ABSTRACT
The political transition of 1989 in Hungary brought up competing versions or interpretations of the very same event: for instance, people asked whether the country had been liberated from Nazi Germany or occupied by the Red Army in 1945. In this chapter, the author analyzes a case that illustrates this point: the lack of a reconciliation strategy and the controversial operation of the people's courts or tribunals in the aftermath of the war, which contributed to a divided collective memory about the Holocaust in Hungary. The author uses the case of the war crimes committed at Csengery Street No. 64 in the Sixth District of Budapest to trace how the possible interpretations of post-Holocaust transitional justice were formed. An important point is that this case led to the erection of the first privately funded Holocaust memorial in Budapest. Therefore one need to explain why "private" memories failed to intersect with collective memory of the Holocaust.
