Exhibition text

Author: House of Terror Museum

What should never have happened, did happen in 1944. The outrage of the century. A section of our compatriots, isolated from the majority of Hungarians merely because of its origins, was sentenced to fall prey to the murderous policy designed by the Nazis for Europe´s Jewry, cynically named the Endlösung - the Final Solution.

What happened to Europe´s Jews during WWII and to Hungarian Jews during the catastrophic months of 1944-1945, cannot be excused, cannot be explained away. Youngsters and old people, women and small children straggled in queues with bundles on their backs and fear in their hearts. This was not only the tragedy of the Jews. It was the tragedy of Europe. And of Hungary as well.

The House of Terror Museum is devoting the year 2004 to the commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Hungarian Holocaust by staging a full year´s program series, entitled ˝Hungarian Tragedy - 1944˝.

The Museum´s temporary exhibition entitled Iniquity, launched on April 13, is dedicated to the memory of the 1.5 million European and 190 thousand Hungarian children slain in the Holocaust.

The exhibition´s symbolic visual elements are assimilated into the scheme of the Wallenberg exhibition, which opened on January 16. Children´s portraits are shown on the walls, as are selections from diaries and notes written by children confined to concentration camps. The names of deported children are projected onto a frosted glass panel near the entrance (The Yad Vashem Authority´s compilation). Abandoned toys, stuck in mud, can be seen in the wall cabinet. On the terminal located in the exhibition, visitors can read numerous informative texts on the history of Hungarian Jewry, Hungary´s occupation by Nazi Germany, the period following the Arrow Cross putsch; about concentration and extermination camps, the persecution of the Roma in Hungary and Europe, as well as about the fate of children in the Holocaust;  they can peruse the reminiscences of these children and look at contemporary photos and other documents, as well as a chronology of events that took place in Hungary in 1944. 
A documentary, comprising interviews made by our historians with survivors and archival shots, is being screened continuously on the monitor.

*

Parallel with the Iniquity exhibition, we have also set up on the 3rd floor of the Museum an exhibition entitled Hungarian Tragedy, 1944, which will be open all year round.
An SS and a Hungarian gendarme´s uniform are on display at the exhibition. One of the walls is dedicated to the ˝Righteous among the Nations˝ (exhibiting the names of non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust), while another wall is called that of the ˝Perpetrators˝ (showing the names and photos of SS and Arrow Cross leaders and their minions functioning in Hungary).

We have indicated the concentration and extermination camps on the map in the exhibition hall, with particular reference to the locations of massacres, as well as camps, where Hungarians languished and perished.
The three coffins in the hall - on whose screens photographs alternate - refer to the European, Hungarian and Roma Holocausts.
That is the hall, where, as of April 27, we shall be screening Claude Lanzmann´s 9 hour-long documentary ´Shoah´, for as long as our visitors will show interest in it.

The photos taken at the opening can be viewed by clicking here.

Keynote address by Mária Schmidt:

Iniquity. We have chosen this title with a biblical flavour for our exhibition by which the House of Terror Museum pays tribute to the memory of the 1.5 million European and 190 thousand Hungarian child victims of the Holocaust.
Hitler´s Third Reich was meant to last a thousand years. And in a thousand year empire all solutions have to be ˝final˝. Totalitarian power knows no other units of measurement. When it kills, it wants to wipe out entire peoples from the flow of history. When it kills, it aims at destruction ˝unto the third and fourth generation˝. It is not satisfied with the death of men, women and old people. The children have to perish too, so that, together with the past, the future too should fade into oblivion.
What should never have been allowed to happen, happened  sixty years ago. Three scores of years have elapsed since then. Yet we shall remember them at least unto the third and fourth generation, because the wounds are so deep that we cannot fail to remember them even after seven generations.

Opening address by Katalin Szili, Speaker of the Hungarian Parliament:

Ladies and Gentlemen!
I stand before you overcome by emotion; little wonder, after all we are commemorating children, slain children. It is indeed a great honour that I have been asked to open this exhibition. But the sorrow that we all share, is immeasurably greater. After all, we are remembering innocent victims and imperilled children.
During the course of history innumerable massacres of children have been perpetrated, always with the hidden agenda of depriving the enemy of its biological future. For anyone, not only born as a human being, but who knows what humanity means, all this has always been intolerable.
Then came the twentieth century, and the Hitlerian insanity, which not only accepted carnage, but perfected it by its meticulous, well-oiled, industrial machinery.
As for figures: they have the death of some one and a half million European and close on seventy thousand small children on their depraved, unconscionable consciences. Were they Jews? Were they Romas? - They were CHILDREN!

