Terror Haza

If you ever visit Budapest (and you should definitely visit Budapest) be sure to travel out to 60 Andrally Ut to visit the Terror House. Andrally Ut itself is a lovely, wide tree-lined bouelevard with a vague Parisian feel about it. If you walk the distance of it, from the city center out to the monuments and the park, you will get a sense of the city's former grandeur, its decades of decay, and its current efforts at resurgence. The Terror House is dedicated to the Nazi occupation of Hungary in 1944 and especially the decades of Soviet domination. The location itself, 60 Andrally, has special significance because it was the actual headquarters of the Soviet secret police. It is a very spooky place, with pictures on the wall of every person who died there during the decades of Soviet control. In every room there are those heavy black rotary phones that used to be the norm - if you pick one up it will tell you the story of the room. The phone messages are in Hungarian, but the rest of the museum is fairly English friendly, including handouts in most every room and some of the films subtitled in English. There are a couple rooms I don't think I will ever forget. In one of the rooms, which was lined with the actual case files of prisoners, they were showing a Soviet documentary of the trial of Imre Nagy after the aborted Hungarian uprising of 1956. Sitting there in that room, watching that film, with a few very old Hungarians, some with almost ashen faces as they viewed the documentary, was staggering. When you get on the elevator that takes you from the second floor down to the basement, the lights suddenly go out and a film starts playing on the back wall of the glass elevator. It is a man talking about the process for executing prisoners. While you watch this you can see the pictures of the dead on the far outside walls and a huge Russian tank in the lobby. In the basement there are the actual, reconstructed prison cells, along with the pictures of people who actually died in the rooms. Devastating, but also something not to be missed.