Exhibition text

Author: House of Terror Museum

A temporary exhibition was opened on December 8, 2003 in the House of Terror Museum on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the great, artificially induced Ukrainian famine of 1932-33. The exhibition commemorates the seven million victims, among them three million children, who perished during the famine.

Opening address by Mária Schmidt, chief director of the House of Terror Museum:

Ladies and Gentlemen!

The twentieth century that we have left behind us is terrible above all not for its horrors and endless genocides! The ceaseless lies make it so. The satanic attempts to wipe out the recollection of the horrors, nay memory itself, make it intolerable. The intention simply to purge the memory of humankind of their crimes. These hundred years are rendered horrible and intolerable because the sinister demons of our history successfully covered up and cover up the crimes they have committed, for which there is no forgiveness.

The twentieth century is the best-documented century of human history.

The twentieth century is the century of humanity´s largest number of blank areas and sinister secrets.

Both statements are valid, and as an historian I am aware of the responsibility that these two valid statements lay upon me and my fellow-historians.
When we started out to plan this chokingly bitter exhibition, we realized that there was no absolution, no catharsis that could offer relief to the visitor.

Between 1932 and 1933, seven million people were exterminated methodically and deliberately. If there was anything that could further aggravate this apocalyptic vision-evoking crime, it was the fact that we have stayed, that we had to stay, silent about it for so many decades.
If pure evil can be aggravated, then it is by differentiating between genocides in favour of one or the other.

On November 24, 2003, the Hungarian Parliament unanimously adopted the resolution to commemorate the 1932-33 artificially induced famine in the Ukraine. There is no absolution, nor catharsis, but there is remembrance, without which there would not be a chance for this disorientated world to find its way back to the radiance of human dignity and our innate thirst for freedom.

Ladies and Gentlemen! Arranging this exhibition was not an honour for the House of Terror Museum; it was an obligation. Because the past has to be able to speak and it is our task to listen to it, even if it is dreadfully distressing. Without this, neither the past nor we can find peace. 

For let us not forget: ˝He who runs away from his past, always loses the race.˝ (T.S. Eliot.)