Central/Eastern Europe was incredible. Having only been there for seventeen days I could only get a smidgen of a snapshot of the cities I visited, but it was a learning experience all around, even in the cities I didn't care for as much. Spent most of our time in Berlin in the former GDR and loved it. It was easy though, as it closely resembled Montreal in many ways. Warsaw and Budapest were more than a little off-putting, politically. Poland is so fanatically nationalistic (also 98% Polish, 90+% Catholic) that I was genuinely unnerved by it. Still, even then I was much more disturbed by the presentation of Holocaust that I saw in Hungary's House of Terror museum.
The deportation and massacre of around a half million Hungarian Jews (third place after Poland and Ukraine) was whitewashed as the doing of a small number of Hungarian fascists and the Nazis, while the bulk of the museum was dedicated to the horrors of communism, which claimed a small fraction of that over four decades. I understand that the Hungarians had to live under communism much longer than they did fascism, but there was zero recognition of Hungarian participation in the Holocaust and the Nazi-backed Arrow Cross regime was reduced to a two rooms at the beginning of the exhibition while later two whole rooms were dedicated solely to communist propaganda posters. There seemed to be more outrage over the detainment of three anti-communist Hungarians than the 450,000 Jews sent to burn in Auschwitz. The overall effect was disturbing.
There is also a positively hideous statue in the middle of Budapest erected a few years ago that is dedicated to the brief Nazi occupation near the end of WWII (when Horthy attempted to cut a deal with the Allies) that completely ignores any Hungarian involvement in the crimes of the fascists. Hungary is quite literally depicted as an angel being attacked by a vicious German eagle. Thankfully the statue is surrounded by a display erected by Jews upset by the nationalistic whitewash of history.
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The deportation and massacre of around a half million Hungarian Jews (third place after Poland and Ukraine) was whitewashed as the doing of a small number of Hungarian fascists and the Nazis, while the bulk of the museum was dedicated to the horrors of communism, which claimed a small fraction of that over four decades. I understand that the Hungarians had to live under communism much longer than they did fascism, but there was zero recognition of Hungarian participation in the Holocaust and the Nazi-backed Arrow Cross regime was reduced to a two rooms at the beginning of the exhibition while later two whole rooms were dedicated solely to communist propaganda posters. There seemed to be more outrage over the detainment of three anti-communist Hungarians than the 450,000 Jews sent to burn in Auschwitz. The overall effect was disturbing.
There is also a positively hideous statue in the middle of Budapest erected a few years ago that is dedicated to the brief Nazi occupation near the end of WWII (when Horthy attempted to cut a deal with the Allies) that completely ignores any Hungarian involvement in the crimes of the fascists. Hungary is quite literally depicted as an angel being attacked by a vicious German eagle. Thankfully the statue is surrounded by a display erected by Jews upset by the nationalistic whitewash of history.