A day of sombre reflection

So many sights and experiences today.  A visit to the Parliament - a massive Gothic (in the main) construction with a vast staircase - see first extra.

Second extra is the wonderful cigar holders in the Parliament.  Smoking was not allowed in the Chamber so if anything interesting was happening, the MPs would leave their cigars in a numbered slot.  If the speech/ event was excellent they would stay in the Chamber returning only to find a pile of ash:  gave rise seemingly to the phrase that a speech was worth a good Havana.

Then on to a memorial on the backs of the Danube where around 20,000 Hungarian Jews were shot. They were told to take off their shoes and when shot fell into the river to be carried away.  The memorial is of some 60 iron shoes, many of them now filled with pebbles in memory of the dead.  Merits 2 extras.

More sightseeing. This included the memorial to the 1956 uprising - another extra.

Then on to Europe's largest synagogue.  Built almost in the style of a Cathedral lift can house up to 4,000.  In the grounds is a memorial to the 600,000 Hungarian Jews and a sculpture of a willow tree (an upturned Menorah) with the names of 30,000 victims engraved on each leaf.  Funded significantly by the US actor Tony Curtis whose father was a Hungarian jew -further extra.

All of this created a sense of unease in me.  On the one I was being a tourist soaking in the sights and architecture of former regimes in charge in Hungary.  yet on the very spots I was standing taking photographs in recent memory - some of them within my lifetime - massacres were being committed.   Children, uncles, aunts, parents, grandparents were being slaughtered because of their beliefs or aspirations for themselves or their country.  

If ever there was a message that we need to work through and embrace  differences and not seek to define differences, today brought that home to me.   

The blip is in the synagogue when the afternoon sun caught a stained glass window and for a fleeting moment added a blaze of colour to the interior.