Holocaust Memorial Center Budapest

Holokauszt Emlékközpont

Since its opening in 2004, the state-run Holocaust Memorial Center has been the central Hungarian memorial site to the victims of the Holocaust.

History

Hungary – a country traumatised by its defeat in the First World War – was ruled by a national-conservative regime under Miklós Horthy after 1919. Although Hungarian Jewry had for decades been well integrated, anti-Semitic sentiments were soaring. Already in 1920 the number of Jewish students permitted to enrol at universities was restricted by law.
At the end of the 1930s, Hungary increasingly aligned itself with National Socialist Germany in the hope of reclaiming lost territories. Between 1938 and 1941, three anti-Jewish bills were passed, excluding Jews from economic and public life, and eventually defining them according to racial criteria.
In 1941, Hungary took part in the invasions of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. The army drafted Jewish men for labour service: they had to conduct forced labour, were marked as Jews and were mostly deployed in life-threatening conditions. In the summer of 1941, Hungarian authorities forcibly resettled Jews without Hungarian citizenship to Ukraine across the Carpathian Mountains, where the SS shot 16,000 of them at Kamianets-Podilskyi. In January 1942, Hungarian units murdered several hundred Jews in a massacre in Novi Sad, a town which had been annexed to Hungary in 1941. Nevertheless, a majority of the Hungarian Jews believed themselves safe, since the government in Budapest refused to deport them, despite its alliance with Germany.
On March 19, 1944, the German Wehrmacht occupied Hungary. Within a few months, Adolf Eichmann, responsible for »Jewish affairs« at the Reich Main Security Office, organised the ghettoization, disappropriation and finally deportation of the Jews - all with the support of the Hungarian authorities. At the beginning of July 1944, Horthy halted the deportations, but the murders continued on numerous death marches and in the Budapest ghetto until the end of the war.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1944, Arrival of Hungarian Jews at the death camp, Yad Vashem

Victims

There were about 490,000 Jews in Hungary before the war, of those about 250,000 lived in the capital Budapest. With the territories annexed in the years 1938 to 1941, the number of Jews residing in Hungary grew to 825,000. About 570,000 of them perished during the Holocaust: the SS murdered almost half a million by poison gas in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where they were deported to in the spring and summer of 1944. Tens of thousands died in army labour service, others were murdered on death marches or in the Budapest ghetto at the end of the war. Thousands more died of the inhumane conditions in the Budapest ghetto in the winter of 1944/45.
With Hungary's 1937 borders as the basis for calculation, the number of Jewish victims in this territory comes to a total of 270,000.

Following defeat in the First World War and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hungary had to surrender two thirds of its territory and sixty percent of its population to its neighbours in 1920. The trauma caused by these losses led Hungary, under the leadership of Miklós Horthy (1868–1957), to gradually ally itself with Nazi Germany from 1937 onwards. Between 1938 and 1941 Hungary managed to almost double its territory in several stages of border revisions. Faced with the advance of the Red Army the country began to distanc itself from Nazi Germany and was therefore occupied by the Wehrmacht in March 1944. Miklós Horthy retained his position as head of state. Almost immediately after the invasion and with the assistance of Hungarian authorities, the SS began to deport Jews to the Auschwitz extermination camp, something that Hungary had refused to do up to then, despite having introduced anti-Jewish legislation. Of the 825,000 Jews from »Greater Hungary« the number murdered in Auschwitz stands at way over half a million. Up to 300,000 of these Jews came from the regions of what is today’s Hungary. In addition, around 140,000 soldiers along with some 170,000 non-Jewish civilians perished during the Second World War. After 1945 Hungary was in the Soviet sphere of influence. Up to 1989, official commemorations in Hungary did not remember the war but rather its end as the »liberation from fascism«. However, for the majority of the population 1945 was the start of a long period of repression. For many Hungarians, memory of the national uprising in 1956 that was crushed by the Soviets overshadows that of the Second World War. Following the uprising the war was viewed as the inglorious prelude to the suffering under communist rule. At the same time, there were many state monuments celebrating »Hungarian-Soviet friendship«. During the communist period there was no official remembrance of those who had died during the war on the front, at home and during the genocide, nor were there any Holocaust memorial sites outside of Jewish institutions. The only related site was the Jewish Museum in Budapest, founded in 1932 and reopened in 1947. In 1985 the Jewish community in Budapest opened a »Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park« alongside the large synagogue located on the edge of the former ghetto. A state monument to Raoul Wallenberg (*1912–?) was inaugurated in 1987 in connection with a visit by the communist head of state János Kádár (1912–1989) to Sweden. Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, saved thousands of Budapest Jews. He was deported by the Soviet occupation force in 1945 and since then has been missing, presumed dead. This monument marked a turnaround in the decades of silence regarding the Holocaust. Only since the new millennium have numerous Holocaust memorials and memorial sites emerged in Hungary. These include the »Shoes on the Danube Promenade« in Budapest, inaugurated on 16 April 2005, the date of the Hungarian Holocaust Remembrance Day introduced in 2000. This memorial remembers the murder of up to 20,000 Jews from the Budapest ghetto in January 1945 by the »Arrow Cross«, a right-wing extremist party that had assumed power in Hungary on 15 October 1944. A national Holocaust Museum was opened in the capital in 2004. However, there are still very few memorials to other victims. Symptomatic of the way in which post-communist Hungary has dealt with its 20th century past is the fiercely debated »House of Terror«, opened in the centre of Budapest in 2002, which deals with the history of »both totalitarian dictatorships«. The involvement of Hungarians in the deportation of their fellow Jewish citizens often recedes into the background.

Remembrance

The Hungarian Auschwitz Foundation was set up as a private initiative in 1990 with the aim of documenting the Holocaust and commemorating its Hungarian victims. In 1999, the Hungarian government made a decision to establish such a memorial centre. In 2002, the Auschwitz Foundation became the »Holocaust Documentation Center and Memorial Collection Public Foundation«. Construction work was begun that same year, and in 2004, the Memorial Center was opened. It is not located in the traditional Jewish quarter of Budapest where the ghetto had been, but a little outside of the city centre. The ensemble consists of a restored synagogue originally built in 1923 and a modern new building.
At the core of the memorial site is the permanent exhibition. It uses many multimedia elements and informs about the Holocaust in Hungary and the developments that led up to it. The persecution of Roma is also addressed in the exhibition. The interior of the synagogue is a place of commemoration - empty chairs symbolise the Hungarian victims of the Holocaust. Located in the courtyard is a memorial wall, on which the names of over 140,000 victims have been engraved. Apart from being a research and educational facility, the Memorial Center continues to search for names of Hungarian victims of the Holocaust.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1944, Arrival of Hungarian Jews at the extermination camp, Yad Vashem

Budapest, 2010, Courtyard of the Memorial Center with synagogue, Stiftung Denkmal

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition about the Holocaust in Hungary, data base with the names of Hungarian victims, events, guided tours, workshops for pupils, training for teachers

Open

Tuesdays to Sundays 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Contact

http://www.hdke.hu

info@hdke.hu

+36 (0)1 455 33 33

Páva utca 39
H-1094 Budapest

Budapest, 2005, View of the permanent exhibition, Holokauszt Emlékközpont

Budapest, 2010, Façade of the Memorial Center, Stiftung Denkmal

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