BUDAPEST, Hungary — For Hedwig Pataki, the opening of Central Europe's only Holocaust museum offered a chance finally to commemorate the family she lost more than half a century ago.
A wall in the courtyard of the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest is inscribed with the names of 60,000 of Hungary's approximately 600,000 victims of the genocide.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday May 06, 2004 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 42 words Type of Material: Correction
Concentration camp -- An article in Section A on April 27 about the Holocaust Memorial Center in Budapest, Hungary, referred to "Poland's Auschwitz concentration camp." It should have made it clear that the camp, although in Poland, was run by German Nazis.
Pataki, an 86-year-old Hungarian Jew who survived the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, had provided the names of her father and an aunt, both of whom died in Nazi camps. She clutched an application to add the name of her uncle, slain in Budapest, his body thrown into the Danube.
"I learned that there is a wall and a place for names. That is why I am here," she said. "It is my obligation."
The Holocaust Memorial Center, which opened April 15, is part of the country's belated efforts to grapple with its role in the Holocaust.
"We show that people are missing, and we ask how did these things happen and why haven't we talked about them?" said Andras Daranyi, the center's executive director. "The Holocaust is part of Hungarian national history. It is not just something that happened to the Jews."
The state-funded facility, the fifth national Holocaust museum in the world, incorporates a 1923 synagogue on Pava Street. The second floor of the synagogue holds an exhibit dedicated to the Romany, or Gypsy, victims of the Holocaust. The first floor will house the museum's permanent exhibition, a comprehensive history of the Hungarian Holocaust, scheduled to open next year.
The complex also includes a research and documentation center and a public database to aid people looking for the names of Holocaust victims inscribed on the memorial wall. Daranyi said names would be added as research continued.
Another hall houses the center's inaugural exhibition, "Auschwitz Album," which features photographs of a transport of Hungarian Jews taken to Poland's Auschwitz concentration camp in May 1944. The pictures, found by an Auschwitz survivor after liberation, document the arrival in the morning and the wait outside the gas chambers later that day.
The exhibition brought back painful memories for Ica Lendvai, an 83-year-old Hungarian Jew who was held at Auschwitz for seven weeks.
"For whoever survived, whoever lived through those times, it was shocking to see those pictures," she said. "It was a shock to be made to remember again."
