60 Andrassy Boulevard, Budapest.

When I was an actor.  When Margaret Thatcher was slicing away at the National Health, and the Arts….it was just the natural thing to oppose her. That meant leaning left. And I guess I have never tilted back.

I still believe, fervently, in voting. I believe it is a gift given to us and I never take it lightly.

outside the national museum. a Russian tank.

And this brings me back to Budapest. There were bridges and beautiful buildings. There were synagogues and basilicas. There were opera houses and the Danube.

doors

doors

doors

There was the beautiful and moving garden of remembrance behind the Dohani Synagogue, where the anti-semitic cruelty happened all in a rush in 1944. Where there is the most beautiful sculpture: an upside down menorah tree with every leaf inscribed with a name. And two marble stones inscribed to Raul Wallenberg and Nicholas Winton.

the memorial tree

The afternoon when I went to see the documentary about Nicholas Wynton called “ Nicky's Family,” turned my life upside down.

But back to Budapest again.

the Rakocsi market

children playing outside the market

hungarian home made gnocchi

It was my visit to the “ House of Terror.”

A grey corner building on Andrassy Boulevard.

60 andrassy blvd

 

 In 1944 it was called the House of Loyalty.  As the party headquarters of the Hungarian Nazis. Then between 1945 and 1956 it became the House of terror. Where  the secret Police and a shadow army of informants would watch people in their workplace and one in every three families had someone seized and tortured. Fuelled by the Communists, they turned on their own.

Finally in 1956, there was the uprising. Young people stood up. Risked everything. Because they thought different thoughts.

outside the radio building where the uprising started. a flag with the hole where the Hungarians cut out the russian insignia. and a little ribbon with the Hungarian colours.

 For two weeks there was freedom. Then the tanks rolled back in and there were imprisonments and mass executions.

 The Russians didn’t leave until 1989. …..1989. 32 years later.

This building, the very same building where people were interrogated and tortured, in 2002 was turned into this extraordinary museum. It is beautiful and moving and breathtaking and frightening.

You pass through rooms of artistic symbolism. You walk past walls of photographs of all the victims. You watch videos of people, simple farmers, who were sent to work camps and starved almost to death. You walk through the cells where they would make people stand up for days on end, you look at the gallows they had set up in the basement. You end up looking at the walls of photographs of people, most of them still living, who wielded power that they had no right to. No one has been brought to justice. Not one.

It was the highlight of Budapest for me.

waiting

 I went out into the daylight and looked at the people carrying their shopping home or waiting for a tram or leaning against a building having a cigarette and I realised I would never have any idea what they had been through.