Another Side (or Sides) to Pest, Budapest, Hungary

"Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East’s exuberant vision of the West, the West’s uneasy hallucination of the East." - M. John Harrison

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Pest saw a boom in its Jewish population. Unlike some other European cities, there was little anti-Semitism as the Hungarian aristocracy recognised the role that Jews could play in helping to modernise what had been a largely feudal country.

Of course this all changed in 1944 when the German army invaded Hungary. Although Hungary was a German ally, Nazi Germany worried that the country might switch sides as they were losing the war. In the winter of 1944, German and Hungarian Nazis relocated 70,000 Jewish people into the Jewish Quarter, which was turned into a walled-off ghetto. Thousands died there of famine and starvation. However, unlike rural Hungary, Budapest’s Jews were spared mass deportations to Auschwitz as in January 1945 the Soviet army liberated the ghetto.

As I mentioned in my previous post about Budapest, we spent much of our time in the city exploring lively Pest. One morning was spent wandering the city’s Jewish Quarter. This had declined in the decades following the war as residents moved out to the suburbs, or fled Communist Hungary completely. But in the early 2000s it underwent a revival, with the famous ruin bars springing up in courtyards of buildings slated for demolition and a mixed community moving into the area to open shops and restaurants, create art or simply to live. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).