Anwesha Rana was unsure when her friend insisted that Budapest is Europe's most beautiful city. She was wary having been enchanted beyond measure by London. She wondered could anything surpass London's beauty? The friend was right once again. Travelling in Budapest captured Anwesha’s mind and she has been planning to revisit it the moment she left the city. In the third part of a series on Europe for TravelEquipped, Anwesha writes about her somber visit to the Holocaust's remnants in Budapest
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| Hungary's pro-German government ordered deportation of 4,37,000 Jews to concentration camps. Wikimedia Commons |
Readers may
have by now gathered a fair idea that my status since October 2018 has been:
Currently obsessing over Hungary. In this piece, I continue to share it and
hope that some of you will consider this country in Eastern Europe as the next
travel destination. My dear
friend RJ, who has been living in Europe since 2015 [and who was greatly
affronted that he has not been mentioned in the posts
so
far despite his endurance of our never-ending tears and long stretches of
silence] joined us in Budapest and our party of three set out to discover the
city further.
We had wandered around in lanes and bookshops in the city and also ventured into the outskirts to
Memento Park, which the last post dwelt upon. We wanted next to visit the remnants and reminders of the horrors of
the Holocaust in Hungary. Budapest has several such sites that send a shiver down one’s spine and one cannot but be affected by the history of gross human atrocity that plagued Europe.
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| A plaque at the Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park that commemorates those who protected many Jews. Anwesha Rana |
Hungary was occupied by German forces in 1944 and the pro-German government ordered the deportation of 4,37,000 Jews from the countryside to concentration camps. About 70,000 Jews who lived in Budapest then were forced into ghettos within the Jewish quarters. This ghettoisation led to numerous deaths under predictably gruesome and inhumane conditions. The ghetto was liberated by Soviet forces in 1945, but not before 20,000 Jews were dragged to the Pest bank of the Danube, made to remove their shoes, and shot at close range. Bodies pierced blind by bullets fell into the Danube and were washed away. Even after being rescued by the Soviet forces, Nazi exploits upon the Jew, including atrocities of raids and mass executions, did not become less regular.
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| Budapest's Jewish quarters now host the Ruin Pubs and a wide array of street art and street food. Anwesha Rana |
We visited the three primary sites in Budapest that reflect this brutal history. The Holocaust Memorial Centre hosts a restored synagogue from 1924 and a garden that has walls with the names of victims, and a tower that lists communities in which Jews exist no more due to large scale deportations. We were the only visitors there during that part of the day. The place was quiet as can be – its silence narrated very accurately, and disturbingly, the many voices that had been stifled and lives that were lost in a raging storm of vengeful violence that was sweeping through Europe at that point of time.
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| A ruin pub in Budapest's erstwhile Jewish quarters. Anwesha Rana |
The minutes spent at the Centre drove home more forcefully the devastation caused by the tide of genocide. The silence was an acute manifestation of the stifling of an entire community that was forced to perish. You could hear cries and devastation in that silence. The east bank of the Danube, on the Pest side of the city, has the installation ‘Shoes on the Danube’ that is a memorial in honour of those killed on the bank during the fascist regime. The memorial was ideated by Hungarian filmmaker Can Togay and brought to life by sculptor GyulaPauer in 2005. It is a row of sixty pairs of iron shoes rooted to the embankment with a long stone bench behind that reads ‘To the Memory of the Victims shot into the Danube by Arrow Cross Militiament in 1944–45.’
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| The Széchenyi Chain Bridge over the Danube connects Budapest's western and eastern parts. Anwesha Rana |
We were at the bank in the evening with the Chain Bridge and the Hungarian Parliament glowing bright and shiny on our either side. Were the memorial to be elsewhere, one would not feel, standing there amid such grandeur, a deep sense of shame and horror at the brutality that humankind is capable of. This is made more shameful as we show no sign of stopping and most shameful because we are so quick to forget.
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| Weeping Willow has the names of the Holocaust victims inscribed on its metal leaves. Anwesha Rana |
Thinking of things forgotten, let us move walk into the Jewish quarters in the heart of the city. The quarters, once reduced to ghettoes by Fascist forces, now host the Ruin Pubs and a wide array of street art and street food. The liveliness and buzz within the streets mask the layers of memories of horror that they were the site of. If you walk in, however, with prior information on this aspect, your senses will cast a shadow of remembrance. There will be two scenes playing out simultaneously – the streets as they stand today and the history of terror that you have read about and are now standing within. Very close to the quarters, further remembering lost Jewish lives is the Weeping Willow, or the Emanuel Tree in the Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park. It is a tree with metal leaves on which are inscribed names of the victims of the Holocaust. The willow tree resembles a menorah [seven-lamp or six-branched Hebrew lampstand] turned upside down.
Knowledge is a beautiful thing, but also a dreadful one. We
are fortunate if we have the luxury of choosing how we yield it.
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