Transport

In 2004 András Böröcz and László Rajk started designing a Holocaust memorial together. Their starting point was the freight car made of walnut by Böröcz in which wooden shoes started stomping if someone cranked it.

The two artists intended to magnify this construction as a house transformed into a freight car in the one-storey building on the corner of Kazinczy street. On the wall of the building there’s a plaque commemrating the first Hungarian card factory, which had been operating there from the early 19th century.

Many generations have lived in the building, which has been transformed several times. Although it is not a classified as a historic monument – or perhaps precisely because of this fact – it has preserved every layer of the past nearly two hundred years, displaying traces of both life and death. It currently houses a pub.

Part of this house would provide the framework of Böröcz’s work. According to Rajk’s design, part of the entrained house would be placed on rails and moved into the park to be built on the corner of Király and Kaziczy street. The wooden shoes start moving in a given time of the day, the stomping resounds for a while and then stops.

The clockwork and the mechanics bringing the shoes to life are to be prepared by István Haraszt˙. In the truncated, remaining part of the house a small museum would present the history of the immediate vicinity of the building, and provide space for temporary exhibitions as well.

The mutilation and entrainment of the house not only describes and models departure to death, but also symbolises the deprivation of rights and property supported by state and private indifference.

In 2011 the artists have decided to exhibit these so far unseen designs. With this exhibition, they hope to generate attention from the professional and civilian public and come closer to the realisation of the memorial – if not on the original site, then somewhere else on the territory of the former ghetto.