Budapest: Why You Should Be Happy that You Can Vote

The "House of Terror" museum was, appropriately, terrifying.

Or rather, moving. Or haunting. All of the above.

The neoclassical building that houses the museum sits right on the "Hungarian Champs-Élysées", Andrassay Út. It makes one wonder if people strolled this boulevard in the fifties and sixties like they do now, and if so, if they knew that hundreds of people were being murdered in the building next to them.

The structure served as the headquarters of the Nazi's Arrow Cross (like the Gestappo) during WWII, then of the Soviets' AVO (like the KGB) from then until the late 1960s. The museum serves as a chilling guardian of the memories of that time as well as a memorial to the victims.

You start the tour on the second floor. In the atrium below, a rusty Soviet tank hints at what's to come. This floor gives an overview of the Nazi and Soviet eras in Hungary. Particularly chilling is a room containing a dining table set with china bearing the Arrow Cross emblem and, standing at the head like a host, a mannequin in Nazi uniform. The difference between civilization and humanity has never been drawn so clearly.

The middle floor focuses more on the Soviet regime. The old surveillance equipment and presentation of gulags render the subsequent displays of communist propaganda nauseating.

From here, an attendant lets you into a glass elevator. The doors shut and everything goes dark. A TV screen lights up with the image of the building's former janitor describing (with English subtitles) the execution process. The door opens, and you fin yourself in a damp-smelling stone basement: the prison, torture, and execution rooms.

The guidebook having warned me that this was coming, I read through this part of the tour before getting on the elevator in case I needed to walk through it quickly. Specially-designed prison cells, electric cables, out-of-use gallows: the basement puts the "terror" in the museum's name.

Finally, you enter a room commemorating the anti-communist uprising of 1956. Then a room about the 200,000 Hungarians who fled the country after the brutal suppression of said uprising, most of them to America (a woman sings "Dreams Are Made of This" in Hungarian through the speakers). Finally, video screens show footage of the last Soviet military officers leaving Hungary in 1991-- the soldiers look as relived as the citizens. The tour ends with a memorial to the victims and an accusatory hallway displaying photos of the bureaucrats who killed them.

The museum does an amazing job of transmitting both the knowledge and the horror of those times to the visitor. You can practically feel the Hungarians' personal outrage against their former oppressors as you walk through.

This is a positive step in the country's quest to deal with its dark history-- and the first time I've seen such a thing on my trip to the former Soviet Bloc. I never heard the word "communism" in Bratislava. The city's history museum focused on its 19th-century Golden Age and ended with the 1920s. I hate to think what happened there.