Maison du Destin (Sorsok Háza)

To understand what the House of Fates commemorates, one must first grasp the scale and brutality of the founding event. On the eve of the German occupation, Hungary was home to the largest Jewish community still intact in Europe. At the time of the German invasion, Hungary had a Jewish population of 825,000 people, the largest still present in Europe, swelled further by Jews who had fled there seeking the relative safety of the country. Until the spring of 1944, this population, though subject to discriminatory laws and forced labor service, had escaped mass deportation, as the government of Miklós Kállay had resisted German pressure.

This reprieve came to a brutal end. Fearing that Hungary might seek a separate peace with the Allies, Adolf Hitler ordered the invasion, and new restrictions against Jews were imposed shortly after Germany's occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944. The machinery of destruction then set into motion with a speed that struck genocide historians. SS officer Adolf Eichmann came to the country to organize the transports.

The pace and scale of the deportation constitute one of the most concentrated episodes in the entire process described by Raul Hilberg in La Destruction des Juifs d'Europe [Hilberg, 1988]. From 15 May to 9 July 1944, Hungarian gendarmerie officials, under the direction of German SS, deported approximately 440,000 Jews from Hungary; most were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau where, upon arrival and after selection, the majority were murdered in the gas chambers, while thousands were sent to the Austrian border to dig fortification trenches. Yad Vashem confirms the staggering speed of this operation: in May 1944 the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz began, and in just eight weeks, some 424,000 Jews were deported.

What is sometimes called the "Hungarian solution" thus represents, in the chronology of the Shoah of which Léon Poliakov was one of the first historians [Poliakov, 1951], a final acceleration: at the very moment when the military fate of the Reich was already sealed, the killing apparatus operated at maximum capacity. The transport of 15 May 1944 was the first of 151 transports that brought thousands of Jews each day to Auschwitz-Birkenau, until on 8 July the convoys were halted by Miklós Horthy. This interruption, secured under the combined pressure of the Allies and the Vatican after reports on the fate of Jews at Auschwitz had circulated, did not, however, put an end to the persecution.

The autumn of 1944 reopened the cycle. In October 1944, an antisemitic party came to power and resumed the persecution of Jews. This party, the Arrow Cross (Nyilaskeresztes Párt), seized power through a coup. The Arrow Cross party, backed by German tanks, overthrew the government of regent Miklós Horthy on 15 and 16 October 1944. There then began the phase of death marches and summary executions on the banks of the Danube, which Saul Friedländer showed to be characteristic of a violence now largely given over to local initiatives [Friedländer, 2008].

The decision to install the memorial in the Józsefváros station follows a precise historical logic, where the archive and the topography of the city converge. This freight station, set apart from Budapest's grand monumental stations, was one of the sites of the deportation of the capital's Jews during the Arrow Cross phase.

After the interruption of the summer, the Jews of Budapest experienced a brief lull. The Jews of Budapest, who had barely survived two attempts at deportation to Auschwitz in early July and late August, lived through a relatively peaceful period between late August and October 15. The Arrow Cross seizure of power brought this to an end. It is in this context that the Józsefváros station entered the history of the genocide: a column of Jewish women, men and children at the Józsefváros station (8th district of Budapest) is among the most emblematic images preserved from this period, documented by European archival collections.

It is also to these convoys and these stations that one of the most celebrated episodes of rescue is connected. At a certain point, Wallenberg personally appeared at the Budapest station, demanding that the Jews present on the train be removed and presenting Arrow Cross guards with protective passports (Schutzpass) for a great number of them. The Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg was recognized as Righteous Among the Nations and remains a central figure in Hungarian Memory. Budapest named him an honorary citizen in 2003, and several sites honor him; Yad Vashem recognized him as Righteous Among the Nations in November 1963.

The inscription of the memorial within an authentic station lends the institution a particular power — that of the real place. Deportation by rail constitutes, in the work of Annette Wieviorka as in that of Serge Klarsfeld, the material motif par excellence of the genocide: the convoy, the ramp, the count of the deported [Wieviorka, 1992]; [Klarsfeld, 1978]. The Klarsfeldian method — reconstructing the persecution transport by transport, name by name, as in Le Calendrier de la persécution des Juifs de France [Klarsfeld, 1993] — offers the documentary paradigm of which such a memorial would wish to be the architectural expression: restoring to each deportee their identity, wresting the victim from the anonymity of the mass.

