Well, friends, this is it. My last full day in Budapest or, I should say, in Pest because while I’ll cross part of the Danube, it will only be as far as Margaret Island and not all the way to Buda. I’d read a considerable amount about Margaret Island and had it on my pre-trip list of places to visit while in Budapest. The only other item on the day’s agenda was that Pat and I had arranged a brief a reunion with Alison and planned to meet her for a late lunch. Alison was part of the larger group who traveled through the Balkans. She has extended family in Hungary and traveled there on her own from Ljubljana. Unsurprisingly, neither Connie, Geanie, nor Jackie wanted to join us so once again Pat and I set off on our own.
Everything I’d read about Margaret Island pointed to it being the antithesis of yesterday’s trip into some of the dark side of Budapest’s history. The weather was lovely so we opted to walk to one of Budapest’s most popular recreation areas. The island, which we’d cruised past last night, sits in the middle of the Danube and is accessible by foot from the Margaret Bridge. (The photo below was taken from the north so Buda is on the right, Pest on the left, and the Margaret Bridge is the one at the top of the island. The Árpád Bridge is at the bottom.)
But first, I needed to solve a mystery
Sometime during one of our walks through Pest, we passed a memorial that had people protesting and laying objects in front of it seemingly with the intention of crafting a message that countered the official memorial’s symbolism. It clearly appeared that this was one of those spots tour guides would avoid so, of course, it piqued my curiosity.
After asking questions of some of the people there and some independent research, here’s what I learned. This memorial, called “Memorial to the Victims of the German Invasion” was erected (somewhat ironically, given the controversy) on Szabadsàg tèr (Liberty Square). It’s not far from either the Parliament or the Shoes Along the Danube and it was designed and built at the urging of Hungary’s current Prime Minister Viktor Orbán who is the head of the very conservative Fidesz party.
Apparently, the memorial stirred contentious wrangling from the time it was proposed. Here’s a close look at a part of it:
The original inscription was to read, “German occupation of Hungary, March 19, 1944” but instead was changed to “Memorial for the victims of the German Occupation.” While it’s true that Hungary suffered under the Arrow Cross which was the puppet government the Nazis installed on after their invasion on 19 March 1944, and that mass deportations of its Jewish, as well as Roma, homosexual, and mentally ill, populations began after that date, most historians accused Orbán and his government, who installed the monument in the dark of night on 20 July 2014, (ironically the Hungarian Holocaust Memorial Year) of attempting to rewrite and sanitize that era of Hungary’s history.
Let’s think about the monument’s dedication and take a closer examination of the symbolism of the memorial. The figure at the center is the Archangel Gabriel. He’s holding the Hungarian orb (We saw it in the Parliament.) that represents all of Hungary. Above him, the German eagle swoops down talons extended and behind him the words “Memorial for the victims of the German occupation.” The implication in all of this is to portray Hungary as a passive victim unable to resist Nazi Germany thus absolving it of blame for the horrors that ensued.
But let’s take a step back for a moment and again consider the history of that period. Recall that Gyula Gömbös, who had ascended to Prime Minister of Hungary in 1931, became the first foreign head of government to visit Hitler after the latter became Chancellor of Germany in 1933. Miklós Horthy, serving as Regent, ousted Gömbös in 1938 and began serially appointing Prime Ministers who incrementally moved the country further to the right.
Hungary became the first country other than Germany, Italy, and Japan to adhere to the Tripartite Pact, signing the agreement in November 1940. (The Tripartite Pact also known as the Berlin Pact formed the military alliance between Germany, Italy and Japan and was signed in September 1940.) During this time, Hungary passed a number of so-called “Jewish Laws” that included restrictions on Jewish marriages and limitations that certain professions be no more than 20 percent Jewish.
Horthy, as I wrote, was able to resist the mass deportation of Jews for a time. However, when the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa on 22 June 1941, Hungarians became culpable in one of the early mass murders of Jews. (2023 Update: Operation Barbarossa was the German code name for their planned invasion of the Soviet Union. I wrote a little about it here.)
The event is known as the Kamianets-Podilskyi massacre. Soon after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Hungarian officials in the agency responsible for monitoring foreign nationals living in Hungary decided to deport “foreign” Jews. However, many Hungarian Jews also couldn’t provide documentation of their Hungarian citizenship and, as a result, were also among those deported.
The Hungarians loaded the Jews into freight cars and took them to Kőrösmező (now Yasinia, Ukraine), and handed them over to the Germans. Once they were in German hands, the Jews were sent on a forced march of nearly 250 kilometers to Kamianets-Podilskyi (now in southwestern Ukraine). On 27 and 28 August, according to Nazi German reports a total of 23,600 Jews were murdered, including 16,000 who had been expelled from Hungary. And, of course, after Germany’s invasion, 430,000 Jews were deported in a period of months and there were also the notorious Arrow Cross murders in Budapest itself.
These are the facts that point to collaboration with the Nazis as much as victimization by them.
The protests failed to prevent Orbán’s government from erecting the monument though it had to be done in the dark of night. Members of a movement called Living Memorial then found another way to protest this attempt to rewrite or even erase the past. They created a counter memorial which is what we saw. Mystery solved.
To date, the official memorial has not had a formal dedication.
Chorwacja jest piękna