BUDAPEST, April 14 (Xinhua) -- Thousands of Hungarians turned out here on Sunday for the 17th "March of the Living" to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust.

Participants left from the Marcius 15 square in downtown Budapest at 18:00 local time for a solemn walk with torches to the Shoes on the Danube Bank memorial in front of Parliament.

This year's march was dedicated to Jane Haining, a Scottish missionary at the Scottish Mission school in Budapest from 1932, who protected her Jewish pupils from deportation until she was arrested in 1944. She died in Auschwitz aged 47.

"The tragedy of our Jewish compatriots is one of the heaviest burden of the Hungarian history," said Szabolcs Takacs, State Secretary for European Union Affairs at the Prime Minister's Office, at the event.

To commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, 98-year-old Agnes Keleti, a five-time Olympic champion who survived the Holocaust, lit a giant torch.

The commemoration was followed by an outdoor screening of "Nicky's Family", a film that tells the story of Nicholas Winton, a British man who saved 669 Jewish children from Czechoslovakia on the eve of the World War II.

Every year, the March of the living in Budapest takes place based on a program originated from Poland. Enditem

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