THE MUSEUM ISSUE Barbara F. Lefcowitz   At the Emlekpont Remembrance Museum Varsarsley, Hungary The identical heads of six Russians wearing steel gray hats push through the roof and rise as if they still guarded the city. Only when you walk down narrow stairs to where their legs and booted feet are enclosed in glass shafts do you realize the guards are beheaded in the Museum of Remembrance, a tilted cube of blue mirrors built so no one will forget what happened between ‘45 and ‘89 all over Eastern Europe including this small farming city. Lenin, Stalin, and Gromyko greet you like family when you enter the hall of red fresco walls, like the split guards a display so clever it’s almost a parody, evoking grim laughter until you enter the Red Room with its lucite floor, such a vivid red that looking down makes you dizzy and you lean against a menacing black machine unexplained but surely meant for torture, red globes like bowling balls at its base. Red, red, everywhere red, solidified sheets of blood whose red after-images invade the summer afternoon block out the lovely old facades of surviving buildings, the church with its bulbous dome, the synagogue, the avenues of lilacs and roses of this sleepy old farm town in the plains of central Hungary. Days later I am still seeing red. Barbara F. Lefcowitz has published nine books of poetry plus individual poems, stories, and essays in over 500 journals. She has won writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Maryland Arts Council, as well numerous prizes from magazines and anthologies. In the summer of 2008 she was a volunteer teacher of English in Varsarsley, Hungary, a small town south of Budapest. The starkly surreal façade and vividly displayed galleries of the Emlekpont Museum were both aesthetically and politically astounding in this town otherwise known for its lace, folk art, and strong red wines.   Published in Volume 10, Number 1, Winter 2009.