BUDAPEST, HUNGARY — Andrassy Street is a stylish boulevard, comparable to New York's Fifth Avenue or London's Regent Street, in this fashionable capital city at the heart of what Donald Rumsfeld calls "the new Europe" — that is, the former Communist satellites now enjoying their 14th year of freedom
Freedom's economic benefits are glitteringly obvious on Andrassy Street in the form of designer label shops, smart restaurants, inviting pastry shops, and the impressive public buildings now being washed free of the gray Communist grime that until recently besmirched them. A stroll down Andrassy Street, stopping occasionally to buy a book or sip a glass of sweet Tokay wine, is one of the great minor pleasures of life even in the chill of winter.
Even in summer, however, one building emits a distinct and sinister chill of its own.
Number 60 Andrassy Street was once, during the Second World War, the headquarters and torture chamber of the fascist Arrow Cross Party that in 1944 was given power by the Nazis and during its brief rule helped Adolf Eichmann to murder hundreds of thousands of Jews.
Nor did Number 60 Andrassy Street change its character with the end of the war. When the Hungarian Communist party seized power in 1947, it became the headquarters and torture chamber of the notorious AVO communist secret police — and the symbol of a remarkable (though not unprecedented) fascist-communist collaboration.
For Hungary's Communists, having obtained the membership lists of the Arrow Cross party, presented defeated fascists with a unique communist party application form: it invited the applicant to confess the "mistake" of his Arrow Cross past as a preliminary to becoming a good Communist. By all accounts these former fascists made excellent Communists. They were both loyal (they had to be, given their previous "mistake") and brutal (they had a natural talent in that regard). And for 40 years this hybrid totalitarian party governed a civilized nation against its will.
Today, Number 60 Andrassy Street is making amends for its past. For the last year, it has been a "Museum of Terror" recording the crimes and brutalities of both totalitarian regimes and reminding the world of what ordinary people suffered throughout eastern and central Europe and the Soviet Union for more than two generations.
It is hard, indeed impossible, to convey the intellectual and emotional impact of the museum. It does not merely record the past. It recreates the past with newsreels, documentary, books, posters, music, sound effects, the objects of ordinary life, and photographs of both victims and "victimizers" (the latter often disturbingly "normal" — looking) so that the visitor finds himself briefly inside the past rather than peering at it from afar.
One enters the museum through a doorway embroidered with the similar insignia of both totalitarianisms, walks past a Russian tank (symbol of Hungary's long occupation), and ascends in an elevator with a view of the dank gray courtyard where once dissidents were dragged in for interrogation. Then, to the sound of solemn music interrupted occasionally by the clang of a prison door or the ranting of some demagogue, one walks from the top of the building, through the last 60 years of Hungarian history, each floor illustrating some aspect of oppression — the fascist murder of Jews, the communist show trial of Cardinal Mindzenty, the starvation of the peasantry, the sudden liberating eruption of the 1956 Hungarian revolution, its suppression, the systematic round-up and punishment of the revolutionaries (including the execution of children), and the long banality of "goulash communism" under Janos Kadar's cynical dictatorship — until one reaches the lowest level of all. This is the cellar torture chambers, narrow cells with bare boards for beds, where the regime's victims were beaten, scalded, electrocuted, suffocated, drowned, and shot in their innocent thousands.
And then, suddenly, one is outside in the street again, returned to 2003, surrounded by Western trade names and neon signs, attempting to shake off the sense of tragedy and sorrow of the last few hours and the last 60 years.
Yet the museum, however improbably, is very popular. It has been visited by over 200,000 people, mainly Hungarian, in the year since its opening. And that is the problem.
For today Communists are as active under democracy as fascists were under Communism. Of course, they have changed their coats. The former Communist Party is now the Hungarian Socialist Party and the dominant partner in the current coalition government. But memory of the past — and thus the museum — is a rebuke and an obstacle to them.
Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy, himself a former informant for the secret policy, has visited the museum and praised it as a necessary reminder of a tragic past. Lower down in his party and government, however, people are trying to censor these memories.
Government MPs — including a son of someone listed on the "Wall of Victimizers" — have tried to cut the museum's funding; the Hungarian Socialist Party chairman proposed to remodel the museum as a "House of Reconciliation" (one wonders how reconciliation with the Arrow Cross would be expressed); and the government is trying to install its own nominees on the governing board.
These moves should be resisted — and not just by Hungarians. Western ambassadors might demonstrate their concern by making a high-profile visit to the museum. Historians too should add their voices — and their presence at any conferences held by the museum. Nor should remembrance be confined to Budapest — why should the Museum of Terror not mount traveling exhibitions to Western Europe and the United States?
