Budapest was an eerily peaceful city throughout the majority of World War II; until the Nazis occupied Hungary in spring of 1944, most residents of the capital went about their normal daily lives, largely unaffected by the flames spreading across Europe and the rest of the globe. This changed dramatically with Hungary’s invasion by the Red Army and the Siege of Budapest in late 1944, but even while battles were raging around the world in the years before then, many city locals continued everyday activities that we still enjoy today, like swimming at the Gellért Bath, cycling through downtown Pest’s Astoria intersection, and enjoying the green space of City Park. We can see all of this and much more in a series of rare color pictures from summers of that era archived on the Fortepan vintage-photo website, including the soon-to-be-destroyed original Elizabeth Bridge as seen through the passage of Piarista köz – and an ominous sign of the heinousness to come, as a Nazi flag appears at the city’s International Fair in 1942. After looking at these photos of Budapest residents enjoying summer days oblivious to the tragic fate that they would endure in their near future, we feel a much deeper appreciation for the peaceful times that we enjoy nowadays, and can only hope that Hungary’s saga will not bring about a similarly devastating destiny in the future.
