Occupation and Revolution
But not my occupation. Oh no. No work today - yippee!
After a long lie-in and a late breakfast, Monsieur Mange-Tout and I walked out and headed for the Terror House in Andrassy Boulevard. This excellent museum is in a building with a very unpleasant history; in 1944 it was the headquarters of the Hungarian Nazi party, and between 1945 and 1956 it housed the offices of the Communist secret police.
On the two upper floors we were presented with a rich and absorbing history of the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Hungary. It was all horrifying, but, because of the pleasant surroundings, still civilised. The basement was quite a different story. A slow lift descended through a dark, dank shaft while on a tv screen mounted on one of the walls a narrator gave an account of the method of execution favoured by the Soviet regime (a grisly kind of hanging, nothing like the long drop system previously used in the UK). He was introduced in Hungarian, so I missed out on knowing who he was, but I got the distinct feeling that he was speaking from personal experience. After we had gratefully bundled out of the lift, we found ourselves in a smelly, cellar-type corridor with doorways on either side. This was death row, leading to the condemned cell and the gallows. Photographs of those who had been held as prisoners lined the walls, many of whom seemed to have been involved in the doomed 1956 revolution against the Soviet occupiers. They had been sentenced to death following crude show trials, propaganda footage of which we had seen earlier.
The final room of the exhibition showed hope being re-ignited with the departure of Soviet forces in 1991. Forty five years - more than my whole lifetime. A very long winter had elapsed between the premature budding of freedom and its full blossoming.
Evening fell, and, energies restored by langos (fried frisbees of dough) topped with sajt and fokh (cheese and garlic - apologies for the puerile interlude in such a serious post), we decided to go to the cinema. We found that a film called Freedom's Fury was showing. We didn't know much about it, but had been intrigued by a poster displayed in the Terror House bookshop citing Quentin Tarantino as some kind of participant. It turned out to be the - very un-Tarantinoesque - story of the Hungarian water polo team who, competing in the 1956 Olympics (held just after the revolution in Budapest), found themselves playing the Soviet team in the semi-finals. Even though my mastery of the Hungarian language is obviously considerable (yeah right - Ed.), I was unable to understand much of the commentary. But the film is well made and moving, with first-hand testimony and excellent visuals, so the narrative was clear enough to be comprehensible and enjoyable. Especially touching was the reunion between the two teams, held in Budapest after the fall of the iron curtain. They were philosophical about the unsportsmanlike argy-bargy that had gone on during their original semi-final match, and greeted each other with genuine affection.
I'll be borrowing the film on DVD when it gets released, just to fill in the gaps left by my outstanding linguistic skills. And I'd wholeheatedly recommend it to anyone even vaguely interested in European history or sport.
After a long lie-in and a late breakfast, Monsieur Mange-Tout and I walked out and headed for the Terror House in Andrassy Boulevard. This excellent museum is in a building with a very unpleasant history; in 1944 it was the headquarters of the Hungarian Nazi party, and between 1945 and 1956 it housed the offices of the Communist secret police.
On the two upper floors we were presented with a rich and absorbing history of the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Hungary. It was all horrifying, but, because of the pleasant surroundings, still civilised. The basement was quite a different story. A slow lift descended through a dark, dank shaft while on a tv screen mounted on one of the walls a narrator gave an account of the method of execution favoured by the Soviet regime (a grisly kind of hanging, nothing like the long drop system previously used in the UK). He was introduced in Hungarian, so I missed out on knowing who he was, but I got the distinct feeling that he was speaking from personal experience. After we had gratefully bundled out of the lift, we found ourselves in a smelly, cellar-type corridor with doorways on either side. This was death row, leading to the condemned cell and the gallows. Photographs of those who had been held as prisoners lined the walls, many of whom seemed to have been involved in the doomed 1956 revolution against the Soviet occupiers. They had been sentenced to death following crude show trials, propaganda footage of which we had seen earlier.
The final room of the exhibition showed hope being re-ignited with the departure of Soviet forces in 1991. Forty five years - more than my whole lifetime. A very long winter had elapsed between the premature budding of freedom and its full blossoming.
Evening fell, and, energies restored by langos (fried frisbees of dough) topped with sajt and fokh (cheese and garlic - apologies for the puerile interlude in such a serious post), we decided to go to the cinema. We found that a film called Freedom's Fury was showing. We didn't know much about it, but had been intrigued by a poster displayed in the Terror House bookshop citing Quentin Tarantino as some kind of participant. It turned out to be the - very un-Tarantinoesque - story of the Hungarian water polo team who, competing in the 1956 Olympics (held just after the revolution in Budapest), found themselves playing the Soviet team in the semi-finals. Even though my mastery of the Hungarian language is obviously considerable (yeah right - Ed.), I was unable to understand much of the commentary. But the film is well made and moving, with first-hand testimony and excellent visuals, so the narrative was clear enough to be comprehensible and enjoyable. Especially touching was the reunion between the two teams, held in Budapest after the fall of the iron curtain. They were philosophical about the unsportsmanlike argy-bargy that had gone on during their original semi-final match, and greeted each other with genuine affection.
I'll be borrowing the film on DVD when it gets released, just to fill in the gaps left by my outstanding linguistic skills. And I'd wholeheatedly recommend it to anyone even vaguely interested in European history or sport.
posted by Botyris at 9:50 PM
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