2 What makes Csengery 64 important?

It is a fact that someone shot the unarmed tenants of Budapest’s Csengery Street 64 on the night of October 15, 1944. It is also a fact that the Budapest People’s Tribunal sentenced Piroska Dely, a notorious “Arrow Cross woman” to death for the massacre. The Budapest press covered the case as the first massacre committed by Arrow Cross Party members. The key questions however remain unresolved: whether Piroska Dely was the murderer and whether she was a member of the Arrow Cross. The people’s tribunal trial did not identify the perpetrators with certainty; and since the analysis of witness statements leads to different conclusions this book will not offer definite answers either. Its aims are different. Firstly, the examination of the Csengery Street massacre can shed light on a part of Hungarian past that is still a subject of political and scholarly debates. Doing so is particularly pertinent today. Since Hungary’s recent populist turn, history writing increasingly focuses on simple people as central actors of history, while it simultaneously neglects methodological challenges in order to legitimize particular political goals and undermine the legitimacy of post-war political justice.32 The chronology of the October 15, 1944 events at Csengery 64 can be reconstructed fairly well, as there are many although often contradictory sources. The chronology in the appendix (see appendix 1, 2 and 3) provides a framework that makes the event straightforwardly narratable and hopefully relatable and understandable too. As Pierre Nora holds: