Kati Marton made a very long journey to visit the synagogue of Miskolc, and the memorial tablets with that touching language. I need only quarter an hour to leave home and walk to my school located at Heroes’ Square. Every morning I see the building and its padlocked gates. I have been learning at my school for almost six years and until recently it has actually never come up to me what can be behind the gate; strangely enough, it was not within my sight. Then one day, on 16 April 2002, to be exact, the gates opened and I visited the synagogue with my class to discover a lost, strange and touching world. I felt as if I had not been in my home town. The fragrance of the candles, the honoring walls, the Hebrew texts were extremely new. Extremely shocking. That was a kingdom of buried history, the dumb walls could not tell us about the many forgotten horrors. There was silence for very long, biting, harrowing moments, then, for the first time in our lives, we heard about the victims of the massacres officially. Our teachers told us nothing else but a range of events – and that was enough for us to realize our ignorance. We spent one hour of shock and consternation in the synagogues.

Our country, after more than 50 years (the first ghetto in Hungary was set up in 1944) remembers again. In a timid, silent way, but finally remembers. All the synagogues of the country were opened at the same time, and several classes (mine as well) had the opportunity to take part in an irregular history lesson in one of them. It was a brand new situation, and not only for us, for the young, but also for our teachers: the dramaturgy, the length, the ’’when’’ and the ’’how’’ were the main questions. Even if it was a bit immature in some places, a new tradition was born on that day. The minds are receptive, it seems.  But the symbols, the yellow star, the swastika still contain something of the cruelty and the heinousness of the Third Reich. We have moral responsibility for getting over all that the holocaust means; we must believe we’ll be able to stamp out racism out of the world. But first of all, we have to know exactly the thing we want to destroy. This year our school will commemorate the victims of the Nazism again. It is naive, initial, crude yet, but the country is slowly becoming conscious of something that we should never have forgotten. Slowly, very slowly, the gaps in our history will be filled, but the man of nowadays needs time to get over the past and commemorate it in an honorable way.

Let’s see what the author writes, about feeling strange in Miskolc, about cold facts, about crimes committed and then buried. And about many other Miskolcs in the world. No doubt: the author wrote about collective guilt. This definition is, unfortunately, correct. But it exists not only in Hungary, but all over the world. There are expressions, words that wake memories of a nameless terror, and all of us feel ashamed of this cruelty of mankind – and this feeling has a positive and a negative aspect as well. Negative, of course, that some do not try and cope with the fear and lack of information of the past decades. Positive that all of us feel: something terrible happened – something brutal. This collective guilt is very hard to resolve; we should resolve it in a very fine and careful way. I think we should be optimistic about the future, because I am sure there is hope for the new generations at the McDonald’s.

However evident it may be, I must mention another very important thing from the very near past: Imre Kertész’s Nobel Prize for Literature proves that there are people who do not only commemorate the holocaust in an extraordinary way, but also help others – with their unique art – to digest the events.

 A different Hungary with different people lived in the author’s memories. The country wanted to forget too much, too fast and too irresponsibly. As I have written above, maybe there is hope for the young guests in the pub and at the McDonald’s. And maybe, in some years, Kati Marton will visit Miskolc again and see the iron gate open. I believe the iron gate of the synagogue and of lost memories must be opened from time to time driven by respect, memory, love and human dignity.

7 November, 2002

By Daniel Vincze