The Complicit Traveler

By Eli Feldblum

"I have to say this," our tour side says, her broken English clarifying for this rehearsed speech. "We were complicit. Hungary made an alliance with Hitler and the Nazis." She walks us through the war, culminating with the round-up of nearly half a million Jews living in Budapest, most of whom were shipped to Auschwitz and subsequently died. She describes Budapest's small Jewish community that survived the Holocaust and remains today--80,000 people out of the city's 10,000,000 residents--and admits that life wasn't easy for Hungarian Jews before (with the passage of Laws I, II and IV--the church overturning Law III out of fear it would target converts) and after the War (under Communist Soviet rule and at the hand of the Black Arrow, the secret band of Hungarians loyal to the Nazis).

A country with a tragic history for the Jews isn't unusual in Eastern Europe, but Budapest--and Hungary at large--feels different. Jewish culture is woven so completely into Hungarian culture that it's hard to imagine how the Jews were treated so terribly here.

On a bar menu, next to a charcuterie platter of ham and cheese, is a Spieler Jewish egg. The hotel breakfast proffers lesco, a ragout of peppers and tomatoes with very Jewish roots, alongside eggs and beans (the latter to the joy of my British traveling companion). The most popular cake at Budapest's most popular cafe is a "traditional Jewish recipe." Pralinka, Hungary's unofficial national drink, is made from "kosher plums." Even modern Budapest seems Jewish; after Italian and Thai restaurants, Israeli hummus places are the next most popular foreign cuisine. Even the prolific gift shops that pepper the centuries-old streets of Budapest, hawking cheaply-made souvenirs, display campy Budapest magnets overlaid with Stars of David alongside magnets displaying the Parliament Building or Geller Baths.

Hard to imagine, then, but not hard to see. We walk Dohany Street, the street once home to Hannah Senesh and Theodore Herzl, their apartment buildings now a mass grave in the courtyard of Budapest's magnificent Dohany Street Synagogue. At the ghetto museum, in the shul's basement, I see a photo of the Nazis marching through Fisherman's Bastion; an hour earlier, I had climbed those same spires and had a coffee on the same balcony from which an SS commander once shouted commands.

Like many European cities, the city is dotted with statues, memorials and monuments to the tragedy of the Holocaust. They are all more recent than I expected--the famous Shoes on the Danube Bank was built in 2005 and the most recent addition to the Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park was built only last year--but, perhaps because of their more modern sensibilities, they are more moving, more touching, more personal than your average stone wall or towering obelisk.

It's easy to line your foot up with a shoe of the same size and imagine yourself standing here, awaiting an ignominious death, to be shot and dumped in the Danube. It's a stark contrast to the start of our day, walking along and crossing the river, so peaceful and beautiful this sunny afternoon decades later, posing by the giant lions that guard its ancient bridges.

It's easy to imagine that death being ignored and overlooked. For me, the balconies stood out the most. I grew up seeing photos of Europeans standing on their balconies, staring down, indifferent, as Jews were rounded up, packed into flatbed trucks and sent off to their deaths. Those balconies are everywhere, above buildings marred by bullet holes or marked with small, gold-tinged plaques explaining who lived in them, who had their lives stolen from them, whose deaths were ignored.

Complicit, our tour guide said. And we see it all around us.