Minorities 2 - the Jews

On Sunday the sun shone out of a cloudless sky, and after a late-night at a couple of Budapest clubs we felt the need to get some fresh air. But not having much daylight time available we only made it as far as the old Jewish cemetery on Salgotarjani ut, in District VIII behind the Kerepesi Cemetery, which I visited last spring.

The Jewish cemetery has rather restricted opening hours, as it has been the target for serious vandalism over the years. Indeed, the gate is kept locked and guarded by two very large Alsatians, but after ringing the doorbell the friendly caretaker chained the dogs and allowed us through the entrance.

 Inside it is an astonishing place. Most of the tombs date from the early part of the 20th century, when Jewish people ran much of the city's industry and commerce. So many of the mausoleums are huge affairs, with magnificent stone work in a variety of artistic styles. The whole place is maintained at a very low level, so is quite overgrown and picking your way through bushes that wrap themselves around huge tombs gives quite an uncomfortable feeling.

I also had the sense, which I have never felt before in any of the cemeteries I have visited (and I have seen a few) of stepping back into a chapter in history that had definitively been closed. In most cemeteries you see people walking around, carrying flowers, stopping to look at headstones and generally paying their respects. But not in this one, and it is not because people have lost interest.

Here it is because there are no people around to pay respects as the population was almost wiped out in 1944. According to Bob Dent's fascinating "Budapest: A Cultural and Literary History" about half a million Jews died during that year as the Nazi and fascist grip on the country intensified. For reasons that I cannot comprehend the pace of extermination speeded up madly as the Russian army closed in on the city, with columns of people being marched from the ghetto to the riverbank where they were shot and their bodies pushed into the Danube. Today one of the most moving places in the city is the row of bronze shoes on the embankment just beside Parliament, making a very simple memorial for this awful period in the country's history.

As I often feel when walking around this city, stuff has happened here.

Minorities 1 - the Roma

On Saturday night we went to Budapest's marvellous Godor Klub, where they were having the last night of a festival of world music. The main attraction for us was an appearance by the Roma singer Mitsoura, and she did not disappoint.

Mitsoura at the Godor Klub

Her music really does suit the label 'world', as her band included amongst other instruments a dulcimer player and a tabla drummer, resulting in a set that sounded like jazz, like folk, like drum and bass, like Indian and, well, like Roma music. It was a really great hour's worth of music.

I have really come to enjoy hearing Roma music here, and, like many people here in Budapest, appreciate the richness they add to the cultural scene. One young Hungarian standing next to me, having noticed that I was English, struck up a conversation where he told me how fantastic she was and that she was the greatest Roma singer. And he was clearly a person of some taste: he had lived in Leicester for a year and really missed English beer and stilton cheese.

And yet the Roma people can have a very difficult existence here. They face routine discrimination and often end up being blamed for the country's ills. Some illustrations.

A colleague of mine who was looking to adopt a child told me that there were very few babies available for adoption, "... except Roma babies, nobody wants to adopt Roma babies".

We saw a film called "Vespa" at the excellent Odeon Lloyd a few months ago whose story concerned a Roma boy who wins a scooter in a competition, but who faces all sorts of discrimination when he tries to collect his prize. The director said that she had received death threats for making such a film about Roma people.

And just a few weeks ago three people died in a stampede at the West Balkan nightclub, crushed by a panicking crowd trying to leave an overcrowded venue. As with all such events the initial reports are confused, but one story was that someone jokingly called out that there had been a stabbing, and this had led to the panic. However, the story metamorphosed into a Roma person being responsible for this. There seems to be no evidence at all that anyone was stabbed at all, but somehow Roma are blamed.

Every society seems to feel the need to identify and scapegoat certain minorities. Why do we do this?

Celebration of civilisations

Our New Year visitors were Charles, Helen's brother, and his wife Julia. As well as showing them around the usual sites of Budapest we decided to pay a trip one day to the city of Pécs, right down in the south of Hungary. The guidebooks say that it is the next most beautiful city in the country, after Budapest, and indeed was a European City of Culture in 2010. True to form, we manage to visit it in the first few days of 2011.

The cultural excitement may have faded but the beauty had not, helped by a beautiful crystal-clear blue winter's sky, something we had not seen in Budapest for some weeks.

Pécs has many interesting places, but the one that caught my attention was the Catholic church in the main square that goes under the name of the Gazi Kasim Pasha mosque. Interesting.

