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The case for a 2nd Holocaust Museum

November 30th, 2013

A centre-right commentator welcomes the idea to build a new Holocaust memorial site in Budapest, since he believes the first, opened a decade ago has not fulfilled its mission.The new museum to be built next year as part of the commemorations in the 70 anniversary of the Hungarian Holocaust is already caught in the crossfire, János Pelle writes in Heti Válasz. While the new pro-Nazi party staged a demonstration in front of the site, left-liberal intellectuals also disapprove of the idea. The latter, he claims, are mainly upset because they have not been invited to take part of the project. But why should they, Pelle asks, since it was them who created the first Holocaust Museum ten years ago and were not successful, he suggests. A new memorial site is needed, because the first one proved dull and schoolbook-like in his view and attracts a mere 16 thousand visitors per year. The new museum will beestablished next year at a former railway station from where large numbers of Hungarian Jews, mainly women, were deported to Nazi camps during the last months of 1944. Pelle  welcomes the idea that the “House of Fates” as it is planned to be called, will concentrate on the tragedy of child Holocaust victims. He remarks that the first Hungarian Nobel Prize winning novel, Imre Kertész’s Fateless also shows the Holocaust through the eyes of a young boy.

 

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