We left Slovenia for Budapest, it’s a beautiful city, we found campervan parking within walking distance of the arena, we had tickets for Ed Sheeran.
John went to the house of terror. It’s a museum dedicated to telling the story of Budapest under the Arrow cross (Nazi afiliated) when Jews were rounded up and sent to a gheto and then on to extermination camps and later when they were ‘liberated’ and came under soviet control. This was a time of fear, suspicion, reporting your neighbour, people disappearing, anything but free. I have often wondered how much of the news we heard in the West of soviet oppression was western propaganda, and how much was true. I have no doubts now it was as bad as we were told, if not worse.
On a lighter note… Ed Sheeran was great.
We too were shocked we visited a living museum inroad our in France. It was a French small town and in 1944 4 days after D Day retreating tank regiment turned up at lunchtime herded up all the women and children in their church and threw grenades in there. They were all killed. The men who hadn’t been shot were rounded up into the town square and all shot dead. The Germans then set about setting the whole town on fire. Today when you walk the streets you can still smell the smoke in the brickwork of the houses inside the houses piled on the floor are all the tings inside the house that wouldn’t burn. In nearly every house the remains of iron bedsteads and frames. Pots and pans and in some the rusted remains of treadle sewing machines. Rusty burnt out cats in some places and milk churns Everything has been left as is as a monument to the poor souls who perished that day after the Germans had surrendered. One of the villagers had gone to another town on an errand that morning and when he returned on the train that evening he was met with the terrible devastation houses still burning. This how the world knows what happened that day as he later told his story. So no, to this day I cannot bring myself to accept that the idiots who say the Holocaust is fiction should hang their heads in shame🙏🏻😡