The area now occupied by Hungary was actually part of the Ottoman Empire between about 1520 and 1680. Not much evidence of the Islamic period remains, the Austrian 'liberation' having destroyed almost everything of interest. However, the mosque in Pécs remains, albeit now a Catholic church.

Mihrab and cross

But what is interesting is the way in which it celebrates its dual heritage. From the outside it looks very much like a mosque and inside still retains many Islamic features, such as the mihrab and a marble tablet bearing some words from the Koran.

Even the cross on the top sits inside an Islamic crescent

In these days where Christians and Muslims can regard each other with suspicion or hostility it felt comforting to be in a place that celebrated their similarities and connections. Would that we could see this everywhere...

'Europeans' and what they bring

When I started writing my blog at the beginning of 2010 I thought that the only people who would read it would be those die-hards who clicked on the link I provided in "I'm still alive" e-mails. However, after a while I started to realise that other people had come across it as well, people I guess just surfing or searching for some information about Budapest.

Most of the strangers paying their respects to the site have been Hungarians, often keen to help me with my understanding of what I have described, adding extra information or putting me right. But one visitor was Marta, a Hungarian living in Sheffield.

Our role reversal always interested me. Here I was from Sheffield trying to make sense of Hungary, and there was she, making sense of Sheffield. And then she came home.

So we arranged to meet in a cafe one evening. Marta turned out to be a very chirpy character - she had lived in Sheffield for four years, arriving speaking no English but by day working in a factory canteen in Chapeltown and at night studying English by reading textbooks and watching ITV. I realised that she was one of the 'eastern Europeans' that I knew had come to Britain to find work, but about whom I knew little.

Eventually she knew enough English to find a job doing the administration in a scrapyard in Attercliffe. She was the only woman working there, and the only foreigner. She quickly learned how to understand the special language of the scrapyard business, particularly how to swear in a variety of British dialects. She told them about Hungary and even showed them my blogs and its pictures; that a Brit could survive in Hungary seemed to offer her colleagues some reassurance that civilisation had penetrated beyond Doncaster. By the time she left it sounded as if they had taken her to their hearts, and they had even said they might pay a visit.

But after four years she was missing her friends and family too much and has decided to come home. It's not easy; the jobs market here is very competitive, with over a hundred applicants for one job she had just been interviewed for. But she is bright and has a warm personality and I hope that will shine through, so that she can prosper in her homeland. I know from my own experience that an interesting job and good salary do not compensate for separation from friends and family.

Marta is just one of the people from this part of Europe who went to Britain to see what they could find. In doing so she opened up the world for many people in Sheffield and showed them how industrious and capable 'foreigners' can be. Now she has returned and, I think, will spread positive news about the British, despite our funny little ways. Better mutual understanding has to be our way forward I think, and I'm glad that my blog has played some tiny part in helping that.

Living the past 2

We had quite a few family members visiting us for Christmas, Helen’s nonagenarian aunt from California and her grand-daughter, along with three of our own children and a boyfriend.

Several of them had visited earlier in the year and they were all excited to be back in Budapest, and one afternoon set off for the Great Markethall to do some Christmas shopping, but when they got back they had a somewhat sorry tale to tell. They had taken the No 2 tram to the market and because of it being packed and them not understanding how to operate their ticket machines, they had not validated their tickets properly, even though they had tried to do so. No-one had offered help to show how these older machines work, so when the ticket inspectors swooped they were in trouble.

They had been ordered off the tram, had had to show passports, were threatened with being taken to the police station, and their parents (i.e. me) had been criticised for not explaining how to validate their tickets. They were then fined 12,000 forints (nearly £40).

This will be a familiar tale to people who know Budapest. Instructions on how to validate tickets on trams and buses are non-existent it seems, especially in languages that tourists know, and the machines themselves sometimes do not work properly or are confusing to operate. Allied with a culture that expects authoritarian behaviour, giving people a uniform makes them become little dictators.

This is something of an issue for Budapest’s international image in my opinion. Following the rules is important, but overall the city’s reputation as a tourist destination would benefit if the BKV explained in each conveyance how the system works (in English as a minimum) and its little dictators were to show rather more customer focus and sensitivity to confused (but not necessarily cheating) foreigners.

A small story, but a bigger one caught my ear this morning, when on the BBC’s Today programme they said they were going over to their man in Budapest. This story was about the Hungarian government’s new media control laws: a government body will have oversight over what television and newspapers want to report. The government minister interviewed suggested that as the ruling party had won such a large majority in the elections that it was their duty to do what was necessary to protect the country against misreporting.

