The Terror Museum

A walk up Andrassy ut, the historic street in Budapest that is a World Heritage Site, past the Opera House to #60, brings you to the Terror Museum. This relatively new museum documents, with chilling authenticity, the brutal atrocities of the Nazis and their Hungarian henchmen from 1944 to the end of World War II, and the takeover of the country by Communist regimes starting with Stalin, going through resistance and the 1956 revolution, and up to 1990, when Hungary became an independent Republic.

60 Andrassy street was Nazi headquarters during the war, then the headquarters of the Hungarian communists, Stalin loyalists, and the dreaded secret service after the war. It was the scene of violence, torture, spying, and executions of thousands of Hungarians. People went in and never came out. Few Hungarian families were unscathed by these regimes. Yale historian Timothy Snyder writes about eastern Europe being caught between Hitler and Stalin in Bloodlands, an amazing history everyone should read.

The young woman who manages the Lavender Circus hostel near the Opera House, Agnes, tells of cousins who were snatched in the night for no reason, tortured, then disappeared. Agnes says that sometimes the fear is still palpable. She is studying for a PhD in English Literature, focusing on Jane Austin, about as far away from politics as you can get. I understand this. Loren would have found it fascinating.

The somber music when you enter the museum, cellos and drums, some contemporary alternative songs beating in other rooms, set the stage and the mood, one of fear and trembling, as do the names and photographs on the outside and inside walls of the museum, a memorial to thousands of victims. It is sobering, like the photos that peered down at us in stunning disbelief at Auschwich, the sound of silence, telling us to remember.

Hungary suffered. There were spies and heroes, collaborators and resisters. It's a tangled web of totalitarianism and terror. The most moving aspects of the exhibits at the Terror Museum are the videos of interned survivors and brave resisters, a fabulous ongoing oral history project that features sensitive in-depth interviews of people telling their stories, spliced with live footage of trials, interrogations, Soviet speechmaking and propaganda, and actual horrors and treatment of prisoners.

It reveals a lot about present-day eastern European countries that they are remembering these atrocities of the past, documenting them for future generations, and opening up once-closed topics for public examination. Deniers still exist, as do ominous stereotypes, evidenced in a rise of neo-Nazis and the graffiti we saw on the white wall of a building as we toured the once-thriving, once-decimated, still extant Jewish community in Krakow (where Schindler’s List was filmed).

That's why these museums, memorials, restored buildings, documentary films, and tours led by informed guides are so important. They help counteract the persistence of prejudice and shed light on the dark side of our history. “Those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it,” the philosopher Santayana wrote. Will we learn our lessons from the past? Are we doomed to repeat history?

OuR FuNkY and faBulouS HosTeLs

No hotels for us senior travelers! Not only are hostels cheaper, they are more fun. So Jud and I take a shuttle from the Budapest airport to the Lavender Circus, 37 Muzeum krt, for the start of a long-planned holiday. The entrance is unprepossessing, to say the least: an overflowing mailbox to the left of a large worn door, a dozen or more apartment numbers on a keypad at the right. A handwritten note for the Hostel bell says "keep ringing until someone answers." I sit on the bell for a while. Then Jud takes a turn, as if it matters who's pushing the bell. In our best PCV mode, we look at each other, but say nothing. We're cool.

At last someone buzzes us in. We enter a long dark corridor with a high coved ceiling and start up a large sweeping marble staircase. We stop on the third floor, ahem, to admire the view. It's an old-style European apartment building that has seen better days, but its original beauty shines through. The wrought iron gates are elegant. The office is on the 4th floor, a long climb, but hey, it's good exercise! (photos above)

Any doubts vanish when we make it up to the top and enter the brightly painted office. It is full to the brim with vintage 1950s and 1960s memorabilia, posters, icons, vinyl records, historic photos of weddings and Hungarian bandits, knickknacks, and assorted items hanging from the walls and ceiling. Loren would have felt right at home here. We are greeted by the proprietors, Andrea, a sweet young man with black hair, who is from Italy, and his business partner Adam, from Budapest. They are both multi-lingual and multi-talented, and very helpful. Andrea's recommendations for restaurants turn out to be fantastic, too, making our Budapest visit a feast of the senses.

It's old-world elegance with a touch of contemporary class and funky flourishes. Our room is on the third floor, large and bright. The hostel is in a good location, on tram and metro lines, directly across from the massive classical Hungarian History Museum, and accessible to all the Buda and Pest landmarks, squares, and neighborhoods.

A second Lavender Circus has opened recently across from the magnificent Opera House. The hostel bears the umistakeable imprint of Andrea and Adam. We stay there for an extra night, close enough to the Opera House to hear artists practicing their instruments and singers their arias. How lovely is that? In either place, we are comfortable and well cared for. What more can we ask for?

Well, there's Greg and Tom's Hostel in Krakow, our next stop, in an equally interesting old-world building. It is rated among the top ten hostels worldwide. It is well-located, spotless, has an attentive staff, great and abundant food (needed for young travelers who pile it on), and good vodka with raspberry drinks on Saturday night. We also meet lots of interesting travelers. One night we had dinner with a California couple celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary, Bonnie and Steve. This hostel is fantastic.

But in magical Budapest, I recommend the Lavender Circus for its Italian-Hungarian charm. Young or old, it’s a wonderful adventure.

Auschwitz-Birkenau: Beyond Twisted

"Time has no power to erase these memories."  A filmmaker at liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945

A large encased exhibit is filled with human hair, 700 tons of it discovered after the camp was liberated in 1945. The hair of thousands of victims, mostly women, mostly infested with Zyklon B and other lethal poisons. The hair of stunned prisoners brought like cattle to Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp outside of Krakow, Poland.

Another exhibit houses thousands of pairs of eye glasses, ordinary glasses that belonged to human beings blinded by evil, then murdered. Glasses piled up like the victims of the gas chambers here, 400 to 500 to 1000 or more at a time.

Another large window exhibit contains a mountain of suitcases, the last remnants of the precious possessions of Jewish victims who couldn't begin to imagine the horrors awaiting them. The suitcases bear the names of their owners. I feel compelled to say the  names to myself, like a prayer list, but the tour Jud and I are on moves ahead and I have to push on; I cannot get them all. I feel guilty. One suitcase is marked simply "M. Frank." Did this suitcase, perhaps, belong to a relative of the young Anne Frank? Did the suitcase of "I. Meyer" belong to a father and mother separated from their young children, sent to the right or to the left, never to be seen again?

Room 6 in Block 6 contains the sad and forlorn remains of these traumatized children: an exhibit of their shoes, so small and worn out; of their clothes, little cotton dresses and hand-knit caps and sweaters; a few books, some toys, a once-lovely doll whose head is severed from its body, its face smashed in. Or is that a real child?

We walk through the gas chambers. We see the extant evidence of mass murder. We see, but we do not comprehend. An exhibit contains thousands of empty Zyklon B containers, testimony to its extensive use and effectiveness in killing hundreds and thousands of innocent and captured people at a time. Terrified people in the throes of evil, stripped naked, packed like sardines in a small room, the door closed firmly, the gas turned on, hundreds dead within 15-20 minutes. The makers of the gas made a killing, too. Better than guns. So cost-effective. So profitable.  I feel sick to my stomach.

Then there are the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which worked round the clock, scattering human ashes like snow over the ground of the camp and beyond, into Krakow itself.   Oscar Schindler, in one scene in the Stephen Spielberg movie, filmed mostly in Krakow, wipes ashes off a car in disbelief and a growing moral outrage that was in short-supply at the time, anywhere.

The tour seems endless. Just when you think you have seen it all, our knowledgeable guide leads us to other horrors. Here is the killing wall where victims were set up like props and shot outright, there the portable gallows where people were hung in front of an audience of family, friends, and emasciated prisoners in various stages of traumatic shock. The daily life of Jews subject to random shootings, starvation, torture, and one inhuman act after another.

We walk on in a daze. Here, our guide says, pointing to blocks 14 and 15, are the medical buildings, places that prisoners tried to avoid at all costs, where medical experimentation took place on human subjects, where women were steralized, where the sick, diseased, and over-worked were sent to die by lethal injection.

And that small square by a kitchen? That's where the Jewish orchestra played marches to muster prisoners to the yard so that they could be counted accurately by the SS, then sent to back-breaking work to die. The musicians played their instruments, but had no voice; they were used to play death marches for their fellow prisoners. I cannot grasp this reality, this torment. It seems so demonic, pitting victims against victims struggling to survive this nightmare in any way they could.

"The devouring of human life," the brochure says. But language seems inadequate. First Poles, some 728 "political prisoners," when Auschwitz was established in 1940, then Jews, along with gypsies and others, who met a fate unimaginable, on a scale beyond belief. Over 1.5 million murdered. Hitler's "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." The pre-meditated, meticulously planned annihilation of human beings.

Primo Levi, an Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor, calls it "the gray zone," a realm beyond good and evil, beyond morality, beyond any language we know. How anyone survived is a miracle.

"The Holocaust left us with a basic vacuum in terms of human meaning," says a priest-scholar, "which, if it remains unfilled, can open the door to other ideologies equally destructive of human life at all levels."

The physical remains and documentation of the horrors of the Holocaust hit you in the pit of your stomach. Photo after haunting photo of victims, in striped prison garb, peer at us through sunken eyes filled with fear, disbelief, dread, deadness. Condemned to extinction. "You are witnesses," they say. "You are witnesses to this gigantic factory of death. Do not forget us. We are real. What happened to us is real. Do not forget us." Time cannot erase these memories. Nor explain them. Beyond language. Beyond twisted.

Magical Budapest

History museum, painted ceiling Opera House, eagle, elephant, view of St. Mathias across the river.

I am in the magical city of Budapest, mourning for my brother Loren. He would have loved it here.

Budapest has a complicated and sorrowful history, a history of destruction and reconstruction over many centuries. The story is well told in the columned Hungarian Museum of History, a beautiful classical structure. Loren knew this story well. He would have filled me in.

After marveling at the beauty of the museum, which is right across the street from our funky hostel, the Lavender Circus, my PCV friend Jud and I went from room to room, from one era to another. It is a chronological presentation from medieval and Renaissance times, with their artisanal traditions and exquisite craftsmanship--jewelry, fabric, metal work, furniture--into the 20th century, dominated by World Wars I and II, Nazi atrocities, and harsh Stalanist regimes. The displays, artifacts, documents and memorabilia are fantastic, often accompanied by authentically produced dioramas in rich detail and some of the earliest historical film footage. A fascinating journey through time.

Much like Ukraine, in some ways, Hungary has a tortured history of foreign invasions, occupation, war, dispersion, resistance, loss, and rebuilding. Budapest has been victim of all of it. While looking at grotesque statues of fearsome soldiers definding the city, in front of the Buda castle or in Heroes Square, I think I heard Loren say something about how necessary it might have been at the time, but how senseless it seems now. Sounds like Loren. He not only knew this complex history, he also knew that Hungary, inspite of its dark past and struggles, fiercely hung on to its identity through the worst of times. Loren understood this on many levels.

Budapest is now in its glory. It shines with magnificent architecture, great parks, bustling squares, great shops and restaurants, friendly people, and the fabled Danube River. Sometimes I think I see Loren peering out from spires and gargoyles, on Buda palace, around St. Stephen's Basilica, from St. Mathias Church, in Heroes Square and the Fine Arts Museum, around ancient palaces that have been reborn as museums. He's often behind angels and chubby cupids and lovely floating women painted on the ceilings and walls of these awesome churches, the Opera House, the History Museum.

I passed a statue of a large cheerful elephant in front of The famous Gerbraud restaurant in Vorosmarty Square, the heart of Pest, and Loren could have been hiding behind it. I looked for him, but I didn't see him. I think he might have been playing hide-and-seek behind that elephant, an animal he was fond of for its lumbering persistence. He might also be around the many statues and carvings of lions and eagles that are everywhere, on buildings and bridges and parks and walkways, all over Budapest. Symbols of courage and freedom. Symbols Loren loved.

Jud and I especially enjoyed our walks along Andrassy ut, a boulevard so full of fantastic architecture from every historic period that it is a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Champs Elysee of Pest, Andrassy ut is graced with grand buildings in gothic, classical, baroque, art nourveau and other styles. Many of the older buildings were once almost rubble, destroyed during wars, some still pock-marked with bullet holes, but most have been lovingly restored over time. It is a feast of the senses to walk along this boulevard, and best of all, it's on the way to the Opera House.

In fact, Loren pulled us inside, and last night Jud and I saw the most ethereal ballet I have ever seen in one of the grandest Opera Houses I've ever been in. The surroundings were breath-taking. The dancers were heavenly, so fluid, so elegant, so masterfully trained (at the Hungarian National Ballet), and the choreography, the lighting, the music so exquisite, that we were transported to another realm. I felt closer to Loren.

As long as Jud and I keep moving, I am okay with Loren fading in and out. But when I am still, the silence is too great. I want Loren by my side, talking to me, going on and on about everything he knows and wants to tell me, like we did in Costa Rica, on our Southwest and Utah adventure, or our Florida explorations. No intermediaries. No gargoyles, spires and statues. Just Loren, with me in Budapest.