On the occasion of the anniversary of the Holocaust – in this case, the 80th anniversary – little is said about the period following liberation, when, like the rest of Budapest’s inhabitants, the surviving Jews tried to start a new life. Or, as Lajos Kassák writes in his 1945 poem, this is the period when “…we must rebuild our faces from nothing.” It is difficult to approach this fragile period comprehensively, as there are countless psychological, memory, and reconstruction processes taking place, developing, and coming to the surface—but at the same time, they are suppressed in Hungarian society, in the remaining Jewish communities, families, and individuals. The ambivalence of the experience of returning home, the difficulty of mourning, the need to uncover what happened as quickly as possible and perhaps to forget it as quickly as possible, the revival of religious life, and the questions of emigration—like pieces of a kaleidoscope—are all swirling around at the same time during these months.
The Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives (supplemented in the current exhibition by valuable pieces from the Kiscelli Museum) has an extremely rich collection of objects and documents from this period, which primarily represent the perspective of the remaining Jewish community. We have grouped the many simultaneous processes and the cavalcade of documents about the survivors into five themes: awakening, mourning, reckoning, satisfaction, and new beginnings.
The starting point for the exhibition is István Zádor’s album Budapest 1945, which depicts Budapest in ruins after liberation. Among the visual artists, not only István Zádor but also Péter Áldor was an important chronicler of this period. Áldor personally followed the people’s court trials of war criminals, about which he wrote reports illustrated with portraits of the defendants. In addition to the rarely exhibited, documentary-style works of István Zádor and Péter Áldor, the collection of the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives preserves many other works depicting the activities of Jewish and Zionist organizations in Hungary after liberation.
In putting together the exhibition, we sought to present a subjective selection from the collections of fine art, objects, photographs, and archives, focusing on personal destinies in such a way that the individual pieces speak in the language of both art and history. For this reason, this exhibition is not a chronicle of the year 1945. Rather, it attempts to convey the atmosphere of the two or three years following liberation through pieces from the collection: patterns of numbness, loss, and new beginnings.