My dear fellow countrymen!

It is difficult to do justice even to a single innocent child´s memory. How much harder is it then to find words, when one is asked to pay tribute to the memory of the child victims of the Holocaust?
It is difficult to speak without passion, even if remembrance requires gentleness. But when I see on the long list that Ágota Beck barely survived her sixth birthday, that Vera Kelemen was only one year old, Albert Holczer 14, Miklós Kemény four, Márti Steiner six,
or that the Szántó brothers, Miki and Tibi could only have been six and seven years-old, then it is very hard to be dispassionate.
According to Éva Ancsel it suffices to look at a child´s face at length to see: ˝If there is such a thing as destiny, well, it starts very early on˝ The children murdered in the wanton slaughter of racist persecution did not survive long enough for anyone to look at their faces at length.
These little children were deprived of the opportunity to have a destiny of their own. A destiny of their own, in a sense that presumes destiny to be the sum total of a life fully lived.
The destiny of these children was sealed the moment they were born, when they came into a world where human sentiment and reason had become disenfranchised.

Dear Commemorators!
I ask you to bow your heads in tribute to the tragic victims, who - had they lived - would today be parents and grandparents, but whose cruel karma has condemned them to remain forever the children of all subsequent generations.
Let us bow our heads in tribute to those little ones, who, instead of going to kindergarten were sent to the gas chambers, who instead of spelling books were given yellow stars, instead of playgrounds, crematoria.
Let us bow our heads in tribute to those children and adults, whose fate was sealed by the lethal yellow star. - Even the needle that merely stitched on this star, wounded every sensitive person´s heart.
The soul, burnt by the acid of Nazi ideology, is shattered over and over again each time it looks back to the Second World War´s atrocious, institutionalized mass murders.
The soul is shattered every time it recalls the 1942 Wannsee Conference´s ˝Final Solution˝ resolution, in whose wake the deportations and genocide continued with thus far unprecedented brutality.
And the soul is petrified each time it encounters the fact that here and there the black phantom, which considers some people inferior to others, is time and again raising its ugly head.

Ladies and Gentlemen!
I know that we are not able to restore the life of the innocents, nor can we possibly alleviate the pain. However, sincere compassion can make us better, and fill our hearts with hope. But it also fills us with the firm resolve never to forget what has happened! Our aim for recalling the past should not be self-torment nor revenge, but for ever after to prevent the recurrence of any inhumanity in whatever shape or form it might reappear.
I trust that both today´s commemoration and this exhibition will serve the future.
It is my firm conviction that it is not enough to say no to any notion and attempt that leads to inhumanity; we  have to take energetic measures against them.
Let us not forget the past, and let us defend the present, so that peace shall be with us!

Thank you for inviting me and for listening to me.

Speech by Zoltán Pokorni, Vice-Chairman of Fidesz - Hungarian Civic Party:

