House of Terror Museum

The route begins at the top, in eight rooms that run in date order from 19 March 1944, the day Germany occupied Hungary, to the resistance against communism.

The first hall is Double Occupation, Nazi and Soviet, and the next two belong to the Arrow Cross. Then comes the Gulag room, where the floor is a map of the Soviet Union and the wood-panelled walls commemorate the 700,000 Hungarians taken to Soviet forced-labour camps.

The small room after it, Changing Clothes, has a rotating figure in an Arrow Cross uniform on one side and a secret-police uniform on the other, the museum’s way of saying the two regimes were two sides of the same coin.

The Fifties room opens with polling booths for a one-party election and turns, behind the scenes, into a room about total control. The floor ends with the Soviet Advisors and a projection room where you can sit and watch full-length propaganda films.

Give this floor the most time. The room texts are in Hungarian, so pick up the printed English sheet at each door or use the audio guide, and do not try to read everything.

The first floor is about what the communist state did to people who were not in prison: the deportations of Hungarians of German descent and of Hungarians from Czechoslovakia, the peasants stripped of their crops in a labyrinth walled with blocks of lard, the show trials, the propaganda, everyday life, and the war on the churches, with Cardinal Mindszenty’s cape in the last room.

On this floor is a recess the ÁVH called the gym. When the political police left in 1956 they smashed and rebuilt the cellar prison so that no trace of it remained, and this interrogation room is the one room the ÁVH forgot to destroy.

On the wall are the words of János Kádár, interior minister in 1948, that you must be able to hit with every means, and along the end wall hang the instruments that were used.

Look for the desk and bunk in the room of Gábor Péter, the head of the ÁVH, and the Imre Nagy trial playing in the centre of the Justice room.

The inner courtyard of the old apartment block is roofed over now, and a Soviet T-54 tank sits in it beneath a wall of portraits that rises the full height of the building under the words ÁLDOZATOK, VICTIMS.

The museum says the ground floor, the staircase and the yard are not strictly exhibition space, but the tank is the image everyone leaves with, and you cross the galleries above it more than once on the way down.

It is a symbol, not a relic of the building. The tanks that mattered here were the ones that brought the communists to power in 1945 and the ones that crushed the revolution in 1956, and the museum’s route ends with the Soviet army’s departure in 1991.

This is the one place in the museum where photographs are allowed. Take yours from the gallery, where the whole wall fits in the frame. Notice, too, the two marble memorial slabs at the steps in the entrance hall and the string music that plays through the building, a score written for the museum by Ákos Kovács.

The way down is by lift, and the lift is part of the exhibition. It takes three or four minutes to descend, and on a screen in the dark a man describes, in a flat voice and with English subtitles, how an execution was carried out. Nobody talks much when the doors open.

The Arrow Cross used the coal cellars here to hold and beat the people it rounded up in the winter of 1944, and many of them died. After 1945 the political police divided the cellars into cells, took over the neighbouring buildings and joined their cellars with tunnels so that prisoners could be moved without being seen in the street.

One sealed tunnel, to number 62, was found when the museum was built and is on show in the Emigration room. The ÁVH wrecked the prison before it left in 1956, so half of what you walk through is a reconstruction of how it stood in the 1940s and 1950s.

The cells are the point: a wet cell where a prisoner stood for days in cold water to the knees, a fox-hole with a ceiling a metre high and no light, a detention cell with half a metre of floor. As the museum puts it, this is not a distant military prison but half a metre from the pavement of the city’s finest avenue.

The other half of the basement continues the story through internment, 1956, the reprisals and emigration, and ends with the Hall of Tears, with its list of the dead, the Perpetrators’ Wall, naming those who kept the regimes running, and a memorial to the Soviet troops leaving in 1991.

Before or after your visit, cross Andrássy út and look back. The building is an 1882 apartment block, and everything that makes it look different from its neighbours was added when it became a museum in 2002. The architect Attila F.

Kovács, who designed the exhibition, gave it a black frame, a heavy entablature along the roofline, blade walls down the sides and a granite pavement, so that it stands out from the street. The entablature is cut with the word TERROR, the Arrow Cross symbol and the five-pointed star, and when the sun is on it the word is written in shadow on the wall.

Along the base of the frame runs a row of small oval photographs with candles and flowers beneath them. This is the museum’s Wall of Heroes, the heroes and victims of the 1956 revolution, and people still stop at it.

A few steps along the pavement stands the Iron Curtain, a wall of rusted chains hung from steel girders, also by Kovács, marking the forty years of closed borders and the fact that Hungary was the first country to cut the fence, in 1989.

The exterior is the only part of the museum you can photograph without restriction, and the shadow needs a sunny day.