Hungary Cache of 6,300 Holocaust Documents Unearthed Behind Wall
A cache of documents that make up a census of Budapest’s Jewish population in 1944 before the liquidation of the city’s Jews to Nazi death camps was found hidden in a wall during the renovation of an apartment in the city.
A cache of documents that make up a census of Budapest’s Jewish population in 1944 before the liquidation of the city’s Jews to Nazi death camps was found hidden in a wall during the renovation of an apartment in the city.
The 6,300 documents were uncovered in August, the French news agency AFP reported over the weekend.
The 135 pounds of documents were believed to have been destroyed during World War II.
The papers have been turned over to the Budapest City Archives.
The census forms found in the Budapest apartment contain names of each building’s inhabitants, and whether they are Jewish or not, with total numbers of Christians and Jews marked in the corners, according to AFP. The Jews listed on the forms were later moved into apartments set aside for Jews, who were later moved into the city’s ghetto.
“The content and scale of the finding is unprecedented. It helps to fill a huge gap in the history of the Holocaust in Budapest,” Director of Budapest City Archives Istvan Kenyeres told AFP.
About 600,000 Hungarian Jews died in the Holocaust, most in Auschwitz.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
