Horváth M. Ferenc (szerk.): „És akkor becsukták az ablakokat”. Emlékek a váci zsidóság életéről és sorsáról. Kiállítási katalógus (Vác, 2023)

"AND THEN THEY CLOSED THE WINDOWS",

when the procession of people forced by the authorities marched through Káptalan Street to their designated residence, the Ghetto. “And then they”, the residents of Káptalan Street, intimidated by the authorities or unwilling to know or indifferent, “they closed the windows”, and probably so they did everywhere else in the city, where the death marches had passed.

This exhibition is about the people of Vác, our former fellow citizens, children and adults, women and men, who lived with us, lived among usforcenturies. Families, schoolchildren, craftsmen and merchants who lived here all the time until 30th June 1944, when most of them were transferred from the Vác ghetto to the Monor concentration camp, and then deported to the Nazi extermination camps. About the men of Vác forced to labour service who died on the battlefield. About the poet Miklós Radnóti, who departed from the Vác railway station to his death. About the few survivors, even fewer who returned home, and those settled in other countries. About the Jewish people who identified themselves as Hungarian, as people from Vác. About the people of Israelite religion, whose memory is preserved in the city only by one synagogue, two cemeteries, a former funeral parlour, some memorial plaques and stumbling blocks, and whose fate is commemorated by a few publications.

Despite all this, we believe that the fate of the Jews of Vác still lives on in many of us, as a kind of hunch, sometimes as a hidden memory.

Countless documents and memoirs prove that despite all the tragedies, or even because of them, the descendants will always remember what happened to them. In the totalitarian states that came into being in Christian Europe, in a city - Vác - predominantly inhabited by Christians, in the first half of the 20th century, events took place that shook our faith in many things: in man, in historical progress, in the state, in justice.

The exhibition commemorates the Jewish community of Vác. It is dedicated to all those who see their loved ones on the exhibition panels, to the survivors of the Holocaust, but mainly to us, today’s people of Vác, who have the duty to remember.