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July 26, 2002/Av 17 5762, Vol. 54, No. 45
Budapest museum controversial
MICHAEL J. JORDAN
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
BUDAPEST - Five months after it opened, Budapest's controversial "House of Terror" has emerged as one of the capital's most popular destinations among both young and old, regularly drawing crowds that endure two-hour lines in sweltering heat.
However, rather than achieving its aim of memorializing the victims of totalitarian terror, critics say the lavish museum symbolizes the charged, right-wing atmosphere that has swept Hungary.
The museum's prominent location at 60 Andrassy Street was chosen because it was headquarters of the Hungarian Nazis between 1944 and 1945, then was taken over by the Communist secret police once Soviet troops liberated, then occupied, Hungary.
Hungary suffered under both Nazism and communism, "but Hungarian society has never confronted the crimes of these terror systems, or had a memorial to its victims," said the museum's director, Maria Schmidt, in an e-mail interview with JTA.
Hungary's Jews, though, are deeply troubled by the House of Terror.
They have several concerns: By presenting all victims as equal, and all victimizers as equal, the museum diminishes the uniqueness of the Holocaust, not to mention the Communist era; by painting Hungary as one of Germany's victims rather than an accomplice, it continues a trend in which right-wing Hungarian historians are whitewashing Hungary's role in the death of some 550,000 Hungarian Jews; and by devoting only one of nearly two dozen rooms exclusively to the Holocaust, it implies that communism was far worse than the Holocaust.
Finally, though Jews are mentioned nowhere in the Communist portion of the museum, the fact that the Hungarian right wing routinely highlights the Jewishness of some of Hungary's most notorious Communists means that many visitors to the House of Terror receive an implicit message that Hungarian Jews are to blame for communism.
Following the war, of the couple hundred thousand Jews who survived and remained in Hungary - many others had emigrated to Palestine or to the West - a substantial number did indeed join the Communist Party.
"Communism was our only guarantee that fascism would never return," said Agota Engel, who was 12 when Hungarian Nazis shot and killed her older sister in 1944, and dumped her corpse in the icy waters of the Danube River, which flows through Budapest.
"However, not every Communist was a Jew," Engel said, "nor was every Jew a Communist."
Blaming Jews for communism "is a falsification of history," said Gyorgy Litvan, a renowned Hungarian historian.
This distortion is not only aimed at scapegoating Jews and exculpating Hungarians; observers say the House of Terror also has contemporary political motives.
The museum opened in February of this year, with two months left in a heated election campaign.
The main opposition party to the right-wing government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban was the Socialists, the increasingly centrist heirs of the Communist Party. The Socialists attracted the vast majority of Jewish voters.
After Orban assumed power in 1998, he missed no opportunity to remind the public of their opponents' Communist past.
In the process, Orban has earned a reputation for nationalist excess and chumminess with a flagrantly anti-Semitic party, the Hungarian Justice and Life Party.
As the elections approached, Orban began using with-us-or-against-us rhetoric to rally patriotic Hungarians, and warning that a vote for the Socialists meant a return to dictatorship.
The incitement frightened many of Hungary's roughly 100,000 Jews.
Among the rhetorical weapons against the Socialists and liberals, say critics, was the House of Terror.
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