On Friday afternoon I visited the House of Terror Museum – it might sound like a haunted mansion, and maybe it is, because many people died there. But it’s primarily now a museum in the same building that Hungarian representatives of the Nazis and then the Soviets used for coordinating interrogation, torture, and murder.
The building at Andrássy út 60 was home to the vilest parts of two destructive regimes: first the Arrow Cross (the Gestapo-like enforcers of Nazi-occupied Hungary), then the ÁVO and ÁVH secret police (the insidious KGB-type wing of the Soviet satellite government).
Rick Steves
In a telling sign of the affinity between Nazism and communism, the Communists welcomed into their ranks those in the Arrow Cross rank and file who showed a willingness to cooperate. They continued to serve, doing the same job as before: terrorizing, humiliating, torturing and killing. They simply exchanged racist theory for the theory of Marxist class struggle: it was a simple matter of changing uniforms.
House of Terror Museum
Far right and far left are both too far, clearly. Hungary tried both, and most people didn’t like either! Complain as one may regarding the USA’s imperfections, but I am very glad to have grown up in the West. I was already an adult when the Warsaw Pact countries shed their Communist overlords and when the Soviet Union went kaput. Good riddance.
In this museum there’s a section at the end with walls of names, birth dates, and photos of the victimizers themselves, as they’re called here — people (men only?) who worked in the building during communist times. These people, many of whom are still alive, have not gotten into trouble for their deeds here. So it’s a wall of shame, and museum coordinators would clearly like to see some accountability. In some Rick Steves audio programs regarding Budapest, his Hungarian guests said that there’s a general feeling of forgiveness in the interest of moving forward instead of feeling angry about the past. These people are neighbors, family, colleagues. Perhaps that’s the most practical approach, and we’ve all seen what continual retribution, tit for tat, gets you: perpetual anger and fear. Righteous indignation.
I am cognizant that I visit a lot of Nazi and Communist sites when exploring Europe. Growing up during the Cold War, I was always fascinated and a bit frightened of the Communists and Soviets over here, so I can’t get enough of learning about the history, depressing as it may be. And WWII is ever-fascinating, but of course none of it is worth ever repeating, and that’s a real lesson on offer. But here we are in 2022, and I see photos of war-torn cities in Ukraine that look a lot like the ones I see in photos from WWII, with the main difference being color vs black and white. Putin is gravely mistaken in thinking that he can sacrifice the lives of thousands of Russian soldiers (as has been the typical Russian way) for the glory of taking over Ukraine. Even if he somehow does so, it won’t last. As someone cleverly wrote on a sign he attached to a Lenin statue in Budapest decades ago, “Stop smirking, Lenin, this will not last forever, after 150 years we didn’t become Turkish either!” (Referring to Ottoman rule over Hungary.)
On a more positive note, here are some famous Hungarians:
- Estée Lauder, cosmetics magnate
- László Bíró, inventor of the modern ballpoint pen. In fact, in the UK, a ballpoint pen is called a “biro”.
- Ernő Rubik, inventor of the eponymous cube
Some famous Americans of Hungarian-Jewish descent:
- Harry Houdini (born Erich Weisz)
- Joseph Pulitzer
- George Soros
- Zsa Zsa Gabor
- Tony Curtis and daughter Jamie Lee Curtis
Some Friday photos:
Today’s limerick:
Nazis, Soviets, neither should one pick.
Out of your country you wanted to kick.
But then not really,
It was just silly,
You sided with Nazis; makes me feel sick.
Hungary sided with the Nazis, but toward the end of the war, Germany took over Hungary anyway.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungary_in_World_War_II
Today’s dad joke:
Gary: “Who was that East Asian ruler who crossed the Danube twice and struck fear across Europe in the mid-400s?”
Viktor: “That was Attila the Hun, Gary.”
Today’s travel quote:
When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.
Clifton Fadiman
Major Meander 
There are some valuable lessons to be found in that museum. It’s good that the Hungarians do not want to forget about such horrible times.