Budapest: Memories of World War II

Several European cities will be linked forever to their role in World War II. Stalingrad (Volgograd) is the obvious one, and the battle there was a turning point in the war. Leningrad (St Petersburg) was cut off from the rest of Russia and held out despite starvation and appalling weather. Warsaw was wrecked during its doomed uprising that saw partisans holding out against overwhelming odds for 63 days.

Budapest's role, however, appears to have been largely forgotten. Even for the historically minded, the image of the tranquil Hungarian capital striding the River Danube with its fairy-tale towers and brightly tiled roofs is disturbed only by recollections of the uprising against the Soviets in 1956.

World War II's battle of Budapest lasted for 108 days, from December 1944 to February 1945, and unlike Stalingrad, where most of the civilian population was evacuated before the fighting started, hostilities took place above the heads of around 800,000 civilians cowering in the city's cellars.

Sitting today in one of the promenade cafes overlooking the River Danube it is almost impossible to imagine that it took the Red Army six weeks to cross from one side of the river to the other.

But if you know where to look, there are still visible scars of the siege that left 80 per cent of the city's buildings damaged or destroyed – despite decades of careful reconstruction.

There is still quite a lot to see and although most of the Hungarian documents and maps were destroyed there are still a lot of German and Soviet sources dating from the siege, says Balazs Mihalyi, a cartographer and one of the founders of the Fortification Historical Society.