Egy budapesti kert történetei
Absztrakt
The barely one thousand square meters of land next to the archways of the Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest is a symbolic place in the history of Jewish-Gentile cohabitation in Hungary. Building on the plot began after the First World War, when a cultural centre and park and the Heroes’ Synagogue dedicated to the fallen Jewish soldiers were developed there. At the end of the Second World War, the building complex became part of the Budapest Ghetto, where thousands of people were crowded together in inhumane living conditions. At the time of the liberation of the Ghetto, thousands of Jewish bodies, victims of starvation, freezing temperatures, military operations during the siege and the brutality of the Hungarian Nazis, were recovered in the streets. 2281 of these bodies, both anonymous and identified, were buried in this garden. The park with a pond turned into a graveyard, a monument to a barbarous age, Hungary’s most authentic place of remembrance for the Holocaust. However, the fate of the garden did not develop as one would expect: the first efforts to landscape and consolidate the graves were made not until 1965, the first monument in 1984. By now, several different monuments have been erected, dedicated to the memory of the liberators, humanitarians, heroic individuals, and the Hungarian victims, but there is none dedicated to those buried in the garden. The history of this cemetery is a precise reflection of the story of the reception of the Hungarian Holocaust, and the way Hungarian society perceives the victims, the perpetrators, justice and responsibility. The names of the victims are recorded in a traditional Jewish memorbuch (book of memory), which has served as a basis for a digital monument dedicated to them on the Internet.