1 Boring Old Man

In a while, I’ll post some wonderful pictures from Eastern Europe. My wife sees the world through the lens of a camera, so there are 3300 photos to look over before she picks out the keepers – thus a lag time. But in the interim, I want to mention again the most moving thing I saw there. In a Museum called the House of Terror in Budapest, built in a building used by both the Nazis and the Communists for secret police, they’ve collected newsreels and relics of the carnage of 20th century Hungary.

The Museum is filled with photographs and news footage of the Holocaust, the War, terrible statistics of the Horror of Hitler’s Nazis, of the Hungarian Nazis [Arrowcross], of the Stalinists – very hard to watch. But it was something I’d seen before. It was something I knew about. But I didn’t really know about the uprising in 1956. I remember it. I was 14 years old, and our papers were full of stories of the Hungarian Freedom Fighters. 14 year olds just don’t register the magnitude of such things – at least I didn’t. What happened was amazing. The Hungarian people in Budapest just rose up and smashed the Russians. Their 14 year old kids captured tanks and drove them down the streets. The people came out of their houses and started marching and shooting. For 12 days, Budapest was free. They cut the center [a hammer and sickle added by the Russians] out of their flags and paraded in the streets – toppling the Russian statues of Stalin. Then the Russians came. The Hungarian leader, Prime Minister Imre Nagy, got on the radio pleading to the West for help to no avail. The Russians retook Budapest and executed Nagy and many others. Of all the footage in that Museum, the ones that rendered me speechless were the proud looks on the faces of the Hungarians who had taken back their City. They thought we’d come and help them. One of our guides said, "but that was naive." I don’t know if it was naive or not. I know we were afraid of a Nuclear War if we fought the Russians directly.

But I’ve got to say that helping people who ask, and show their resolve sure beats the hell out of what we’re doing right now in Iraq. That same guide said that Hungarians see what a mess we’re in in Iraq, but that they know what it’s like to be living under dictators, implying some sympathy for our invasion. But then she added, "unless it is about the oil."

And it is…