We spent the weekend in Budapest at my cousin’s apartment. On Saturday, Bernard and I went to the Terror House…it is located on one of Budapest’s most beautiful boulevards, at Andrassy Utca 60. Terror House was the headquarters of AVO-the Hungarian secret police; and it is telling that it was located in the center of the country’s center. When your purpose is to terrorize a people, go directly to the heart of them.
The first thing you see when you enter the main exhibit hall is a Soviet tank. It is located at the bottom
of an open – three-story high central stairwell and enveloped on two sides by a black marble wall that stretches from the top of the third floor down to the floor …on it are inscribed the faces of the victims of a terror inflicted in the names of a variety of isms: nazism, communism, socialism… There is loud, foreboding music blaring from the loudspeakers…this first view literally attacks you on all sides. The entire exhibit is unrelenting and relentless.
The exhibit is organized historically, beginning with the 20th century and detailing the years of Nazi occupation during World War II (supported by Hungarian fascists), followed by the occupation by the Soviet army and consolidation of near dictatorial communist control that was aided and abetted by the growth of this security and terror network. AVO was so efficient–when opposition in any form revealed itself, it swooped in and eliminated it. It didn’t matter that the kid who wrote anti-Soviet graffiti on a wall was only 16–they simply lowered the minimum age for the death sentence to 16 and then executed him. You couldn’t be half-hearted in supporting the regime…if on May Day you didn’t smile broadly enough, you could come under suspicion and be arrested, sometimes to disappear for years. Young children who were indoctrinated at an early age by the Soviet-inspired educational system were held up as national heroes if the information they provided about their parents resulted in the death penalty. I cannot describe to you all of the things that we saw, but let me just say that I started to cry.
One of my students had warned me that going to the Terror House was like going into Dante’s Inferno. The exhibit begins on the upper floor and descends, finally reaching the basement where the prisons and torture chambers have been reconstructed. The smell lingers…it is indescribable. I have been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC and in Berlin. The Terror House invoked the same revulsion about man’s inhumanity to man…but this time, it was by Hungarians on Hungarians which made it, to me, especially heartbreaking.
When we exited the exhibit, we were disoriented by the bright sunlight and warm weather–it was so radically different from the dark and depressing space we had just left behind us. Later that evening, we met several of our cousins at my cousin Tibor’s house. My cousin Klari said she couldn’t bring herself to go to that exhibit. During the early days of the Soviet-supported communist regime, AVO appeared at her house in the middle of the night. She and her family were given one-hour to pack up their things and they were repatriated to a small farming village way out in the countryside. Klari had a newborn baby. I asked why they were exiled. They had never been involved in any kind of political opposition or resistance movement, but her father-in-law had once worked at a foreign embassy. This was enough to cause AVO to question their loyalty. They were not able to return to Budapest until a general amnesty was proclaimed (years later)…that did not occur until after the Hungarian Revolution. Fortunately for them, they were able to get their home back….Many other Hungarians were not so lucky.
As a historian and as a Hungarian, I feel compelled to write about this. But, there is another reason as well. A cousin of mine teaches English. She sat in on a history exam for one of her high school students and came away completely outraged. The student was asked a question by her history teacher about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. In her response, she referred to it as a counter-insurrection. This was the official view of the Socialist regime…Hungarians were not allowed to refer to the victims of 1956 as national heroes or freedom fighters…the official party line is that they were criminals. My cousin realized by this student’s response, that the history teacher was probably a communist and was still teaching the officially sanctioned communist view of the Hungarian past. Some of my own students have told me that they learned a completely different version of the Cold War when they were in high school.
I think I had mentioned that once the two Germanies were reunited, the Stassi files were made public. In the Czech Republic, former communists were prohibited from holding public office for 5 years. None of these things happened in Hungary. Many of the former communists are today’s capitalists and hold and control an enormous amount of the country’s wealth (now privatized); they also continue to hold power in the Parliament. In the many conversations we have had with faculty, students, and ordinary people all around Hungary, we keep hearing the same story. The Communists were never exposed and they continue to run colleges, universities, hospitals, and provincial governments. Bernard gets outraged when he hears this and sometimes says, Hungarians need to rise up. My cousin said that it is always the youth who die when revolutions occur…she cannot bear the thought of even one young person being killed.
Many of the young Hungarians I have met, both in my classes as well as in the audiences for the 9/11 Panel which we presented around the country, have little interest in history or politics. These events are “old news” and boring to them. Tyranny relies on the people’s apathy and ignorance of their own past. A democracy needs transparency and its citizens need to remember their own history…otherwise things will never get any better.
Thanks for tuning in and best regards,
Marcsi
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