Budapest Day 1: The Holocaust Memorial Center

Our three hour train ride to Budapest from Bratislava yesterday got us to our hotel (another Ibis) just in time for Paul to start working so we didn’t do much apart from check out the area we’re in and buy stuff at the grocery store to make sandwiches for dinner so we wouldn’t have to eat fast food, which is the only type of food near the hotel.  Today we began our sightseeing at the Holocaust Memorial Center, which was sad but very informative…

On our way to the Memorial Center, we decided to eat lunch at a small self-serve restaurant which we noticed while walking along Üllői Avenue to get from the tram stop to the Memorial Center.  We picked it because it was busy and looked like a local eatery (there wasn’t even a sign outside with it’s name!) and it turned out to be a truly authentic Hungarian fast food place.  Problem was, the menu (posted on a blackboard behind the cashier where you order, pay for and pick up your food) was only in Hungarian, and the girl working there didn’t really speak English.  Paul asked her to pick two dishes for us, and she described something with spinach, bean, and egg and we nodded and said sure!  Then we noticed chicken legs in a buffet-style case near the cash register and asked her to add an order of that as well.  The chicken turned out to be a very good idea because she ordered us two dishes of really thick creamed spinach and bean soup with a fried egg on top which I thought tasted ok, but Paul took one bite and left the rest to me!  Next time, I think we’re better off just blindly pointing at two different menu items

After eating, we found the nearby Holocaust Memorial Center on Páva St.  After a quick security check (just a metal detector), we headed down a set of stairs in the courtyard and paid an entrance fee (1300 HUF – about $7.50 CAD – or 100 HUF for students) before beginning our visit in a room which depicted the lives of Jews and Hungarian Roma in Hungary before the Holocaust.  Being a much faster reader than me, Paul ditched me after about 10 minutes and left me to go through the exhibit at my own pace while he went ahead, which was fine by me because I hate being rushed!

A long corridor full of pictures and the ominous sound of soldiers marching led me to the rest of the exhibit, which is divided into sections relating to different phases of persecution: deprivation of civil rights, property, freedom, human dignity, and existence.  Personally, I liked this better than a chronological presentation because it shows you how it got to the point where Jews were murdered in mass numbers instead of focusing on the period of time when the Nazis killed over a million people just because of their race.  I, for one, did not know that Hungary had its own government party that began taking away the rights of Jews before the Nazi occupation in 1944 and reading about this in the first section helped me understand how they were able to get to the next step, taking property away from Jews and Roma and deporting them to camps.  When you realize how long discriminatory practices went on for before progressing to the mass murders, you really have to wonder why the rest of world didn’t put an end to it sooner…

The exhibit took me over 2 hours to complete, and I had to skip some of the reading because we were running out of time and Paul had finished long before me and was getting tired of waiting.  I probably could have spent the whole day here if I read everything thoroughly!  Before heading back to the hotel, we had a quick look around at the nearby Central Market Hall, which is one of the biggest indoor markets we’ve seen on this trip.  Upstairs you can buy all kinds of souvenirs and trinkets, and downstairs there is an incredible selection of meat, produce, and fruit.  I power shopped through all the fruit stands, picking up pears, plums, oranges, and bananas.  The stuff we got was ripe and fresh, but I’m still not used to the way fruit stands work here and got scolded by one lady for trying to pick my own fruit (here you tell them how much you want and they just grab it at random for you).  It made me buy a lot less than I would have if I was picking my own, but at least it wasn’t like the markets in Italy where we were deliberately sold the bad fruit by vendors because we were tourists!