(Wikimedia Commons)
In 2011, I spent a week in Budapest meeting family friends.
it was a splendid time of listening (to the Hungarian I don’t speak) and hearing stories.
Our party included an able translator and amusing teenages for counterpoint.
But I wasn’t just visiting Budapest, I also was reading Julie Orringer‘s The Invisible Bridge, a novel about Hungarian Jews in Budapest during World War II.
It underscored my trip with a melancholy parallel universe as I visited many of the sites mentioned in the book.
I weighed the book and the sites against the stories I heard from the families we visited.
Viewed through the lens of history.
Because of book and family connections, I viewed this beautiful city on both sides of the Danube River through the lens of history.
We saw the bullet holes still in the wall from the days of the Jewish Ghetto where one family lived.
Enormous statutes on the top of Liberty Hill honored the “liberation” of the city from the Nazis.
All my reading about the trials of surviving under Community rule knew the truth behind the occasional hammers and sickles, not to mention the golden stars.
Author photo
The Soviet decorations dripped with history and irony.
Sobering Budapest museums
On Friday, I took the metro by myself and visited the Holocaust Memorial.
From there I visited the House of Terror–the building where first the Nazis and then the Hungarian version of the KGB interrogated and then tortured citizens to death.
I felt it was important to bear witness, yet again, to the atrocities visited on innocent people in central Europe.
To finish the book, bid the freinds good-bye, and then visit such horrific spots left me emotionally reeling.
Both museums were very well done (and recommended by Rick Steves), using multi-media to tells their sorry tales.
The Holocaust Memorial is underwritten by Hungarian Jews/American actors Tony Curtis and Jamie Lee Curtis.
I was one of a handful walking through the exhibit–familiar to me in a hundred ways, but also told from a slightly different slant.
(We visit museums in foreign countries for that reason–to understand their points of view).
The gypsies received a long-needed recognition for their suffering.
The exhibit began with the subtle changes in society toward the Jews and the gypsies.
It described how their rights were gradually stripped away. The government made them scapegoats of societal pressures beginning as early as 1918.
The changes occured because of the Trianon Treaty which gave away a large portion of Hungary to other nations following WWI.
And of course it all led to the grotesque concentration camps.
I felt emotionally slapped when I finally exited the museum–frozen in the horror of what happened to so many.
10% of the concentration camp dead were Hungarian–and they did not deport people until 1944.
How CAN anyone ever forget?
I always try to read fiction about or by a native of the place I am about to visit. Really gets one in the mood!