To my ears this sounds pretty much like the sort of justifications that dictatorships can use, and indeed several voices in the European Union have questioned its ethicality.

Democracy is new in this part of the world, and its subtle responsibilities do not sit easily with traditions that respect autocracies, whether they be on the No. 2 trams or in central government.

Living the past

Berlin has always been around the top of my list of cities to visit. For many years its weird situation as a divided city fascinated me, but I had never before managed to pay a visit.

The Brandenburg Gate

The Reichstag

Christmas revelries on Unter den Linden

When I finally did I was surprised to see how much its tourist industry plays on World War II and its 40 year epilogue. Most of the postcards on sale and sights to see are about this period: the bombed out city, the burning Reichstag, Checkpoint Charlie and Hitler’s Bunker, for example.

Checkpoint Charlie

Perhaps this has been the catharsis that the country needed: the Germans I have met all seem to be forward looking and not outwardly hung up by a period in history that clearly could create some deep psychological issues.

Several places made a deep impression on me. The first was the Holocaust Memorial. Approaching this from a distance it looks like a small area of black stone slabs arranged in a grid pattern on a gentle knoll, but as you walk into the spaces between the slabs you find yourself disappearing down into a subterranean level where you cannot see out, people appear fleetingly and disappear ahead and beside you and the black stones lurch and lean intimidatingly. 

The Holocaust Memorial

I had not read anything about the place before, but I immediately felt a sense of panic as I slid into the cracks, disappearing from the world and not being able to see an easy way to escape.

The second was the Jewish Museum, housed in an astonishing building whose shape and internal layout has been designed to capture the dislocation and uncertainty of Jewish history through the centuries. I know that Britain is not free of anti-semitism, but I was relieved that my people were not directly involved in the terrible story that it told about Germany and other parts of mainland Europe in the 1930-1945 period. However, had we not been able to rely on the English Channel to save us in 1940 I’m not so sure that we would not have also joined in with what happened, so no self-satisfaction here.

It’s a fascinating, compelling but ultimately depressing exhibition, telling a vitally important story, but I left feeling that it did not deal at all with one of the Holocaust’s postscripts, the situation in Israel and Palestine. I guess I’m just hopelessly naïve about people and politics, but would it not have been so much better for the world if this terrible experience had led Israel to steer away from crushing the Palestinians and instead show real humanity in seeking to find ways of sustainable coexistence.

More uplifting was the East Side Gallery.

Lining the River Spree for several hundred metres on the east side of the city, this is the most complete remaining stretch of the old Berlin Wall and is celebrated by artists expressing in a variety of ways what the Wall signifies to them. Great fun.

Freedom means getting Kylie

The medium is still the message

I was lucky enough to spend a few days recently in Berlin at the Online EDUCA conference. This is the biggest conference in Europe looking at the whole subject of using technology to support learning, and I went thinking that I would be meeting some of the smartest people and listening to the biggest, newest ideas in my professional domain. I’d also been invited to make a presentation to a sub-group there, but came away reflecting on the words of Groucho Marx: to paraphrase, “I’d never want to go to a conference that wanted to have me as a speaker.”

Perhaps the subject of my own talk prejudiced me; that for all the exciting talk about the brave new world of computer and mobile device technology, there is still a woeful lack of application of basic educational principles in most technology-delivered learning.  

I was hopeful; I diligently read the synopses in the programme and went along to the sessions that promised to tell me lots of new things, but with one or two exceptions found that what people talked about was only vaguely related to their presentation title, that most people talked in only general terms about things they had done and what that might show, and that there just weren’t that many really new and interesting ideas.

I was also appalled by the general inability to communicate ideas: the PowerPoint slides crammed with indecipherable text or statistics, the lack of structure in delivery and the reluctance to look at the audience when talking. In my funny old way of looking at the world, learning relies on communication and an inability to do this to a roomful of consenting adults does not give me the confidence that it will be done effectively to a bunch of stressed, sceptical or cynical members of staff.

Although the audiences perhaps did not help. In every presentation I attended most people seemed to be dealing with e-mails or updating their Facebook pages on their laptops or tweeting or texting on (the mobile phone of choice) their iPhones. So while there was a whole lot of communicating going on, I’m not sure that many people were paying much attention to the moment.

Which took me back to good old Marshall McLuhan: who cares what you’re saying if you’re saying it on an iPhone?