Greetings!
Permit me to begin with a quotation: ˝The railways transported the Jews to Treblinka, to Auschwitz, or any other destination, as long as they paid the fare, so many pfennigs per kilometres. Charges remained the same throughout the war: children under the age of 10 could travel at half-price, children under 4 free of charge. The tickets were one-way. The guards needed return tickets.
The agency that had to pay, was the same one that had ordered the trains, i.e. the Gestapo, Eichmann´s office. As there was a funding problem, the Reichsbahn, the imperial railways, agreed to grant a group concession. From this viewpoint, the deportation of the Jews was handled like a tourist group, which receives a discount on group travel, if the party travelling together is big enough: in this case the minimum was a party of 400. 
In addition, if the railcars got unusually dirty, which could happen, couldn´t it, well, then the railways presented an additional bill. The Central-European Travel Bureau handled part of these transactions, as well as the ticketing and invoicing; smaller transports were processed by the SS. Was the abovementioned travel bureau the one that also handled ordinary passengers? Indeed it was. The Central-European Travel Bureau handled the transportation of the Jews to the gas chambers, and the holiday-makers to their chosen destinations. The same office, the same procedure, the same invoices, the same everything. Was there no difference? Not at all. Everyone performed this job like any other job. As if they were performing the most ordinary task.˝ (School remembrance days, Holocaust Remembrance Day; teaching aid, the Education Ministry´s March 2001 publication.)
Three years ago we paid tribute in Parliament to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust. All of us who were there could listen to the speech by President Ferenc Mádl, and the words of Chief Rabbi József Schweitzer, who reminded us that the anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s and 40s were passed in the same chamber where we now sat; and from exactly the same spot, for the first time in the history of the parliament, for the first time in the history of the Hungarian Republic, we could hear the Kaddish, the mourner´s prayer in Hebrew. We, who were there, felt and knew that something very important was happening. Numerous countries in Europe observe a Holocaust Remembrance Day, doing so on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in January. When we proposed that a Holocaust Remembrance Day be established, we decided on a date with a Hungarian connotation, April 16. It is the anniversary of the creation of the first ghetto in Hungary. We did not want the Remembrance Day to be tied to a small town in a distant corner of world history, because we believe that the Holocaust is part of Hungarian history. Hungarian people were murdered, they are our dead. It was Hungarians who played a part in their murder. It is no excuse, merely an explanation that none of this would have happened, had the Germans not occupied Hungary.
A grown-up person becomes grown-up only when he can come to terms with his own errors, his own sins. A nation too can only grow up, if it is not only proud of its glorious moments, but can candidly confront its mistakes, failings, its sins. I think that Hungary has grown up in this respect. We have not initiated the Holocaust Remembrance Day to produce guilt feelings in the young generation that is growing up, but to awaken its sense of responsibility. That is our only hope; there is no other. The machines are betraying us. The Holocaust is perhaps the clearest symbol of the fact that the naive expectation, which had flooded Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century, that machines will improve our lives, that we shall have to work less, that they will ennoble society, has turned out to be the exact opposite. If modern technology, efficient organization, machines are linked up with the evil residing in people, they are capable of the most horrendous things. It will not be machines that will save us. We can only hope - and I trust that my listeners won´t misunderstand me - that the memorial day of the Holocaust is not only about the past. Paying respectful tribute to the victims is only one half of it. The other, far more difficult one is the undertaking for the future. We can only hope that by implanting a barrier, a moral bastion, an attitude into the hearts of young people, of our children, our students, of every coming generation again and again, which spells out the command: resist evil! Look for a way out, even if there does not seem to be one, do not accept that you did something by ´just following orders´. That is the only thing that can protect us.; nothing else. Our aim was not to stage exhibitions, to give orations. That too is important. What is happening here today, however, is only one half. It is laudable that sundry party politicians stand here united, but this is only the necessary supportive environment for the essential to happen: for twenty-five young people to assemble in a class room, and encounter something that burns in their hearts, their souls. They should be given an experience that they will remember, they will keep for the rest of their lives. It was not our aim when we established the Holocaust Remembrance Day just to have an extra history class. It is not the fact of the six million victims that a young person should know. Far more poignant than the six million victims is the photo of a little girl, who did not mature into a woman, who couldn´t have any children, who never became a grandmother, who is no longer with us, because she was murdered. If this picture will remain with him, it will give him far more strength than any historical perspective, the repetition of any data. And really, if we consider what is happening in our schools in this respect, we have to admit that we have accomplished only half of the job. Some carry greater, some smaller responsibility for this, and there is still much to be done. Thank you for having listened to me.

Mayor Gábor Demszky´s speech (written version):

Madame Chair,
Ladies and Gentlemen!
We stand deeply shocked before the documents of the twentieth century´s cruellest deed. The victims of the Holocaust were sacrificed on the altar of an unfathomable, irrational hatred. ˝A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture... seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp˝ - writes Orwell in his 1984. Indeed: the fact that innocent people, defenceless old people, women and children were slaughtered by the Nazi murderers and their collaborators, is incomprehensible to the mind. It feeds on abstract hatred, which the dictators and the masses sharing their obsession wantonly turn against a people, a religion, a group of people. Every totalitarian dictatorship and every exclusionist system justifies its existence by it.
When the Nazis eradicated children, among others Hungarian Jewish and Gypsy children, they knew perfectly well what they were doing. They were eradicating the future of a people. If for nothing else, they deserve eternal contempt for this. Neither they, nor their beastly beliefs must ever again be able to play a part in history! This is our responsibility which we owe to the murdered children, and to our children as well.
When we pay tribute to the innocent victims and the handful of heroic rescuers on the sixtieth anniversary of the Holocaust, we can only proceed with a clean conscience, if we pledge: never again a holocaust! No more hatred!
The historian Randolph L. Braham, the biggest expert on this matter, once said: ˝he who doesn´t learn the lessons of the past, is condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past˝. I agree with him. We have to stem the tide of verbal anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial or minimizing, and attempts at historical revisionism - while the going is good. I am convinced, and as mayor I am proud of it, that the vast majority of today´s citizens of Budapest turn away with loathing and contempt from anyone who does so. And I am also convinced that not a single responsible shaper of opinion - be it a politician or journalist - can undertake or even tacitly support such an attitude.
One has always to combat that specific extremism, which in the given historical circumstances happens to pose the real danger to democracy, humanism, human rights. Today - after the fall and discreditation of Bolshevism - this extremism is represented by the racist extreme right-wing, and of late by fundamentalist terrorism. The suspicion of a terrorist plot linked to the visit of the Israeli President has currently arisen in Budapest too. I expect stringent security measures from the police, the National Security Office and the government, and I ask the people of Budapest: be watchful about each other, but do not let yourselves be intimidated. We have to declare in words and deeds again and again: Budapest is the city of welcome and not of exclusion.
 
