We enter an Arrow Cross assembly hall. The ghostly figure of Ferenc Szálasi stands at the head of the table. Informative photos of the Arrow Cross movement can be seen on the back wall. The monitors show contemporary filmed material, amongst them the deportation of Hungarian Jewry, Arrow Cross propaganda clips, the forcible return of war criminals and a series of pictures documenting the interrogations carried out in this building. Under the monitors Arrow Cross and SS uniforms are displayed. Loudspeakers blare sound clips from the program of the Hungarist Híradó (Hungarian Nazi Newsreel). Ice-floes drifting on the Danube projected onto the wall at the end of the hall conjure up the memory of Jewish victims shot on the Danube embankment in the winter of 1944-45.
“I breathed fire and a curse on everything Jewish.”
“Father” András Kun in 1945
From 1937 the Arrow Cross movement, led by Ferenc Szálasi, rented the building at 60 Andrássy út. Their leader named these headquarters the “House of Loyalty”, but after the party came to power in October 1944 it immediately became a house of horror, with the prison formed from its coal cellar being the site of mass torture and murder. In July 1944 Governor Miklós Horthy was still able to stop the deportation of Jews from the capital. By then, however, Adolf Eichmann, the notorious senior SS officer the Nazis had sent to Hungary, had – with the help of the Hungarian authorities – all but completed the deportation of Jews from outside Budapest.
The Arrow Cross Party’s seizure of power with the support of the occupying Nazis presented an immediate threat to the lives of Budapest’s Jews, who still formed an almost intact community of around 300,000 souls. Some of them were confined to ghettos or forced to march to Austria to work on fortifications. The accounts of eyewitnesses and survivors tell of the unbridled terror of the Arrow Cross, who, for example, attacked a hospital and slaughtered its patients. By the banks of the Danube in Budapest they shot defenceless women and children, whose bodies were carried away by the river’s icy waters. During the spring their menfolk had been called up by the Hungarian Defence Forces for forced labour, and this enabled many of them to escape a still worse fate.
After the war, many of the members of the Arrow Cross puppet government received their deserved punishment. People’s courts executed more than 100 people for war crimes. During the Holocaust in Hungary there were also many who remained human in the midst of inhumanity, collectively saving tens of thousands of our Jewish compatriots from certain death. The internees of the Budapest ghetto were also saved, which was something unique in Europe.
