By: Safwan Salleh

Secret Underground Hospital In Hungary

A three-year-old Erzsebet Seibriger and her family headed underground to one of Budapest’s many natural caves where they were safe from tanks, bombs and gunfire in autumn 1956, as Soviet troops suppressed the Hungarian uprising against the country’s communist regime.

But their location in underground hospital where Seibriger’s surgeon father treated both Hungarian revolutionaries and Soviet soldiers would haunt them for years.

Due to a heart condition, Seibriger’s father was not jailed but he did lose his medical license.After Soviet troops crushed the rebellion, tens of thousands of Hungarians were imprisoned or executed for participating, including doctors who treated injured freedom fighters.

Even though the government declassified the hospital’s existence in 2002, and this year it will celebrate its 10th year as the Hospital in the Rock Nuclear Bunker Museum, the space remains frozen in time, full of mysteries and untold stories. The Seibrigers’ story is one of only hundreds that have emerged since the museum opened.

According to marketing coordinator for the museum, Fruzsina Polacska, many Hungarian still don't know about this place.

Today, the beds in one ward are filled with lifelike wax figures of Hungarian, German and Russian soldiers to depict scenes from when the hospital was first used during World War II. Another room includes a figure of a young Dr Seibriger standing among beds of patients injured during the 1956 uprising.
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