House of Terror

Andrássy út 60,
Budapest
Budapest
Hungary

http://www.terrorhaza.hu

Type: Museum
Addmission Fee: 1,500 HUF admission.
Hours: Open 10-6 daily except Mon.

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From 1939 to 1945 this was the headquarters of the Arrowcross, the notorious Hungarian Nazis Party and it was known as the House of Terror. Of course, they were driven out by the Russians, but the Russian communist methods found an equally suitable home in this building. From 1949, its turn-of-thecentury style was forgotten in favor of dark cell rooms, and it gained a new name, the House of Horrors. Today it is a museum, flanked by barbed wire, and sober insights into the recent past. It provides a glimpse into the grim inhumanity of man to man. The Stalinist secret police occupied it from 1953. Many people were muscled and dragged in and never came out. No one is exactly sure of the numbers. But, down the hallway from the director’s office, a small room with various instruments of torture on the wall leaves an uncomfortable reminder of the screams that must have issued from this room. It is a suffocatingly small room, and there is a drain on the floor (one might speculate as to why you would need a drain in such a place). The elevators will take you upstairs to where Nazis and communists dined, while in the basement, the dark, dank walls enclose bare cells with a few wood planks for beds. Prisoners were not allowed to leave the cells and their waste accumu-lated. After the 1956 Revolution, the Russians, showing their innate sensitivity, turned the basement into a clubhouse for communist youth. From the Oktogon we continue our walk, or take the metro at the Oktogon to Kodály Körönd.