The museographic approach of the Sors Háza rests precisely on this focus. The Józsefváros station building houses the Sors Háza — a memorial museum dedicated to child victims of the Shoah. By centering its subject on children, the institution adopts a proven memorial choice, one that makes the figure of the deported child the most unbearable and most universal condensation of the catastrophe — a choice that Serge Klarsfeld himself embodied through his work devoted to the deported Jewish children.

The project was born within the framework of a state memorial policy, in the lead-up to a major anniversary. The memorial center was built in Budapest for the 70th anniversary of the Shoah. The 2014 deadline, marking the seventieth anniversary of the 1944 deportation, served as the horizon for the public commission. The saga began in 2012, when Orbán's government appointed Mária Schmidt, a right-wing historian whose detractors claim she has drawn inappropriate parallels between communism and Nazism.

The chosen site was selected for its historical significance as much as for its state of disrepair. The site of the new museum is a former secondary-line railway station abandoned in Józsefváros, the infamous 8th district, which was greatly in need of renovation. The question of the name was itself the subject of discussions. The institution was to be called "Sorsok háza," which most Hungarians understand as "House of Fate"; the word "sors" also appears in the title of the book by Nobel Prize laureate Imre Kertész: Sorstalanság / Fatelessness. The allusion to Kertész, a Hungarian survivor of Auschwitz and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, immediately situated the project within the field of reflection on the "fate" and "fatelessness" of Jewish children condemned to death.

Architecturally, the restoration sought to combine heritage authenticity with a contemporary gesture. The station building was restored to its original state, with later extensions removed; surrounded by a "sea" of basalt blocks on the surface, the building can only be approached through the new underground exhibition space, which further abstracts the station. This device of submersion — descending underground to access the site — spatially expresses the idea of a plunge into catastrophe. Within the exhibition, one can ascend to the two towers clad with the sides of railway wagons, which are connected to one another. The wagon walls erected as towers constitute the central visual motif: the very material of deportation, wrested from its function and raised into a monument.

The scale of the complex testifies to the ambition of the project. The ensemble, left completed but unfurnished, covers some 600,000 square feet of floor space, spread across the three and a half hectares comprising the museum and educational center complex of the House of Fate in the 8th district of Budapest. The cost of the operation, borne by the state, was considerable: the government built the museum and transferred ownership of it. Specialized press sources estimate the investment at around twenty to thirty million dollars, depending on the estimates consulted.

No history of the House of Fate can afford to overlook the conflict that, for more than a decade, paralyzed its opening. This conflict is not incidental: it strikes at the heart of the historiographical issues that Saul Friedländer and Raul Hilberg helped to articulate, namely the responsibility of national actors in the implementation of the genocide and the temptation of apologetic rewriting [Friedländer, 1997]; [Hilberg, 1961].

The designation of the intended director crystallized the opposition. Mária Schmidt, a right-wing historian whose critics claim drew inappropriate parallels between communism and Nazism, was at the center of the accusations. She repeatedly equated and conflated the Shoah with Soviet domination of Hungary, provoking the opposition of other Jewish organizations. The accusation leveled against this approach was severe: the Simon Wiesenthal Center characterized Schmidt's claims as a form of distortion of the Shoah.

The underlying issue concerned the place accorded to Hungarian responsibility for the deportations of 1944 — a responsibility that the archive establishes clearly, since it was, as historical encyclopedias recall, Hungarian officials and gendarmes who physically carried out the roundups and convoys. A contemporary observer of the project summarized the fear then widespread: that the museography might tend to "inflate the number of Hungarians who risked their own lives to help their Jewish compatriots." In other words, the suspicion was one of a shift in emphasis, from the crime committed toward exceptional acts of rescue, at the risk of attenuating the co-responsibility of the Hungarian state.

The institutional consequence was a prolonged deadlock. This resulted in a four-year delay in the opening of the institution. The museum thus completed its construction only to remain empty. Although the memorial center had been built for the 70th anniversary of the Shoah, it remained finished but unfurnished, with pigeons and bats taking up residence in the many recesses of the complex. The diagnosis offered by the international press was unequivocal: the history of the museum shows how deeply the legacy of the Shoah prevents Jews from being fully integrated into Hungarian society, and illustrates how profoundly divided Hungarian Jews themselves are over the manner of commemorating the Shoah.

The resolution of the crisis came through a transfer of responsibility. In 2018, the government handed control of the museum to the EMIH, a Hungarian Jewish group. This organization, affiliated with the Habad-Loubavitch movement, intended to take over the project on new foundations, both in terms of content and institutional identity. Rabbi Slomo Köves, executive rabbi of the EMIH group affiliated with Habad, declared that Mária Schmidt's "role will end" when the EMIH opens the museum.

