Having wandered around Budapest for a few days, I very suddenly realised that for the average tourist, there’s very little here to say “you’re in Hungary”. Budapest is a bubble in its own right. It’s where stag parties go for beer bikes and to make a racket in the big outdoor thermal baths, where middle aged middle class people go to appreciate Parliament and Castle Hill and where cruise fans go for a long lazy trip up the Danube. It’s a very nice place and rightly popular but I bet if I’d walked up to 100 tourists and asked what country they were in, half of them wouldn’t know and the others would have to stutter, mutter and think about it before realising.
And I’m just as bad. I know nothing about Hungary. I couldn’t even name another city in the country. And I realised very sharply – admittedly a couple of weeks beforehand – that I knew nothing about Hungary’s history either. I realised it because the Budapest-born-and-raised colleague who gave me a to-do list (see my previous post) put the House of Terror on that list. Now, bear in mind I was there Halloween week, it would be very easy to go “Ooh, House of Terror, that sounds fun and spooky!” but it’s not. It went on the list with the caveats “it’s very heavy” and “it’s not fun” and the matching tone of voice and facial expressions. It is in fact a museum about some of the darkest times in Hungary’s history, the Nazi occupation and the communist era which immediately followed.
I debated it. Boti had said it was heavy and not fun and it certainly didn’t sound like something I’d normally do. But as a travel blogger, it should be my job to look a bit deeper than beer bikes and hot baths, to learn about the place I was visiting and I knew not only that I should go to the House of Terror but also that I would. That got locked in by discovering that my “mini-hotel” was pretty much right opposite it.
So, the House of Terror. It’s at 60 Andrássy út, the Budapest equivalent of Paris’s Champs-Élysées, a long boulevard lined with expensive shops and beautiful architecture. This was, in the 40s, the headquarters of the local Nazis, the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party. The actual Hungarian Nazi party was outlawed in 1937 but the Arrow Cross Party was pretty much the Aldi version – everything from ideology to aesthetics as close to the Nazis as the copyright lawyers would allow, to put it flippantly. There’s a room in the House of Terror where there are Nazi uniforms hung up with Arrow Cross uniforms and they’re pretty much identical, give or take that the wonky pointy cross is wonky and pointy in a slightly different way. And then the Nazi invaded and for a year or so, the House of Terror, then called the House of Loyalty was the actual Hungarian Nazi headquarters.
The museum purports to be about these two periods in Hungarian history, the fascist occupation and the communist occupation but actually, the Nazi days take up little more than a single room. There are four storeys – you go in the ground floor, take the lift up to the second floor and work your way round there, like a labyrinth, descend to the first floor and do the same and then take a second lift all the way down to the basement. So a lot of the House of Terror actually revolves around the communist period. You can pick up information sheets in every room but if you want to know what it’s actually telling you about, get the audioguide. Almost every room has a commentary and they range from 30 seconds up to about six minutes, although most are around the 3-4 minute mark, plus there’s some information to just read off its screen if standing in a single room for six minutes listening to a lecture isn’t for you.
Right. Onto the communists. Towards the end of the war, Hungary was occupied by the Soviet Army and then later formed a provisional national government under Soviet control. Arrow Cross officials were given the chance to repent and grovel and be converted to communist officials and until 1956, Hungary lived under pretty much the same appalling conditions as across the USSR – neighbours spying on neighbours, propaganda, torture, starvation and gulags. The museum details it all in a dizzying labyrinth of rooms, each on a different subjects, with artefacts, listening posts, screens, speeches, all of it laid on top of the rest and culminating in the torture cells. There’s a recreation of the office of the chief of the Hungarian secret police, who turned the Nazi headquarters into the communist headquarters and created from the State Political Police (PRO) first the State Police Defence Department (AVO) and then the State Protection Authority (AVH). For all intents and purposes, the AVO and the AVH are the same, just rebranded as they came to realise how much control they had over Hungary. Who needs outside enemies like Hitler and Stalin when you’ve got the likes of the AVH to deal with?
The second floor of the museum details the backstory, you might say – the story of the Nazis, the Arrow Cross Party and the founding of the AVH. Down a flight of stairs – or follow the balcony round to take the lift down – and you reach the first floor which details life under the communist regime. There’s the story of resettlement and deportation, small torture chambers, the tale of agricultural collectivisation – where land was seized, production quotas went through the roof and prices plummeted, bleeding the peasantry dry in an attempt to force them to leave farms and work in factories. This is told through a mini-maze of white blocks of lard. They’re not real lard, but the blocks do feel weirdly rubbery. Show trials were held, in which torture was sometimes applied, both to the accused and possibly to the people forced to play judge and jury. Between 1945 and 1956, 487 people were executed on political grounds. Churches were banned, church leaders imprisoned or tortured or both,
And finally, you’re ushered into a glass lift which descends from the first floor to the basement impossibly slowly . The lights go down while a screen outside lights up and an ex-prisoner, a miraculous survivor, tells you what happened in the torture cells. If at any point, you’d felt anything besides “heavy” up to this point, this is where it breaks. This basement is the actual torture centre of the communist regime. The cells are recreated from pictures and witness testimonies but they were right here, in the basement under this very building. All of this really happened, right here. The audioguide, which sparks up every time you walk into a different room, allows you to freely roam the cells while it tells you all about it. There’s the original chokey a la Matilda, but the communists were a very different kettle of fish to Miss Trunchbull and this really happened. There’s the fox hole, a pitch-black cell just tall enough to stand bent over. The cells themselves were a form of torture – no toilets, no beds except a handful of them had a handful of planks, little or no food or water, no washing, no glimpse of the outside world – even the air they breathed could be turned off if the guards felt like it. This was relatively peaceful and pleasant compared to the torture cells and the interrogations. Most of the prisoners weren’t actually executed here – they would probably have been sent somewhere else for that, or to the gulags or the mines or whatever torture the guards fancied that particular day but plenty of them would have died here from the conditions.
One thing largely brought an end to the worst of this. In 1956, students and resistance and rebels and anyone who could get involved, rose up in the Hungarian Revolution. It lasted twelve days and was crushed by Soviet tanks and troops. But the result was that it was the beginning of the end for communist control. Communism didn’t officially end until 1989, and the modern Hungarian Republic that we know today, was officially declared on the anniversary of the 1956 revolution, 23rd October. But things improved after 1956, economic reforms came in, standards of living improved.
You come out of that building with a faint sense that it can’t possibly be daytime, the sun can’t possibly be shining and it can’t possibly be the same day as when you went in. All of this was happening – well, Hungary was still under communist control when I was born. My dad was alive, albeit a very small child, while the worst of it was happening. What about my Hungarian colleague? He was born well after any of this but his parents and certainly his grandparents would have been here while the secret police were torturing and executing Hungarian citizens. It’s one thing thinking about what my own grandparents would have endured during the war but at least when it was over, it was over and there was nothing particularly worse to follow. And the worst of it is that most of us have no idea any of it ever happened. We go to Budapest and drink and sail and lounge in hot water and rave about the zoo and we have no idea that right here in this city, in our parents’ lifetimes and our grandparents’ lifetimes, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people were being tortured, executed, condemned to half-lives under communist control, displaced, sent to gulags, selling out their friends and neighbours. It’s all so recent!
So if you’re in Budapest, please do take a couple of hours out of your fun adventures to learn what life has been like recently in this amazing city.