Birthday in Budapest.

28th of October 2018

Birthday 

Today was my birthday, another year passed, another number, another reason to evaluate, another moment to take stock of what’s gone and what is yet to come (maybe).

For my Birthday weekend me and my wife organised a three day trip to Budapest, I’ve been there before to perform comedy a few times and there is something about the place that intrigues me. A city that has had it’s share of tears and fears, the Hungarians sided with Hitler until 1944, Hungarian nationalists played a big role in the deportation of thousands upon thousands of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and everyone else who defied the nazis. The role of the Hungarian nationalists gets ‘played down’ by the present Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, himself a nationalist, but there are sites all over the town that still bear witness to the deportations and the murders. 

Not far from parliament on the edge of the Danube there is a monument to the place where Nazis and Hungarian Nationalists forced Jews young and old, male and female to stand and be shot, their bodies falling into the Danube and being swept away by the tide. Shoes line the harbour wall as a monument to the monsterous ‘ethnic cleansing’ of jews by the Nazis. Seeing this monument, trying to imagine the fear, the disbelief, the horror of those times, parents watching as first their children were shot and thrown into the river before they themselves were murdered. Visiting the Jewish area of the city imagining the German trucks loading jews onboard to be brought to the cold banks of the Danube,anger and imense sadness engulfed me that afternoon. How far we’ve come, the streets of Budapest now full of tourists from all over the world, young, old all sharing everything that Budapest has to offer for the city tripping tourists of 2018. I met up with a friend I made while performing here, he’s a young non european comedian, we had a coffee talked a while about comedy then the talk turned to how it is living as a black person in Budapest, he told tales of the brushes with the administration, flagrant acts of racism, about how intense and stressful it is for him when he leaves the country and comes back, always fearing that he won’t get past border control although he’s in Hungary completely legal. Fear of racism , discrimination in this city? after all it’s been through, after it’s own fight for freedom from the Russians in the 1950’s, go to the ‘house of Terror’ museum see the photos of the ‘patriots’ gunned down by Russian troops during the rising. This city now very vibrant, young people from all over the world come here. Yet as in many cities all over europe at the moment ,people are again looking for scapegoats, others to blame for their woes, politicians all too eager to oblige by pointing the finger toward the migrants, the homeless,the gypsies...

We have come a long way from the evils of the Nazis and the terror of Stalinism, but have we beaten the scourge of racism, anti semitism, homophobia etc etc? Or is our ‘progress’ just a thin coating? Today I read in the newspaper that an american racist gunned down and killed 11 people at a synagogue, he’d rushed into the building guns at the ready shouting ‘all jews must die’ , last week also in America a radical republican had sent pipe bombs to politicians and others outspoken in their dislike of Donald Trump, thankfully none had exploded.

We have come far, but there is still some way to go before we humans come to the realisation that we are all one tribe, one sort, one species. 

Today was my birthday, lots of people sent me best wishes through messages mostly on line. We are now all connected through internet , no corner of the globe excluded, we now have the chance to unite our sort over the whole of our planet how great is that? Let’s do it, for our own sake.

Thanks for all the birthday greetings.