Terror Haza

Just wow. The Terror House, maybe 200 yards from my apartment, is where the communist political police tortured their political opponents. Before that, it was the party headquarters of the Hungarian Nazis -- the Arrow Cross Party. It has to be the world's most comprehensive museum devoted to political and military developments in post-WWII Europe. In some ways, the end of the war was just the beginning of mass collective persecution in Hungary, which, while a small nation, proved it was never powerless to resist.


Here I learned of a complex character named Imre Nagy, a lifelong communist who thought Stalin got it all wrong. He helped lead the 1956 uprising against the Soviet occupation. Demonstrations broke out in Budapest and several other cities on Oct. 23, 1956, and Nagy was swept into power as prime minister five days later. In just two weeks, Soviet tanks bore down on the city and that was that.

He was put on trial in a courtroom on Fo Utca along with a dozen others. A communist propaganda film in the museum shows extensive clips from the trial. One by one, the defendants plead for mercy, saying they had seen the light. "I have traveled a long distance to see the merits of socialism," says one. Another weeps when he recounts seeing the death of a Soviet soldier in combat.

Nagy, the last to speak in his defense, says, in a distinguished and respectful way, that this is all bullshit. Your case is based on systematic terror and the need for merciless reprisal, he told the court. In essence, you've proved nothing. He was sentenced to death, of course. After being hung a year and a half later, he was interred face-down, his hands and feet bound by barbed wire.

A listening and recording device of the State Security Department (AVO), the "fist of the party."

Many of the torturers and the districts attorney who abetted them, the leftist unionists who ratted out their own countrymen, the agents of the state security apparatus who killed without hesitation and elicited false confessions, and the informers who recorded the thinking of factory workers, journalists and clerics, are alive today and walk among us in Budapest. The Terror House is a chilling place and will leave you changed.

The last Soviet "advisers" in Hungary departed in 1989.

Terror House
60 Andrassy Blvd.
Tues.-Sun., 10-6
No photography; the guards are pretty nice about telling you to cut it out.
1800 HUF