Ladies and Gentlemen!
Budapest is the only city in Central Europe with a close on hundred-thousand Jewish community, which, since the change of regime, can once again freely and without fear assert its identity, and enrich Hungary´s society and culture. Around the previous turn of the century, the Magyarized Jewish bourgeoisie played a prominent role in Budapest developing into a modern, European-style metropolis. During the first half of the century close on a quarter of Budapest´s inhabitants was Jewish. When the anti-spiritual and anti-life forces muzzled them and hounded them to death, they laid waste to Budapest itself.
The ˝Final Solution˝, the Endlösung, denoted the deliberate eradication of six million Jewish men, women and children, among them some six hundred thousand Hungarian Jews and part of the Hungarian Gypsy community. In 1941, 825 thousand Jews lived in Hungary, including the Jews from the re-annexed territories and all those whom the Jewish laws deemed to be Jewish. Barely a quarter of them survived the labour service, the deportations and the Arrow Cross reign of terror.
This foul deed was committed in Hungary primarily by the Nazi occupiers, albeit with the active co-operation of the Hungarian authorities of the day. The moral breeding ground for this complicity was created by the Horthy regime´s quarter-century of anti-Semitic and racist ethos and the anti-Jewish legislation. The Nazi fanatics wiped out essentially all of provincial Jewry within three quarters of a year. At the beginning of 1944, two hundred thousand Jews lived in the capital, and ultimately a significant number of them survived the Holocaust. This, however, was due merely to the fact that the murderers and their accomplices ran out of time to finish what they had started.
Ladies and Gentlemen!
At present several important events are taking place in connection with the commemoration of the Hungarian Holocaust. The building of the Budapest Holocaust Museum and Documentation Centre has now been completed, and we shall be opening it in two days´ time with the exhibition of the Auschwitz Album. Simultaneously the new Hungarian exhibition will open in Auschwitz, put together by excellent and unbiased young Hungarian historians. At the same time too The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is hosting a major international conference, which coincides with worldwide commemorations of the 60th Anniversary of the Holocaust in Hungary. All the events of the House of Terror´s Holocaust year fit into this sequence, including the Iniquity exhibition. It is high time that the Holocaust should feature so strongly in the House of Terror. It lends itself for summing up this, and everything else referring to the tragedy of sixty years ago. It also lends itself for ruthlessly responding not only to yesterday´s, but also to tomorrow´s racists.
Thank you for your kind attention.

Speech by István Domonkos (edited version)

