Exhibition text

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 hall, 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 continuously screened on the monitor.
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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.