Hi all. So today was a somewhat “heavy” day. I was really moved by the “shoes by the Danube” memorial I saw yesterday so I devoted the whole day to learning about and seeing what happened to the Hungarian Jews. I started the day off with a 2.5 hour guided walk thru the Jewish District. The guide was really well versed in the history but also added some levity. He shared two jokes:
1. Did you know when Moses came down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments, that he was actually the first person to download something from the cloud!
2. When Moses came down with the commandments and saw all the people dancing and celebrating he said I have good news and bad news. The good news is there were originally 15 commandments, but I got it down to 10. The bad news is adultery is still on there!
OK, I thought those both were funny! He and I got to talking and he told me he was coming to visit America for the first time. I said great, which city. He said Cleveland! I said Noooooooo!! Lol. But I found out that’s just his first stop since he has a friend living there but will also be going to several other places in the US.
So one of our stops was to the Great Synagogue which is the largest synagogue in all of Europe and 2nd largest in the world (one in NYC is bigger). I showed pics from inside and out. It actually looks more like a Catholic Church than a Synagogue and even has some Moorish influence.
I the garden behind the Synagogue, I also included a pic of the “Tree of Life” which is supposed to represent an upside down menorah as a willow tree and each of the 4,000 metal leaves is etched with the name of a Holocaust survivor.
What’s interesting is the area right behind the Synagogue has become known worldwide as a nightlife destination. There are all these “ruin” bars that are scattered all over. They call them ruin because a lot of the old houses in this area were left deserted and dilapidated after the communists took over but someone had the brilliant idea to add ramshackle second hand furniture to give them sort of a bohemian-junkyard vibe and opened them as bars. The one we went to called Szimpla Kert (Simple Garden) is the most famous and it was like a maze going thru all the rooms throughout all 3 stories. I included pics of inside and out. And right down the street I shared a pic showing how they too have succumbed to the food truck phenomenon and the guide says that place is always hopping.
After the walk I went across town to the Holocaust Memorial Center. This site honors the nearly 600,000 Hungarians that were victims of the Nazis (one out of every ten Holocaust victims). Talk about heavy… it traces the gradual process of disenfranchisement, marginalization, exploitation, dehumanization and eventually extermination that befell Hungary’s Jews as WWII wore on. One powerful room is devoted to the notorious Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp where some 430,000 Hungarian Jews were sent (out of the total 1 million people sent there). Most were killed the first day they got there. The pictures and videos they showed were just horrifying. One thing I learned was that the word “Holocaust” originally meant a sacrificial offering to God that is entirely consumed by fire. Sad how it came to eventually be defined. One bright spot within the memorial was a beautifully restored 1920’s Synagogue I included a pic of. Inside is a touching memorial of glass seats, each one etched with the image of a Jewish worshipper who once filled it.
Then finally, if I hadn’t had enough heavy, somewhat depressing scenes, I went to tour the House of Terror. It’s an actual house along one of the prettiest stretches of Budapest (Andrassy Blvd – some say it’s their version of Paris’s Champs Elysees) where some of the most horrific acts in Hungarian history took place. Sadly the Hungarians Jews were tortured by both the Germans and the Soviets. The Soviets shipped them off to the “gulags” or work camps, some in Hungary but some in Siberia, where they were worked to death. But this house was also used by the “Arrow Cross” (Nazi-occupied Hungary’s version of the Gestapo) and the AVO/AVH (communist Hungary’s secret police) to torture people. Just unreal that it was right there in the middle of that residential area. I only included one pic from the lobby showing a Soviet T-54 tank that was used to kill a lot of people during a 1956 uprising and on the wall were 3,200 pictures of people who were murdered by either the Nazis or Soviets in this very building.
Whew…. that’s a lot of heavy stuff! But like the Dachau camp day, it is history and hopefully by learning more about it we will never repeat it again.
I hope everyone had a great weekend!
Jeff
The Wandering Italian 