An exhibition that evokes the horrific fate of the children of the Holocaust on this site, inevitably reminds me of the memories that are linked to the House of Terror. It is often said that old people are forgetful, sometimes they don´t even remember where they were the day before, what they had for lunch. Maybe so, but we old people can recall all the more what happened in our childhood, our youth.
One day in 1938, walking on Andrássy Road, I saw a group of people standing here, in front of this house. A man with a high-pitched voice was making a rabble-rousing, Jew-baiting speech from the balcony of the house, and the people gathered in the street one after the other took out from behind their lapels the then banned Arrow Cross badges, pinning them on openly. Then an Árpád striped Arrow Cross flag also appeared and, forming a column, yelling slogans, they proceeded towards the centre of the city. They didn´t get very far, since mounted policemen soon broke up the demonstration.
Sometime in the fifties, passing by once more, I again saw a man holding forth from the balcony. Below him in the street state security shock troopers were lined up in military formation, presently marching off, and singing along Andrássy Road.
During the period of the anti-Jewish laws I was already an adult, and as someone affected by them, I can only talk about my own experiences. When the Nazis overran Poland, I saw their soldiers and civilians fleeing to our country. At the time I was working as an electrician in a building, which we were renovating for the refugees. We noticed that along with the Polish refugees, the service was also taking in people of all kinds of other nationalities and countless orphans. I could not know at the time that these pitiful children were orphaned, because their parents had been deported, while charitable hands had rescued them from the ghetto.
From 1942 onward I was conscripted into the labour service, I spent time in Transylvania and then in Ruthenia. Here and there, in expanded, greater Hungary Jewish families were still living peacefully. Their children attended Hungarian schools, the parents in blissful ignorance were proud of their Hungarianness, which they had preserved even during the two decades of the Trianon truncation. Many of them had kept their First World War medals, pictures of Kossuth and the Hungarian flag. 
In 1944, exactly at the time of the German occupation, I was transferred to the army´s Rail- and Sapper Supply Depot. Here I already had the opportunity to see first-hand the Sztójay government´s ever-growing flood of anti-Jewish decrees. It was appalling to see little children in the streets with large yellow stars, and to listen to the remarks made by filthy-mouthed, drunken Arrow Cross thugs.
The Jews of the provinces were deported with consummate speed and organization. We simple people, especially in the army, had no inkling of what was happening to the deportees. They began to transport the labour service units to the West as well, together with all the equipment of the army installations. I realized that it would not be a good idea to travel to Germany, and I managed to escape in a rather adventurous manner before the train was about to leave. I got hold of a well-worn army uniform and stayed on in Budapest. A decent company commander admitted me into his detachment, which was to remain in the capital. László Ocskay, that was the name of this First World War invalid veteran, let me have free rein, and as a simple soldier I was able to rescue Jewish old people and children, often just by leading them out of Jewish Yellow Star buildings, which the Arrow Cross were about to ransack. I always told them that I was acting on the orders of the Town Commandant and taking my people for interrogation.
The International Red Cross and the Churches established several refuges in Budapest for orphaned Jewish children and their carers. On quite a few occasions, dressed in army uniforms and carrying false papers, the courageous youngsters of the Zionist movement did a particularly good and hazardous job of rescuing orphaned children wandering around the streets.
As the decades go by, memories and people surface in my mind. There are those, whose names ought never to be forgotten. Not only the memory of a Raoul Wallenberg and a Karl Lutz, the Swiss consul, should be cherished for ever; there were some simple people, whom, perhaps only I recall. There was a young lecturer at the Technical University of Budapest, who for months gave shelter to small group of Zionist youths, girls and boys. There lived in Szív Street, in Budapest, a decent janitor, who on Christmas Day, 1944 rescued some one hundred children and their carers from the clutches of a few Arrow Cross hooligans. The story is such that it might seem unbelievable, had I not known Imre Huber, the janitor and the residents of 33 Szív Street personally. At the time, in December, 1944, the boarded-up Jewish ghetto was already in existence. A demented Arrow Cross district leader decided that not even those few hundred Jewish children, whom the Red Cross was sheltering in its home in the sixth district, could remain outside the ghetto walls. He ordered some of his minions to drive the children and their helpers out of the home and take them to the ghetto. The young hoodlums were probably drunk and did not comprehend the order properly, or they did not know that the centre of the ghetto was in Síp Street, or else they mixed up the two street names; at any rate, they drove the children, shivering with fear and the cold, to Szív Street, and began to search from house to house for some kind of Jewish organization. Huber, the janitor, was a  quick-witted, brave man, who said to the young hoodlums that they were in the right spot, he would promptly take the group off their hands, and give them what they deserved. The Arrow Cross chaps were pleased that they had discharged their Christmas job, and the janitor, with the help of the residents put up the children in warm rooms. There was plenty of room, the Jewish occupants had long ago been driven into the ghetto and the empty apartments were quickly made ready for the children, while the women provided the refugees with hot soup, tea and some food. Meanwhile they decided that the best thing would be to notify Wallenberg and the International Red Cross. Within a couple of days the Swede and the Swiss came along with policemen and took them all back to their old habitat. The evidence for all this is a grateful letter, which the head of the Jewish orphanage wrote to Mr. Huber. I have seen the letter with my own eyes, and some years ago I wrote an article about this event in the Catholic journal Vigilia, enclosing the document.
Children and old people had the worst time in the ghetto. A communal kitchen, transformed from three old restaurants, catered for some eighty thousand people. The Jewish Council managed to provide the basic provisions only with great difficulty. There was a lack of fuel, the few bakers that existed, could bake only such a minimal amount of bread that famine was steadily growing. May old people and children died of sickness and starvation.
And I might conclude by saying that there it was truly the Soviet soldiers who brought deliverance and a new life, because, had the privation lasted much longer, tens of thousands would have perished.