Created by the sun shining through cut-out letters punched into an overhead ledge, the sign marks the entrance to one of Europe's most chilling museums. Between 1944 and 1956 the three-storey building was used as the headquarters for the Secret Police of two terror regimes – first the Hungarian Arrow Cross Party (1944-45) and then the Soviet-backed Communist Party (1945-56). During these years political opponents were terrorised, tortured and executed in the building's basement.

Today the House of Terror is an historic site, a multi-sensory museum and a memorial dedicated to those who suffered or died under Hungary's sequential reigns of terror. The circuit begins on the second floor, with exhibits detailing Hungary in the early 1940s and the country's subsequent takeover by the Nazi-affiliated Arrow Cross Party in the waning days of World War II. During its short rule the party did its best to exterminate Budapest's Jews, either by executing and throwing them into the Danube River, or exporting them in the hundreds of thousands to various death camps, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.

After passing the war room, where the Arrow Cross Party hatched its evil plans, I enter a room dedicated to the deportation process, and finally the Gulag room, with its giant floor map outlining life in the camps. The installations are largely interactive with telephones to pick up, secret listening chambers and hidden videos.

On another floor there's a maze of alleys made from rubber "pork-fat bricks". Whether the fat symbolises human flesh or the harsh conditions of the time, I'll never know, since I've long abandoned my audio guide and can barely concentrate on the one page leaflets at the entrance of each room. Reducing the atrocities to a single A4 page is as hideous as the exhibits themselves.

Why then, I ask myself, do we visit such places? From Cambodia's Killing Fields and Thailand's Death Train, to New York's National September 11 Memorial and Amsterdam's Anne Frank House, I've struggled to come up with answers: Is it to learn more about the event, to honour lives lost or, like Laurence Binyon's words from the poem For the Fallen, a heartfelt promise – "We will remember them"?

Shadowed by these thoughts I follow the circuit to the Communist era, the time when the newly created Department of Political Police (PRO) took over the abandoned Arrow Cross headquarter. In a classic "out of the pot and into the frying pan" scenario the wretched, war-weary Hungarians didn't realise there was more to come. Much more.

In a darkened room, with just the sound of wheels crunching on gravel, a shroud pulls back to expose a shiny black limousine. Moments later the opulent interior, with its crimson lining and Soviet symbols, is revealed. Instinctively, I'm both attracted and repulsed, my skin crawling as I inch away from the vehicle. Later I learn that agents in black limousines would round up detainees, the so-called "enemies of the people", during nighttime raids.

The tour ends with a slow elevator ride to the basement where political "criminals" were interrogated and executed. From the video explaining how prisoners were prepared for the gallows, to dozens of windowless cells, these reconstructed torture-chambers are not for the faint-hearted.

Finally, the Hall of Tears, a memorial to the 2500 who died in the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, gives way to light and hope, a colour video showing the festivities of 1991 when the last of the Soviet Troops left the city, paving the way for freedom.

Back outside, the sun is still shining on this most beautiful of cities, newly flush with trendy pubs, cafes and cultural spaces. For the moment I'm happy to stand and take it all in; the young families with their fresh-faced children, the old couples walking hand in hand, the hipsters on their vintage bikes. While the word TERROR is still shining, this time on a black parked car, it's in the play between light and shadows that I finally get it – why I'm drawn to these sad places. It's because they give me hope that good will always triumph over evil. 

TRIP NOTES

MORE INFORMATION

gotohungary.com

GETTING THERE

Cathay Pacific operates regular flights from Sydney and Melbourne, via Hong Kong, to more than 30 European destinations including arrival and departure points for Avalon Waterways cruises. See cathaypacific.com.au.

CRUISING THERE

Avalon Waterways' 2015 river cruises are priced from $2382 a person twin share for the eight-day Taste of the Danube, travelling between Vienna and Budapest. Phone 1300 230 234 or see avalonwaterways.com.au.

SEE + DO 

The House of Terror Museum is open Tuesday to Sunday from 10am to 6pm (entry $10, Andrassy Ut 60, see terrorhaza.hu).

The writer was a guest of Avalon Waterways.