Europe in These Times: House of Terror

Budapest, Hungary, 19 February 2022

One descends into the basement of the House of Terror via an elevator from the second floor (the House is toured in a very specific order, starting with the third floor and ending in the cellar). As the elevator doors close, the lights inside click off, and a screen on the rear wall begins to play interviews of survivors. Ominous music fills the space as the occupants move slowly downwards, catching glimpses of unfinished stone walls and angular beams through the glass enclosure. The doors slide open, giving way to a dungeon, a torture chamber where Hungarian dissidents (and indeed, regular citizens) suffered and died—here in their capital city, for more than a decade—at the hands of fascist and then communist occupiers.

The descent into the basement is an emotional experience, one intensified by the history that is so vividly and thoroughly presented in the floors above. On the third level, one walks through rooms arrayed with artifacts, displays, videos, and recordings that present the brutality experienced by the country’s population (most especially its Jewish population) under fascist rule after Nazi Germany invaded and wielded power, through willing proxies—including the Hungarian Arrow Cross party—from 1944 to 1945. Jews were deported to death camps or killed in the street, while dissenters and anyone deemed insufficiently loyal was brought to the basement of what is now the House of Terror museum. The Arrow Cross maintained and in some ways intensified its murderous ways as the Nazis lost control of the city and fled in 1945.

Obviously, the suffering of the Hungarians would not end at that point. Visitors to the House of Terror walk down a staircase to the second floor, where the focus of the museum’s displays shift in the manner that control of the country did in 1945: to the Soviets. This would be a much longer occupation, lasting all the way to the end of the Cold War, and its brutality, as laid bare in the museum, equaled that of its predecessor. Until 1956 (when they decamped for a larger facility), the Soviet-aligned security regime maintained the House of Terror as a kind of headquarters, and its basement remained a jail and torture chamber. Former Arrow Cross members were often brought there, as well as all manner of dissidents and regular citizens that held or seemed to hold beliefs that diverged from the official state dogma. The museum’s curators have gone to great lengths to convey the horrific national experience of this “double occupation” by forces adhering to two of history’s most vile, and destructive, ideologies. Indeed, one cannot possibly walk through this space and not feel the terrible weight placed for so long upon a single population.

Rounding into the last corner of the second floor, the visitor enters a long, dark chamber in which light floats up from a cross-shaped cut-out embedded in the floor. At the far end, a priest’s vestments are displayed upright in a glass case, and all manner of Catholic artifacts line the side walls. From the exit at the far end of this room, one enters a smaller chamber—the last stop before the elevator ride to the basement—where a video describing the life and work of Cardinal József Mindszenty plays on loop. Arrested for speaking out against the persecution of the Jewish population under the Nazis and later sentenced to life imprisonment by the Soviet regime in 1949 (for treason, of course), Mindszenty was among the foremost figures of the Hungarian resistance, a man who became a symbolic leader because he was a leader in fact, an outspoken voice for truth under a regime that could not coexist with it. Eventually released in 1956, Mindszenty immediately had to seek refuge at the American Embassy as Soviet tanks rolled into the country that very same year to put down the Hungarian Revolution. The Cardinal, of course, was not alone in his struggles or in his bravery, as several others (including fellow clergy) were sentenced in the same 1949 trial (and of course, such show trials were a constantly-employed tool of a regime that lasted over forty years). As the displays and video in the House of Terror make clear, the Catholic clergy of Hungary paid a dear price to stand and speak out against the oppression of the Hungarian people.

Just a few miles away, in fact, sitting on the far bank of the Danube, is the remarkable Gellért Hill cave, inside of which one can tour, or attend a Mass at, a chapel founded by the by the Pauline brothers in 1926. In 1951, secret police raided the site. Belief in a power and a source of authority higher than the governing regime is not something communism has ever been able to tolerate, and the Pauline brothers paid a dear price for the persistence of their faith: they were all arrested, and hefty prison sentences were passed down to most. Their leader, Ferenc Vezér, was executed. The entrance to the cave was sealed, and remained so until 1989.

A visitor to Hungary today will find, at both Gellért Hill and the street outside of the House of Terror, scenes that belie the difficulties faced there during both the Nazi and Soviet occupations. The cave church is perched scenically above the flowing Danube, directly across the street from one of the city’s famed and ornate bathhouses. For its part, the House of Terror occupies an outwardly pleasant neo-Renaissance building on the Boulevard Andrássy, the city’s wide, leafy, upscale shopping thoroughfare; it’s the type of structure (barring the massive awnings announcing the museum’s presence) in the type of setting that a visitor to a great old European city might expect to house an expensive hotel. Both settings are indeed now so pleasant as to mask how very close in time these places—indeed, any place—can be to shuttered churches and jailed monks, to deprivation and violence. It is a juxtaposition that is jarring but instructive, a reminder that we should never feel so safe from tyranny and chaos that we forget what the stories of Cardinal Mindszenty and the Pauline brothers have to teach us about fortitude and sacrifice in the face of humankind’s very worst impulses.