The new administrator also announced a change of name, carrying significant symbolic weight. The leader of the EMIH, Rabbi Slomo Köves, indicated that Schmidt was being removed from the museum, which the EMIH wished to rename Etz Hayim, "tree of life" in Hebrew, and he hoped to open the museum by 2024. The envisaged transition from "House of Fate" to "Tree of Life" reflects a different museographic intention: to substitute, for the motif of deadly fatality, that of the continuity and transmission of Jewish life.

The planned content of the exhibition, as outlined from the outset of its conception, explicitly targeted a school-age and youth audience. Both the installation and the narrative are intended for the 14–24 age group. The visitor journey combined an immersive device with documentary sections. Having moved through this exhibition unit, the visitor can proceed to the "exploration" section, where they are given a tablet containing essential information about the objects on display — names, dates, vocabulary — as well as questions and exercises. Thematic rooms were to complete the ensemble. The exhibitions in these rooms were to present Hanna Szenes, Zionist resistance, and Raoul Wallenberg.

The uncertainty that has long surrounded the actual opening of the institution calls for caution: the project has seen so many postponements that any assertion regarding its definitive inauguration date remains subject to revision. What remains established, however, is the persistence of a fundamental disagreement over the narrative — a disagreement that the reference historiography, from Poliakov to Friedländer, illuminates without being able to resolve it, for it pertains less to the establishment of facts than to their public use.

The trajectory of the Sorsok Háza is fully intelligible only when inscribed within the broader movement of Holocaust commemoration in Central and Eastern Europe over the past several decades. The changes that occurred a quarter of a century ago in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc transformed the social conventions of the time, and a form of social dialogue emerged, notably on the subject of the Holocaust. The fall of the communist regimes made possible, and sometimes urgent, the construction of new sites of Memory. New memorials and monuments dedicated to the Holocaust were built across the countries of the region as a result.

This regional context helps explain why the House of Fates became such a sensitive issue. Several phases can be identified in the construction of Holocaust monuments over the past twenty-five years. The Budapest institution belongs to a recent phase, in which the question is no longer simply one of commemorating but of defining who commemorates and which narrative prevails. The extreme sensitivity of the subject in Hungary is itself symptomatic: one sign of that sensitivity lies in the fact that, although the project was carried through, the changes in the manner of remembering did not stop there.

The parallel with the French experience illuminates, by contrast, the specificity of the Hungarian case. In France, the memorial construction rested on meticulous documentary work — Serge Klarsfeld's Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France [Klarsfeld, 1978] — and on a historiography that, from Marrus and Paxton in Vichy et les Juifs [Marrus and Paxton, 1981] to Renée Poznanski [Poznanski, 1994], directly confronted the question of national responsibility in the persecution. The Hungarian difficulty lies precisely in the fact that this assumption remains contested in the public sphere, something the long paralysis of the House of Fates made visible to the world.

Yet the very existence of the building, erected on an authentic deportation station, constitutes in itself a memorial fact. The structure, its towers of wagons and its sea of basalt, awaits investment with a stable narrative; but its material presence, at the heart of a long-neglected district of Budapest, already inscribes in urban space the memory of the children who disappeared in 1944. In this sense, the House of Fates illustrates a truth that the history of Memory never ceases to confirm: a place can be completed long before its meaning is fixed.

The House of Destiny condenses, in a single place, two histories that intertwine without merging. The first is the established and documented story of the destruction of the Hungarian Jewish community in 1944: a population of several hundred thousand souls, the largest still preserved in Europe, annihilated within a few weeks by a deportation machine of terrifying efficiency, carried out with the active participation of the Hungarian state apparatus. The Józsefváros station, the actual departure point of convoys in the autumn of 1944, anchors this memory in a tangible place.

The second history is that of the present: the story of a state memorial project conceived for an anniversary, immediately caught up in a controversy over the very meaning of what it was meant to say. The debate surrounding Mária Schmidt, the accusation of distortion, the transfer of the project to the EMIH, the announcement of a name change to "Tree of Life": all these developments reveal that the commemoration of the Shoah remains, in Hungary, a contested political terrain, where the establishment of facts is not enough to impose a shared reading.

Thus the House of Destiny appears as a mirror. It reflects the image of a historical catastrophe about which the archive leaves no doubt, and that of a society still grappling with its own Memory. That the building could remain for years completed and empty speaks volumes: the monument was built, the narrative was not. It is in this gap — between stone and meaning, between History and its use — that the true lesson of the Sorsok Háza resides.