Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

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 CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.