The 6 year old House of Terror, is one of the most captivating museums I’ve ever experienced — worthy I thought of opening a Globespotters page for Budapest.
It is a museum dedicated to remembering the terrible things done first by the Nazis and then later by the Soviet-backed Communist Party in this now vibrant democratic country. Housed in a former headquarters of the Communist Secret Police, in the very center of Budapest, it is a fitting site for such memorial.
The House of Terror is a brilliant amalgam of history museum, performance art and touching architectural memorial to all the people — Jews, liberals, intellectuals — who died or suffered under Hungary’s sequential reigns of terror. Their small framed portraits are discreetly displayed on the outside of the building, their names etched in its interior walls.
In a city now known for cafes, rock festivals and indulgent baths one might regard the House of Terror as an unnecessary downer — a reminder of the ugly things that happened in this now hedonistic capital. Why, my teenagers asked me last week, were we wallowing in this uncomfortable history when we could be taking in some of the world’s hippist bands at the Sziget Music Festival or luxuriating in the Gellert baths?
But to me the House of Terror more meditative than depressing: asking us to remember the lessons of history and to contemplate how is it that humans can sometimes be so blind and cruel.
Starting on the top floor you walk room-by-room through Hungary’s recent history, starting with the Nazi invasion of Hungary in the 1940s. The museum makes good use of old newsreels as well as oral histories of people who survived these two eras; the sound in Hungarian, but with English subtitles. (The entire museum has excellent explanations in both Hungarian and English.)
There is the war room of the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party, the Nazi party’s local affiliate, so to speak, where a meeting table is lined with uniforms. There is unflinching treatment of how Hungarian officials in Budapest, still home to Europe’s largest synagogue, first passed laws restricting the rights of Jews and finally sent them off to death camps.
Then on to the Communist era: You watch video about the sad history of the rigged election that brought the Communists to power in tiny rooms that resemble voting booths. In a courtroom wallpapered with records from the secret police, you sit on benches and contemplate video excerpts from sham trials in which officials deemed to be not sufficiently loyal to the Communist cause were humiliated and sentenced to prison.
There is are rooms dedicated to Soviet propaganda as well as the Hungarian resistance where underground heros tell stories of the failed 1956 uprising on video screens, facing small cameos of Lenin and Stalin.
Each room is inventive and thought provoking.
The route ends with a very very very slow ride by elevator to a basement crammed with prison cells, during which a Communist official describes on camera coldly how “criminals” were prepared for the gallows. Once in the basement, you wander through dozens of tiny windowless rooms, each adorned with portraits of the unfortunate Hungarians once imprisoned there. It is understated, though not for the faint-hearted.
More to the point, it is not to be missed. And in some ways the House of Terror ultimately tells a tale in which good triumphs over evil. When you leave the House of Terror, you walk out on to Andrassy Street and can head right to some of the most freewheeling cafes, clubs and restaurants in Europe.
House of Terror
Andrassy Ut 60
(Oktagon Metro)
Open Tuesday-Friday 10am – 6 pm, Saturday/Sunday 10 am – 7:30.
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