The Terror Haza

On the beautiful classy Andressay Blvd. are most of the embassies, fine stores, governmental offices. It has a main road, bilateral pedestrian walks on each side, and then a service road on each side of that, so it is a large hansom road.

But #60 is a stone building that has a new addition on it, a wrap around border has been added on the top floor that says TERROR HAZA, or Terror House. The reason is that this building was the source of terror visited on the inhabitants of Hungary from 1940's to 1989. In fact it was not till 2001 that the last Hungarian political prisoner was released from the Russian Gulags to which thousands and thousands of Hungarians had been sent.

This building was first used by the ARROW CROSS party which was the pro-Hitler party in Hungary and in its basements they began to intimidate, beat up, and sometimes kill their enemies, mostly the Jews of Hungary. Until the Germans invaded Hungary with troops, their activities were partly restrained by the weak Hungarian government, but in 1944 when Hitler sent in the troops, the ARROW CROSS party became the real government, and the Germans donated Adolph Eichmann to them, and in the hopeless last days of Nazi power, with demonic determination the planned extermination of the Jew was feverishly prosecuted in Hungary.

The Arrow Cross was the symbol of Hungarian Nazism. It reminded me that the Nazi Swastika in German is called the HAKKEN KREUTZ or the Hacking Cross. How demonic that both organizations used a deformity of the Cross with a hacking or spearing twist for their twisted anti-Christian destruction and terror.

I was reminded that these systems appeal mostly to the underclasses, you could be a no-body but join the party and suddenly you could be the boss! You could humiliate and terrorize the "system" which in Europe is the system of classes, of aristocracy, of hereditary privilege, or talent.

If you had no heredity, and little talent, the "party"either Nazi or Communist, offered a way to put you at the head of the class, high on the feeding chain. I saw the same thing in South Africa where the most fanatical supporters of Apartheid were the lower class whites, who knew that in a competition with talented blacks their jobs would be lost to those of color with ability. They held onto their "racial superiority" as a mask for their inferiority.

There were 600,000 Jews in Hungary at the beginning of 1944. When the Red Army finally smashed the Germans in 1945, there were only 200,000 left. In less than a year the majority were sent to Auschwitz or simply murdered in Hungary.

However as the Communists powered by the Russian Army but followed by their bureaucrats who became "advisers" for Moscow trained Hungarians, they took over the ARROW CROSS headquarters at 60 Andressay Utca and made it their Secret Police (AVH) command post. So Nazi terror was simply replaced by Soviet Communist Terror, and Stalinist Communists who had survived the terror in Moscow, brought the terror to Hungary.

In this building, now a museum of the past, you can watch Communist era propaganda films. The great leader is met by adoring crowds, their speeches are loudly and enthusiastically applauded, little children bring them bouquets of flowers. And all of it supported by the secret police who for the crime of not applauding enthusiastically enough would grab you, and send you to a forced labor camp in Hungary or in Siberia with no trial, no redress. No wonder those people in the films are clapping so vigorously to the dictator's speeches!

Outside Budapest someone has built a park to take representative statues from the Communist reign in Hungary, and mounted them to help people remember the past so many are trying to forget and even I think pretend it didn't happen.

The statues are coarse and husky, and the liberators all carry machine guns!

As one of my books wrote, the Red Army came to liberate Hungary from the Germans, but they couldn't bring liberty, because none of them had any at home in Russia. They just brought another kind of oppression, a system sustainable only by violence and terror.

The happiest thing is that the huge statue of Stalin erected by his fawning underlings in Budapest around 1951, during the 1956 Hungarian revolt, was one of the first things to go in the few days that the Russians fell back before sending in their massive army to crush the revolution.

The rebellious mob of students and Hungarian soldiers going over to the side of revolt, pulled it down, a passing truck with a welder stopped and used their torch to cut him off at the legs, so all that is left of Stalin is his empty boots.

The Russians soon sent back 500,000 troops (we have 130,000 in Iraq) to control the 10,000,000 Hungarians. Their tanks smashed the hand built street barricades in Budapest, and their Secret Police identified and either killed or sent to the Gulag in Siberia at least 20,000 Hungarians.

It took 34 more year before that Revolution against Communism finally won over the morally bankrupt and economic disaster of the experiment in scientific atheism.

The Communist art was all triumphal, and one famous statue shows a mythical "worker" running with the Russian Flag in his arms at joy over being "liberated" by the Red Army.

The Hungarians after a thousand year of being occupied by one power or the other, have a cynical sense of humor, and their interpretation of this statue was that this was a Russian Soldier who found a towel in a Hungarian house and was running away after stealing it!