A Week In Budapest - Part I

     More than two years after my last trip abroad, I had the opportunity to take a one week trip to Budapest with Marcee and Mark Samberg, David and Laurie Salem, and their wonderful guide from previous trips, Gabe.   Snce I arrived a day early, on Sunday I took two quick walking tours to orient myself to the city.  The first tour met at the main cathedral of Budapest:  St. Stephen's.

This St. Stephen is not the first Christian martyr who was tortured in gruesome ways.  Rather, he was the first Christian Hungarian king, so as Gabe told us later when we went into the basilica, it is less a church and more a monument to Hungarian nationhood.

In Liberty Park we visited the fascinating monument that Victor Orban had put up in the middle of the night and the counter monument which is all the papers encased in plastic and hanging on the string in front of the monument.  In fifteen different languages, the counter monument explains why Orban's view of Hungary's role in WWII is wrong.  The counter monument cannot be removed because of freedom of speech laws.  More on why Orban's view is wrong later.

   
    The other signature buildings in Budapest are the Parliament on the Pest side of the Danube and the Castle on the Buda side.  The most significant feature of Hungary's geography is that it is completely flat on the Pest (eastern side) and mountainous on the Buda (western side).  When the hordes of Mongols and Huns arrived from Asia, they could ride their horses no further than Pest, while Buda maintained more of a European identity.  So while the flat plains allow Hungary to produce enough food, over the century, the Hungarians were overrun by everyone.  The Huns, the Turks, the Russians, the Austrians, the Romanians.  Everyone took a shot at poor Hungary.

The tour of the Jewish quarter with Gabe's fellow guide Agnes on Monday was fascinating.  Three incredible and incredibly different synagogues survive including the Dohany Street synagogue which is the largest in Europe and the second largest in the world, seating 3,000.  This is not a synagogue.  It is a church, complete with an organ.

    Then we went to the Rombach synagogue.  This is not a synagogue.  It is a mosque, complete with geometric designs on the walls.

    Finally the Kazinczy Street synagogue which looks like a synagogue inside.  It fact, it looks like the one that I attended as a child.  All three synagogues have balconies for the women.  Hungary developed its own reformed movement which it called Neologue (Latin for new law).  Despite the organ, the movement was not nearly as liberal as the German Reform movement, and kept much of traditional orthodox practice including separate seating for women.

    Prior to the Holocaust, Hungary had a thriving Jewish community of over 600,000 people.  I believe that Gabe said it was the second largest community in Europe after Poland.  Hungary allied itself with Germany in large part because Germany promised to restore to Hungary the lands it had lost after being on the losing side in WWI.  Present day Hungary is only one third the size of pre-WWI Hungary.  Despite fighting with the Germans against the Russians, and despite having passed repressive anti-Jewish laws similar to the Nuremberg laws, Hungary refused to transport its Jews to the East, which of course was a euphamism for the extermination camps.  When Hungary realized in 1944 that Germany was going to lose the war, they tried to switch sides, and Germany then invaded Hungary and took over.  In the last year of the war, Hungary was the site of the fastest and deadliest deportation of Jews.  Fully one third of the Jews murdered at Auschwitz were Hungarian Jews.

    The dispute about the Orban memorial has to do with the culpability of Hungary in the Holocaust.  Yes, the deportations did not occur until Germany took over, but although Adolph Eichmann came to Hungary himself, he had a staff of only twenty.  The deportation of hundreds of thousands of Jews took place with the active participation of the Hungarian authorities and police.  The Orban memorial assigns complete culpability to the Germans for the Hungarian holocaust, while the counter-memorials acknowledge, and to the extent that they can, apologize for, the role of Hungarians.  

  

On Wednesday we visited the excellent Holocaust Museum which, like the counter-memorials, explained in great detail the sad sequence of events and responsibility.  Then we went to the promenade along the Danube and the site of one of the most unique and touching Holocaust Memorials that I have ever seen.  Sculptures of pairs of shoes are lined up where, after the deportations stopped, Jews were lined up, removed their shoes and were shot, falling into the Danube.  To save bullets, several people were tied together and only one was shot.

    In the afternoon, we visited the Soviet Statue Park.  After the fall of Communism, people removed all of the large statues that the Soviets had placed prominently around the city, and placed them in a park outside the city.  All except the massive statue of Lenin.  During the uprising in 1956, people had tried to topple the statue but it was too big.  And it was too hard to remove from the plinth.  So they cut it off at the top of boots, and then tore the body apart.

And our late afternoon activity:  when in Rome ...

When in Budapest, enjoy a soak in one of the many hot spring fed baths, the fabulously ornate Szechenyi Baths.