Terrified in the House of Terror

I don't think any of the field studies trip yet have had the impact on me, that the House of Terror did. I thought Holocaust class in high school was bad but sitting in a classroom, reading articles and watching movies is nothing compared to standing in an old Hungarian Nazi headquarters and seeing the real thing.  Being where it all happened, gives you a certain pit in your stomach that you can't ignore.
The set up of the museum had a lot to do with the feelings that developed inside you. The music playing in the background was very thematic and definitely set the mood a certain way, whether you liked it or not. The videos that were in each room were impossible to walk by. I could have spent hours in each room. One thing I keep thinking about was that now matter how grotesque and sickening an image or media clip we see is, we cannot help but keep our eyes glued to the screen. Its strange how something that is so awful to see, keeps your interest. It is so sad to imagine being those people and being in those times that it's sort of like the least you can do is watch it and feel for them, since you don't have to BE them. As we walked through each room, I for once, had nothing to say. The mood was an unspoken understanding of disgust, angst and sorrow. There was no way to truly feel for these people or to understand what their lives truly were.

A few rooms affected me a lot. Seeing the offices of the heads of the Hungarian Nazi regime threw me off a lot, in the sense of how they had these big comfortable chairs in these highly decorated offices, as they wrote down orders for people to be shipped off and exploited. Seeing their notebooks sitting on the desk, you can't help but stare at them wondering about what was written. Did they have any remorse when they wrote these things down? As they sat in their big offices, did they think about those stuffed into a tiny cell barely big enough for a child? All these thoughts buzzed through my head as I imagine being in that chair.

Seeing the torture cell topped all imaginable fear. There was a sound playing of water dripping into a drain, symbolizing all that could be heard once the torture was over and someone laid there after being beaten to death. There were violent tools; clubs with nails, knives and other awful looking tools hanging from the walls. I stood there for 10 minutes staring, unsure of what to think or feel, yet I could not seem to walk away. I could not grasp what I was seeing.

Another time where I was utterly speechless was in the elevator we took down to the basement. We were all in this giant elevator that went super slow, so we could watch this video of a man, explaining the exploitation process. His job was to clean up the area of execution after the person was killed. He explained in great detail everything from the victim's last good shave to the kicking of the wooden block, causing their neck to snap as they hung there. Everything was dark and eerie in the elevator, symbolizing the mood and the feeling in our minds. Normally, when an elevator stops, everyone rushes off it. This time, we all just stood before moving. No one said anything. And that was our introduction to the basement. The most horrific place in the whole building. Tiny cells where you couldn't even stand up that were pitch black, used as torture cells. They also had the isolation cells and the cells that were considered "normal" were tiny, gross and had one bowl with a pipe constituting a toilet. The bed was a wooden surface. I think anyone would have volunteered to go to Eger after seeing this.

But of all the things we saw, there was one video in one room in the basement, that stuck out the most to me, leaving me with the strongest impact of anything I'd come across so far. Being a psychology major, I am always interested in seeing what sort of role psychology plays in certain situations. What I learned in this quick movie was more in 5 minutes then I have learned in one semester. The Hungarian Nazis used psychology to torture victims as an act of violence. They would leave them locked in rooms, not let them sleep, play loud music in a dark room, isolate them for days so they would lose track of time. Then they would start having hallucinations and begin going insane. After the insanity started to take over, with the  incorporation of narcotics, the victims would begin "admitting" to crimes they had not even committed, but they were tricked into believing they had. They would say things that would never be said if they had a choice, which would later be used against them. Psychology was a deathly weapon. This is fascinating to me because you hear about the cruel tools they used and such, yet who would think that such cruel violence would take place using the mind as its main tool.

At the end of the tour, I was speechless. I had nothing to say and was not even sure what to think. I walked over to the guestbook with Mary, thinking I had so much to write. I was hoping to thank these people for opening my eyes, to even more of what had happened, where I stood. But as I stood with the pen on the paper, I couldn't put anything into words. All I could manage was a short thank you. It blows my mind that something this cruel and vile happened only 50 years ago. That's insane. Nothing like this should have been happening so recently. This makes me question when did people really start valuing the human life? What we saw at the House of Terror affects every single one of us differently. But no matter how it affects us, the point is, it does somehow. And every single person in this world should be subjected to this sort of thing and should be experiencing some sort of feeling. I would argue that it would change anyone's perspective, even if it was just a tiny bit. People can't turn their head's from this horror in a reality. We need to face it in order to understand how IMPORTANT every single person's life is and how everyone has the right to contribute to this world. We all share a responsibility to understand the horrible truths of what happened and learn from them. Learn the value of the human life and the need of equal contribution from every single person. No one should be put through anything like the victims of torture of the Hungarian Nazi Regime. At some point this semester, I will be traveling to Poland to visit Auschwitz and I hope to share some more ideas after that.

I leave you with a quote that Dr. Zoltan Illes shared at the Industrial Accidents Conference today while he was discussing the need to work together and understand each others ideas to prevent these accidents.


"We are quite lucky we are different from one another. We all share a responsibility and have something to contribute." 

The Wall of the Victims, with the tank in the middle. We discussed the possibility of how some of the victims on the wall did not have an end date on their plaque, only when they were born. Imagine not knowing if they were killed or escaped or what? We also talked about how it would feel coming into the museum and seeing someone who is a long lost relative on the wall and had no idea, or what it would feel like to see the face of someone you know.

A memorial representing the double occupation of the  Nazis & Soviets

The IRON CURTAIN. That's sort of an ironic question it shows up at the top... "shall we live as slaves or free men?"