The 'House of Terror' on Andrassy Street
Budapest Despite its new faade and refurbished interior hinting at a revived opulence, the ghosts of a still unsettled history linger at 60 Andrassy Street. For it was at this late nineteenth century mansion on one of Budapests premier belle epoch boulevards, which housed the headquarters of Hungarys notorious Stalinist secret police, was prison to notable Hungarians among them Josef Cardinal Mindszenty, and now commemorates the victims in an eerie modernist museum.
The building at 60 Andrassy houses a controversial but popular museum called the House of Terror. Though Hungarys communist rulers fell to the tidal wave of liberation in 1989, memories and versions of the past are still a subject of contention, reflection, and often heavy-handed revision. The museum was opened earlier in the year by conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orban at the onset of a contentious election campaign against the Socialists. Even a half century after the worst atrocities carried out in the name of The State, the nuance of the period is very fluid and fraught with emotion.
The Museum does not mince words nor present an airbrushed view of what many foreigners often perceived as Hungarys freewheeling goulash communism, a kind of Leninist Lite as compared with the far more demonic and dour regimes in places like Prague and East Berlin. Exhibits combine both modernist presentations with eerie music and frightening photo montage of the countless victims; the House of Terror presents a tableau vivant of an era in which terror enforced conformity through fear.
Museum Director Maria Schmidt stresses the need to remember without the whitewash of political correctness. She said recently, Today in Hungary you cannot use the word communist. People act as thought that part of history had not happened.
Yet it is the Hungarians who make up the majority of visitors to the museum many people having a first glimpse into an era which was deliberately forgotten.
A pamphlet states, The House of Terror is a museum now but it was witness to two shameful and tragic periods in Hungarian 20th century historyIn 1944 during the gruesome domination of the Arrowcrosss Party, the building was party headquarters to the Hungarian Nazis. Then between 1945 and 1956, the notorious communist terror organizations, the AVO and its successor AVH took up residence here.
The Museum traces the march of communist power from the liberation by the Soviet Red Army to the horrific deportations, mass arrests, and internment camps of the late 1940s and early 1950s. From 1945 to the time of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, the house was the headquarters of the dreaded AVO secret police.
Beyond the memories of the terror one comes to the conclusion that even if one entirely sanitizes the sanguinary political content of communist Hungary, turning a rich agricultural land into a satrap of the Soviet Union accomplished little more than wasting generations and serving as the impetus for at least 200,000 Hungarians to flee their homeland for Europe and North America.
The four story interior courtyard of the building is covered with the haunting black and white photos of the victims at the bottom of the floor stands a Soviet tank resting in a pool of water; the visual effect is the reflection of the victims faces under the treads of the tank.
Among exhibits are the gruesome basement prison cells place of Nazi Arrow Cross executions. Later during the Stalinist era executions did not take place keeping the person alive in terror became more of a punishment than death. Many choose suicide as an escape. It was in these cells that Roman Catholic Josef Cardinal Mindszenty languished before the 1956 Revolution.
Equally moving is the exit hall, the Gallery of the Victimizers pictures of those Hungarians who served the Stalinist dictatorships secret police as torturers and executioners; many of whom are still alive.
Needless to say, Hungarys current Socialist government, the successor party to the old Hungarian Socialist Workers Party, and a narrow victor in recent Parliamentary elections, is not comfortable with such memories of the past even though Stalin is dead half a century. Thus exhuming these ghosts of Hungarian history is not as simple as one would assume even in a democratic country.
Now the new Socialist Premier Peter Medgyessy is under investigation based on reports in the Magyar Nemzet newspaper that he served in the secret police in the 1970s and early 1980s. A bi-partisan Parliamentary committee is reviewing the charges which revive less than pleasant memories.
Yet in the words of Hungarian author Jozsef Attila, The past must be acknowledged.
John J. Metzler is a U.N. correspondent covering diplomatic and defense
issues. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.
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