With its stark angular walls of yellow stone, doors set at odd angles and bare columns pointing skyward, the memorial center is intentionally discordant. Visitors feel unsettled, both by the grim history it relates and the visible architecture.

The Budapest center’s modernist design is partly inspired by Daniel Liebeskind’s controversial Jewish museum in Berlin. Its sharp corners and narrow windows are intentionally jarring, said the museum’s spokesman, Bálint Molnar. “The Holocaust was an event with no reason, so we wanted the space to be discordant, and uneasy.”

In that respect, the center is already succeeding. But the wider process of encouraging and even forcing Hungary to come to terms with its darkest era, will take longer.

The Holocaust Memorial Center is the first such purpose-built complex in Central Europe. Built around a restored synagogue on Pava Street, in Budapest’s working-class IX district, the HUF 2 billion site includes exhibition halls, lecture rooms, a library and an archival research unit. A memorial wall also lists the names of Holocaust victims.

Sixtieth anniversary
The opening took place April 15, the 60th anniversary of the start of the ghettoization of Hungary’s Jews after the Nazi invasion in March 1944. Over half a million Hungarian Jews were killed in the Holocaust. Between May and July 1944, over 437,000 were deported to Auschwitz. Tens of thousands also died in forced labor, or were killed by Hungarian Nazi Arrow Cross troopers.

The April 15 opening was also just two weeks before Hungary acceded the European Union on May 1. Politicians are keen to present a modern vision of the country as a nation coming to terms with its past. Western diplomats have delivered a strong message that as Hungary joins the EU, it is not acceptable to exploit anti-Semitism to gain votes.

“For 60 years there has been no debate about the responsibility of Hungarian society for the Holocaust,” said Molnár. “Under Communism everything was blamed on the Germans and a handful of Hungarian extremists. There was no discussion over the role of the wartime Hungarian authorities, the lack of resistance and the wholesale looting of Jewish property.”

Governments of both right and left have supported the center. The former Fidesz government set up the center’s public foundation, and initiated a Holocaust Memorial Day. Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy laid the foundation stone in December 2002.

Writing in Hungary’s conservative daily Magyar Nemzet, former prime minister Viktor Orbán described the Hungarian Holocaust as a “wound inflicted on the heart of the nation,” whose “mortification and shame still lingers.”

Medgyessy attended the center’s opening with President Ferenc Mádl, Israeli President Moshe Katsav and French Finance Minister Nicholas Sarkozy, himself of Hungarian descent.

For some Hungarians the Holocaust remains a purely “Jewish” tragedy. A recent study even showed that 9 percent of Hungarians had not even heard about the Holocaust, while 66 percent do not even know the meaning of the word. The center aims to change such misperceptions.

“The Holocaust in Hungary was not the private tragedy of the Jews,” said Molnár. “It is part of Hungarian history, as much as the revolutions of 1848 or 1956. Even now it is hard to comprehend the profound damage that has been done to Hungarian society.”

Memorial events
The opening was the centerpiece of a week of events that commemorated the Holocaust. Hundreds of young people formed a human chain around the former border of the wartime ghetto, before marching to the banks of the Danube. Memorial events also took place at Budapest's Terror House museum, which commemorates the victims of both Nazism and Communism, in addition to memorial events at some 50 other sites around the country.

Some among the Jewish community have criticized the Pava Street location for being in a little-known part of the capital, far from the main Jewish areas of districts VII and XIII. But the center’s founders argue that the Pava street synagogue was used as an internment camp during 1944 and is an apt choice.

Hungary is home to an estimated 80,000 Jews, the largest community in the region. Jewish communal life is steadily rebuilding, and Jews play an active role in the country’s political, economic and cultural life, at least in Budapest, which boasts several Jewish schools, cultural and religious organizations.

Works by Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Imre Kertész, author of “Fateless,” are extremely popular and have helped increase awareness, especially among the young, on the fate of Hungary’s Jews.

Hungary’s new Holocaust Memorial Center is the first in Central Europe

Not everyone welcomes the renaissance of Jewish culture. While the far-right MIEP party, which has been criticized for anti-Semitism, lost its parliamentary seats in the 2002 election, anti-Semitism still flourishes among nationalist extremists. The conservative weekly program “Vasárnapi Újság” on Hungarian state radio has been criticized for its xenophobic coverage of Jewish issues and Israeli investment. MIEP remains an influential force in regional and local politics.

Deep psychic scars
The Holocaust has left deep psychic scars on Hungarian society. Holocaust survivors still talk of the shock of betrayal, and the disbelief that their motherland would so readily dispatch them to their deaths. Hungary’s historical and moral confusion is perhaps best illustrated by the courtyard of the Museum of Military History, in Budapest’s Castle District. Two memorials pay homage to those who lost their lives in World War II: one to Jewish victims, and another to the viciously anti-Semitic paramilitary Gendarmes who put them on the trains.

For Holocaust survivors such as Robert Ligeti, the opening is a long overdue recognition of Hungary’s central role in the deportation and murder of its own citizens.

“Without the help of the Hungarian authorities the Germans would not have been able to eliminate the Jews of the countryside,” Ligeti said. “The Hungarian government drew up the lists of Jews. The Hungarian gendarmerie put the Jews in ghettos and on the train to send them to the camps.”

The worst massacres on Hungarian soil were carried out not by Germans, but Hungarian Arrow Cross troopers, who, during the winter of 1944 and 1945, nightly marched dozens of Jews to the banks of the Danube before shooting them into the water.

Ligeti, 74, a retired child psychologist, vividly remembers the mocking laughs of his compatriots as the Jews were rounded up and spat at. “Before that I had always felt that I was Hungarian. But when we were marched into the ghetto we were humiliated. People were standing by the side of the street, laughing at us and making comments as though we were interesting curiosities.”

Failed bomb plot
Two days before the Holocaust Memorial Center opened April 15, Hungarian counter-terrorist police arrested three men of Arab origin in Budapest on suspicion of preparing an attack against it. The alleged ringleader of the plot is a 42-year-old Palestinian dentist, with Hungarian citizenship, who also served as the Imam of Budapest’s only mosque in a flat on Bartók Béla Street. Two Syrian nationals resident in Budapest, acquaintances of the Palestinian dentist, were detained and questioned as possible witnesses and accomplices.

A Hungarian security service source said: “The operation was conducted at the highest levels of secrecy. It was launched in March after we received a tip-off that a man of Arab origin and member of the Muslim community was allegedly planning an anti-Jewish terrorist act involving a bombing in Budapest of a Jewish institution. The consequences of this would have been incalculable.”

The Palestinian dentist was well known in Budapest’s Arab and Muslim community, about 6,000-strong, for his anti-Israel views, the official said. Intelligence officials and police are investigating possible links to Al-Qaeda, although there is no evidence of such connections so far.