May 8, 2017 Budapest

So, we are on full day two in Budapest – William wants to walk (duh), and we set out to find a café for breakfast and plan our day.

Today, May 8 is the anniversary of Bill’s death. Even after 4 years it still causes me physical pain to know that he is no longer with me. I try to not make this the focus of my life, but I acknowledge that to survive I will have to set aside memorial days to allow myself this time. The anniversary of his death, or wedding anniversary, and his birthday, these I have determined are dates on which I can feel the full weight of this loss. I share this with my son who was with me when we discovered him, but I won’t allow this to color this experience. I deliberately planned this vacation to be with William on this anniversary, but I have a personal and private grief that I experience. I have brought some of Bill’s ashes with me to symbolically allow him to be in some of the places that he always wanted to go – and we will scatter some ashes today in the Danube to allow him the river cruise he always wanted.

We know that there are a couple of things we want to do: The Grand Synagogue, St. Stephan’s Basilica, and the House of Terror. We also have an evening tour with our Hop on/Hop off, the only thing I can say about that is that it is damn hard to figure out where to Hop on! I can’t remember the order of where we went our what we did, I will share the pictures and comment where I can but I want to start with the Grand Synagogue. Dohany Street Synagouge is the largest synagogue in Europe and the world’s second largest Jewish temple, following Temple Emanuel-El in New York

This is a mosaic of the day. The first photo is of the guide in the Grand Synagogue, William and I agree that would have been most fascinating to have sat with him and heard his personal story. I honestly knew very little about the Hungarian Jews during the War, but he did and spoke of the experience most eloquently. You see him standing in front of “the Tree of Life” The tree was donated to the synagogue by actor Tony Curtis. We visited the Synagogue (no photos) and went outside to see Martyrs’ Cemetery, Location: in the courtyard of the Great Synagogue. A small plaque on the Wesselényi street side of the synagogue marks the spot where once the gate of the Budapest ghetto stood in 1944-45. Not far from the plaque stands the small Garden of Remembrance where those who died in the ghetto were buried during 1944-45. Their names are engraved in the stone gravestones.

Holocaust During World War II

According to Jewish customs cemeteries are not supposed to be placed next to synagogues, but this one in the garden of the synagogue, overlooking Wesselényi Street, was created out of necessity during WW II. Until the 2nd half of 1944 Budapest was reluctant to cooperate with the Nazis to collect and sent Hungarian Jews into concentration camps, though the Hungarian government (lead by Miklós Horthy) stood on the side of the Germans. Adolf Eichmann arrived in the Hungarian capital in December 1944 to carry out the deportation and execution of Hungarian Jews and Roma people. A ghetto was established between Király utca and Dohány utca. Because of the cold and the state of war the people in the ghetto weren’t able to carry their dead to the cemetery and bury them properly so thousands of corpses were left at the walls of the synagogue for 40 days. During the liberation of the ghetto on 18. January, 1945 thousands of unburied dead victims lay on the streets. 1140 known and 1170 unknown martyrs were buried in 24 common graves in the courtyard of the central synagogue. The Dohány Street Synagogue is the only synagogue in the world that has a cemetery in its garden.

The Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park with the Tree of Life.The silver metal weeping willow tree, the Tree of Life, stands in the Raoul Wallenberg Park (named after the Swedish diplomat who helped many Jews to escape from deportation in 1944-45). It is located in the garden of the synagogue and the Jewish Museum. It’s a very moving and sad monument created by Imre Varga in 1991 with the support of the Emmanuel Foundation (founded by Tony Curtis actor). Names of the victims disappeared or died during the Nazi terror are engraved on almost each of the 30,000 leaves.

Jews do not bring flowers to cemeteries, they bring stones. The history is that the earliest graves were mounded by stones (to prevent animals from getting to the deceased), the tradition is that when visiting a grave one brings a stone to acknowledge the visit, and then a prayer is said. As you can see, there have been many visitors to these lost souls.

There were many individuals who worked against fascism – there were diplomats such as Raoul Wallenberg – Wallenberg was a Swedish architect, businessman, diplomat and humanitarian. He is widely celebrated for saving tens of thousands of Jews in Nazi-occupied Hungary during the Holocaust from German Nazis and Hungarian Fascists during the later stages of World War II. While serving as Sweden’s special envoy in Budapest between July and December 1944, Wallenberg issued protective passports and sheltered Jews in buildings designated as Swedish territory. http://www.history.com/topics/wallenberg-raoul

Sir Nicholas George Winton MBE was a British humanitarian who organized the rescue of 669 children, most of them Jewish, from Czechoslovakia on the eve of the Second World War in an operation later known as the Czech Kindertransport. Winton found homes for the children and arranged for their safe passage to Britain. The world found out about his work over 40 years later, in 1988. The British press dubbed him the “British Schindler”.  http://www.powerofgood.net/

Needless yo saw this was a moving experience. I won’t soon forget our guide, who I know had a story to tell, and I regret not going back and asking him his story.

The rest of this day is a blur, we visited St. Stephan’s,

And the Budapest Opera House, where at the end of the tour we were treated to a tenor singing two opera pieces – wonderful!

 

Simply opulent!

Lastly, and no picture for this, was the House of Terror. When I saw it on the map I was thinking, wax museum or something equally silly, but no, House of Terror is a museum located at Andrássy út 60 in Budapest, Hungary. It contains exhibits related to the fascist and communist regimes in 20th-century Hungary and is also a memorial to the victims of these regimes, including those detained, interrogated, tortured or killed in the building.

https://www.ricksteves.com/watch-read-listen/read/articles/budapest-remembers-the-cold-war

I can’t begin to express how impactful this was – it reveled to me my utter ignorance of significant history during the cold war – this museum reminds us of the actual and real cost of freedom – it isn’t just about storming beaches – these reminders also tell me that I have an opportunity to learn more.

We hopped on and off a couple of times, finally making our way to the river where we saw the shoes memorial and I took a flight of stairs down to the waterline to put Bill’s ashes in the Danube.