In the Darkroom review – an elegant masterpiece

Susan Faludi’s funny, painful investigation of identity centres on her father’s gender reassignment and a family history of Hungary under Nazi occupation

In the summer of 2014, Susan Faludi, the Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, and her father, whose name we will get to later, visited the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest. Although the museum was then participating in what the country’s rightwing government, desperate for some good PR, had decreed was Holocaust Remembrance Year, it was obvious to both Faludis that in this case the word “remembrance” meant something close to precisely the opposite. The forgetting was everywhere. In the room dedicated to the second world war, the theme was mostly one of German culpability in the matter of the deaths of 565,000 Hungarian Jews; just two small plaques made any mention of the Arrow Cross, the country’s very own national socialist party, and then in language so evasive as to be almost meaningless. Only when they descended to the basement did they finally discover an exhibit that really did do some remembering, for here they found, after two hours of searching, some portraits of Hungarian Holocaust survivors and their descendants by the Israeli photographer Aliza Auerbach.

The room was small and windowless, and the pair were at first discombobulated. Slowly, though, they came to their senses, circuiting it until they arrived at a photograph of the 16 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren of Dina Friedman, who was deported to Auschwitz in May 1944. It was – this may sound odd – an intoxicating moment. Upstairs, the fact that Adolf Eichmann, no less, had declared himself delighted by the Hungarian state’s enthusiasm for the Final Solution appeared to have escaped the attention of the museum’s curators. But in this room, blame had not been pushed elsewhere, for which reason, perhaps, it could now be spoken aloud. “Let the people of Hungary look at them!” said Faludi’s father, addressing a non-existent crowd. “They turned their back. They never looked at who was taken. These people were just like them. They spoke the same language. They were your neighbours. They were your friends. And you let them die!” Susan Faludi listened to this in silence, and then the two of them turned on their heels and left. They had seen – or not seen – quite enough for one day.

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