Address by Bence Pintér, Mayor of Győr, at the Holocaust commemoration
Jewish Cemetery on Győr Island, June 14, 2026
Eighty-two years. By human standards, the span of an entire lifetime. That is how much time has passed since the 5,000 citizens of Győr, confined to the ghetto and then forced into cattle cars, last saw the waters of the Rába and the Mosoni-Duna, the tower of the City Hall, and last touched the doorknobs of their homes.
Eighty-two years have passed since the machinery of hatred, with industrial precision, stripped thousands of our Jewish fellow citizens in Győr of their dignity, their possessions, and then their lives. They were not strangers. They were citizens of Győr. Doctors who treated our children; merchants from whom we bought our daily bread; teachers, lawyers, factory workers, mothers, fathers, and children. The fabric of our city was torn apart then, and the scar has remained with us ever since.
As we bow our heads today in memory of the victims, it is our duty to ask the question: is all of this truly a thing of the past? Have we truly left behind the most horrific plague of the twentieth century, fascism? Unfortunately, our answer is not reassuring.
Fascism did not die in 1945 on the faded pages of history books. It is not a closed museum exhibit, nor a relic of the past. Fascism lives with us. It lurks here in our daily lives, in suspicious glances, in exclusionary words, in social media comments, in populist rhetoric. It is just waiting for the right moment to engulf the world in flames once more, for war is the true breeding ground of fascism.
Let’s look around at today’s world! In our neighbourhood and in many parts of the world, guns are firing again, bombs are falling, and innocent people are fleeing their homes. And where there is war, fascist ideology immediately finds followers.
For what does war do to the soul?
War reduces security to rubble, and fear begins to grow amid the ruins. Existential anxiety and uncertainty are fascism’s best allies. When people fear the future, they easily lose their sound judgment. And fascism exploits precisely this: it offers simple, false, and black-and-white answers to complex, difficult questions.
The first casualty of war is always empathy. War rhetoric demands that we divide the world into “Us” and “Them.” It teaches society not to see the other as a human being, but as an enemy, an abstraction to be destroyed. This is dehumanization.
And let us not forget: in Győr in 1944, the tragedy did not begin with the cattle cars. It began with words. With incitement, with the deprivation of rights, with the majority society learning to turn a blind eye, learning not to see its fellow human beings as people. War, meanwhile, normalizes violence, shifting society’s threshold for what is acceptable. Humanist values, the rule of law, and dialogue suddenly seem like weakness, and the cult of force takes their place.
Every war taking place today sows the seeds of tomorrow’s fascism. The lives shattered, the cities in ruins, the untreated collective traumas, and the legitimate desire for revenge will continue to fuel new and radical ideologies for decades to come if we are not vigilant. War is a vicious cycle from which fascism profits the most.
The martyrs of Győr compel us not to remain silent. We must recognize even the very first, subtle signs of war propaganda and fascist ideology in our surroundings, and we must firmly reject them. We cannot allow fear to dictate our actions.
Let us preserve the memory of the victims of Győr, and do everything in our power to ensure that hatred never again triumphs over humanism, neither here nor anywhere else in the world.
English translation supported by AI: P. Krausz