Ukraine Trip - Day 4

Resting a few days in Budapest and orienting myself before taking a bus to Ukraine on Sunday. Sightseeing and talking with friends has been fascinating and eye-opening.

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Beauty---and tourists---are everywhere in most of the parts of Budapest that I have seen. Early 20th century houses mingle with massive, imperial structures on the bluffs overlooking the Danube that seem to recall the days of the Austro-Hungarian empire. ​

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But talking with friends here I get the impression that Hungary, like the U.S., is increasingly polarized, with people on both sides of the Conservative/Liberal divide feeling under threat. The painful, disturbing past seems much more present here than I think it does for most people in the U.S., with the history of  domination by other European powers memorialized in some of the monuments.

My impression is that this consciousness creates an unsettled relationship with the past: part "Make Hungary Great Again," symbolized by the the Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán and his far-right policies (and architecture) but also part deep unease at the ways that that mentality has played out in the past. I learned, for instance, that the Hungarian government allied itself with the Nazis in WWII, after having had huge swathes of its territory taken after WWI.

​Two days ago a friend brought me to a monument here on the eastern bank of the Danube, erected to the thousands of Jewish and Roma (Gypsy) people who were rounded up by Hungarian fascists allied with the Nazis in 1944-45 and brought to the river bank. Here they were bayoneted and pushed into the river, where the current carried away their bodies. Beforehand they were forced to take off their shoes which were later sold by members of the militia who killed them.

The monument attached shoes  made of iron to the marble blocks of the embankment.

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In the past few years some of the shoes have been stolen and graffiti has appeared on some monuments to Roma victims, saying "Extinction of the Roma = Extinction of Crime."

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Yesterday afternoon I was introduced to a Hungarian man and Ukrainian woman who very recently left Odessa as the bombing there intensified. It was awful to hear the woman's description of the terror she and her children experienced during the missile attacks. But what stood out most for me was the the man's description of the sense of fear and powerlessness he experienced just in traveling between Odessa and Budapest, passing through ex-Soviet countries. Whereas, in my experience, most (white) Americans have the impression that officials in the U.S. are there to serve us, I gather that many of the officials in these countries have a "post-Soviet" mentality of using their position to demonstrate the power they have over people who have to deal with them.  His description of the fear and uncertainty evoked by  officials like this who have just taken your passport and then sometimes take hours to return it as you sit on the border, waiting, was a good reminder to me of how much and how often I take the safety and security of being a white, middle class man in Bend, Oregon and the U.S. for granted.

By a curious coincidence, on my flight to Budapest I came across this short story by James Baldwin, reprinted in the Atlantic from 1960,  that reminds me how much the sense of insecurity and fear expressed by this man is present in the lives of most African-Americans in the U.S. It served as a reminder of the need for American humility and a sense of how much work we all still have to do if we actually believe in "liberty and justice for all," not as a political slogan, but as an acknowledgment that we're all in this together, and that none of us is really free till all of us are free.