizens, to citizens of other countries
touched by the war. Such horrors must not be repeated."