I liked the physical design of the museum, with slanting walls, a lack of right angles, the entrance through a dark basement, long sloping ramps all emphasizing the disorientation of deported Hungarian Jews and Roma.
There was a noticeable and repeated effort to stress the uniqueness of the Hungarian experience in terms of the numbers of Jews killed as well as the speed with which this was accomplished. In some cases, like stating that 1 million Jews were killed at Auschwitz and most of these, 430 thousand, came from Hungary, these efforts made absolutely no sense to me. Saying that unlike the Warsaw and Bialystok ghetto uprisings there were no meaningful uprisings in PoW camps is a false comparison in several respects. Why the need to stress Hungarian Jewish uniqueness?
There was also a repeated indictment of Hungarian Gentiles for complicity in the fate of the Jews. „Gentile“ isn’t normally a component of my self-identification, but here I felt rather slapped in the face with it. I appreciated the language of texts detailing Hungarian complicity in the Final Solution as well as discussion of the economic incentives for complicity.
The texts dealing with depersonalization of Jews as a component of genocide very much brought back to me my conversation with the Israeli couple at Prague’s Museum of Communism. I wonder how much continual insistence on ownership of both Holocaust victimhood and resistance enables shooting Palestinian teenagers seven times in the foot.
